Ian Castle
The date: Sunday 1 September 2013. To borrow the words of Charles Dickens, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. On that day we beat that free-spending lot from up the road 1 – 0; it was the best of times. But I wasn’t there; it was the worst of times.
I became a season ticket holder way back in another era – 1969 to be exact. Neil Armstrong had just taken his first steps on the moon, Harold Wilson was prime minister and a quick search on the internet informs me that the average house price in Britain was £4640 and a gallon of petrol retailed for 31p. My season ticket – bought for me by my Dad – cost just over £19. It was indeed another era.
Since that time I’ve been at every single home game we’ve played against Tottenham, or, as Jon Spurling revealed in his excellent book ‘Rebels for the Cause’, should I say the ‘Marsh-dwellers’, as Arsenal fans used to call them in the early days. That equates to 43 league games in 44 years; we must never forget that Tottenham finished bottom of the old First Division and were relegated at the end of the 1976/77 season to spend a year in Division Two. But now my personal unbroken run is at an end. In June 2013 when the time came to pay up another £1200 to renew my season ticket I had a big decision to make. I’d known the day was coming since I’d made a life-changing decision six months earlier. I’d sold my London flat – my home for 31 years - and moved to the country. This had financial implications – and travel ones too. And now that football clubs’ fixture lists are not their own anymore, the vagaries of kick off times also had an impact – a 7.45pm kick off means getting home at 00.45 in the morning! But I should also mention the crushing effect our performances in the first half of last season had had on me too.
And so I took that decision – on 1 June 2013 I said ‘no’, bringing the curtain down on 44 years of attending every home game – a journey that had seen me grow from boyhood to middle age. And now it is over. But it didn’t seem like it at first – it was the summer after all, and let’s face it, the club wasn’t setting the transfer market alight (at the time!) to make me think of what I would be missing.
As a reaction to the enormity of my decision (well it seemed like that to me) I felt the need to make a statement in some way. I wanted the club to know, to understand what it had meant to me over the years and perhaps to help them appreciate that with high ticket prices many more long-term fans will be forced to drop by the wayside in coming years. In 2012 I wrote a book, ‘Arsenal: The Agony & The Ecstasy, a book detailing my personal perspective on almost half a century of following the team. I think I probably realised when I was writing it that the end of my time as a regular attendee was drawing near. I bared my soul in the book and recounted the gloriously giddy ups and the despairingly dark downs that are part and parcel of following this football club. I felt better for writing it.
When I made the decision not to renew my season ticket I decided to send copies of the book to the Club with a brief letter explaining that I was now about to bring to a close 44 years of season ticket ownership. I sent copies to Arsène Wenger, Ivan Gazidis and the editor of the Arsenal Magazine. What did I expect in response? Well, I thought it would be nice if they read the book, but realistically I doubted that they would. I presumed though that I would at the least receive a brief note thanking me for the book and my loyal support over all those years. What did I actually get? Nothing. Zilch. Zero. It confirmed for me something we have all began to realise: the club does not particularly value the ordinary long-term fan anymore.
And so, as the summer dragged on, I became a ‘Red’ member, determined to still come to games, but on my terms – that means Saturday 3.00pm kick-offs; I am a traditionalist at heart. From having taken it for granted for all those years that I’d have a seat at every game, now the first cold winds of reality began to chill my bones. Once Sky and BT had picked over the carcass of our fixture list there were just three discarded crumbs for me to scramble for this side of Christmas: Aston Villa, Norwich and Sunderland. I was at the Villa game – lucky me. Because I’d been at the season’s opener this change in my relationship with the Club only really hit me for the first time as the Tottenham game approached.
I started thinking about my unbroken run against the old enemy. I checked the facts and figures and discovered we’d won 24 of the 43 games, drawn 11 and lost eight. I looked a little closer at those eight defeats and took some pleasure from the fact that half of them came in my first seven years (although clearly pleasure had not been in abundance at the time) meaning only four defeats in the next 36 games.
But now, as the next instalment dawned, I was not at the stadium, I was at home, no longer part of the event, and preparing to ‘see’ the game through the disembodied voices of BBC Radio 5 Live. I lived through that game on the edge of my seat – or pacing up and down - painting pictures of the stadium in my mind and kicking imaginary balls when Tottenham threatened; in radio-land every half-hit, wayward shot sounds like an Exocet missile heading unerringly into the top corner of the net! But they didn’t score, and, as the game wore on, despite their late threat, I actually began to feel calm again, a sense that we would ‘do it’ settled over me. And we did. Then the realisation; something that had once seemed unthinkable had just happened. Life – of the Arsenal kind - had gone on without me.
So now I must learn to come to terms with living on the outside looking in. The dates of forthcoming fixtures are etched on my brain, but even so I look at the list again knowing full well what I will find. My eyes rest on Saturday 19 October at 3.00pm; never before has Arsenal v Norwich seemed so appealing.
Ian Castle is the author of Arsenal: The Agony & The Ecstasy, a fan’s perspective on almost 50 years of supporting the Club. It is available both as a paperback and eBook from Amazon.co.uk and other online retailers.
