football is... connection

Illustration by Ed Richards

I grew up in Highbury, but I now live in southeast London because I’m a traitor and I can sort of afford rent there. Despite my new mooring on the ‘wrong’ side of the river, the connection with my spiritual home still runs deep. A couple of Saturdays ago I made the long journey north to meet an old school mate for a fry up on Holloway Road before the Arsenal game later. On my way to the station I passed two blokes wearing Arsenal shirts. This was New Cross, not the North Bank, Millwall country really, but Gooners get everywhere. I was also a bloke wearing an Arsenal shirt, ‘SAKA’ lovingly emblazoned on the back. Usually, when I wear one of my overpriced polyester adverts for a Middle Eastern airline and Rwandan tourism, I feel a bit silly. Maybe it’s wearing a top made for sports when I’m not playing sports. Maybe it’s the fact that I have the name of a 22-year-old man-boy on my back. But on match day, it feels different. Even down here, in my adopted Lewisham, it feels right.

It’s late August, the sun is out, and the cold of winter and the inevitable dropped points away at Everton still feels a long way off. The first man I pass is wearing a ‘bruised banana’ number, a throwback to the nineties heyday of kit design. He’s on the opposite side of the road. We lock eyes for a moment. I nearly raise my hand in greeting, but it’s still early and the spirit of match day is not yet filling me with enough confidence to hail passing strangers in the street. Instead, I give him a micro nod, and he looks away, smiling. Connection. It’s what we all crave. I pass the second man as I enter the station, also in bruised banana (I’m in ‘primegreen’ and I’m starting to feel left out). Emboldened by my encounter a few minutes ago, I fling out another nod, a proper one this time. There can be no mistaking it for a nervous tick. I have just greeted a man, in public, that I do not know. A flash of confusion crosses his face – who is this strange lanky nodder? Then it dawns on him. He is wearing a t-shirt. I am wearing a t-shirt. They are not the same shade of t-shirt, but they bear the same crest. They show that we are not from this place. We are from somewhere else (he might be from Berlin for all I know, but I’m talking spiritually.) We both know that we are only lending our hearts to Lewisham. Truly, they belong somewhere else. The United Arab Emirates Airline Stadium, or Emirates for short. He realises, and then he does it. He nods back.

I ride the Overground up to Islington on a wave of euphoria. I am a human, who connects with other humans, who I don’t necessarily know. It’s what I keep telling myself to do every morning during my attempts at meditation. ‘I am open. I am curious. I am friendly.’ I find it very hard to smile at strangers unless they’re already smiling at me. Even then I usually only manage a forced grimace. I didn’t mention this before because I didn’t want to show off, but my nod to the second man was accompanied by a broad, easy, confident smile. And I hadn’t even had a drink yet. Ok now I’m showing off. There are other Arsenal fans on the train, a whole carriage-full of potential human connection. I decide not to connect with any of them. You can have too much of a good thing. I head north buoyed by a sense of returning, of homecoming, of belonging. Granted, I only live forty five minutes away from where I grew up, and I make regular trips to my parents’ for Sunday night dinners, but there is something different about coming home on match day.

I get off at Highbury & Islington station and survey the scene. The sun is still shining, even this far north, and the replica shirts flash red, yellow and blue as they are paraded around Highbury Corner roundabout. I spot my mate Henry, wearing a bright red 19/20 kit. It would be fair to say it clashes fiercely with his long ginger mane, but today, no one cares. We hug – the ‘Fly Emirates’ tagline on his shirt pressing against the new and improved ‘Emirates: Fly Better’ on mine. Me and Henry grew up together, went to the same school – Highbury Grove, where basically every conversation revolved exclusively around football – and we went to the Arsenal together. We were Junior Gunners, loyal disciples of the Gunnersaurus, the club mascot who was brutally let go during the pandemic and then rehired by Mesut Ozil. We went to nearly every home game between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, at which point we weren’t allowed to be Junior Gunners anymore. Tickets jumped from twelve quid to fifty, so we had to stop going because we weren’t oligarchs. In his early twenties Henry got a job as a steward at the Emirates, gently corralling a small section of the reasonably sedate crowd. For years, he wore the ultra high vis jacket with pride, until last August when he was offered a season ticket, having been on the waiting list for nearly a decade. He now sits in the upper corner between the West Bank and Clock End, right above where we used to sit in the Family Enclosure as Junior Gunners. I hope to join him there one day, once I’ve become a millionaire.

Hug complete, we head off down Holloway Road and turn into the Hope Cafe, where the food, they proudly announce on a sign outside, is good. We know the place well. After we’d been financially frozen out of going to the games in our late teens, we started sampling and ranking the various greasy spoon establishments of North London. The Hope sits in solid mid table, with the potential for a heroic charge for the Europa League places given a few good signings – namely, better sausages. The dark wooden chairs are reassuringly old, and the woman who runs the place is jovial, seasoned and sharp. She warns me not to leave my natty little bumbag on my chair when we go up to the counter to order. We may all support Arsenal, but an opportunity’s an opportunity. As we eat, we sneak glances at the shiny new shirts that sit around us. There’s a black one, which is cool but a bit serious, and an aquamarine one which is definitely not serious and we think could be a grower. The food is, as promised, good, apart from the sausages. We catch up, then get on to the serious stuff. Have we made enough signings? Why have we got so many left backs? What happens if the big German gets injured while the little Brazilian is out? Can we win the title? Finally?

Bolstered by our fry ups and mugs of tea, we head back out into the sun. The streets are fuller now, the unmistakeable buzz of a Saturday afternoon kick-off is growing. It’s about two hours until the game. We turn off Holloway Road, passing the library where Henry works, and down Benwell Road - our traditional approach to the stadium. Stalls sell half and half scarves bought only by tourists; burger stands sizzle with the allure of beef and grease; the same man stands on the same roundabout, touting his fan-mag with the same old cry of ‘Gooner, geeeet yer Gooner.’ We walk around the great spaceship that is the Emirates, which crash landed in 2006 on a plot of land previously home to a recycling and waste centre. We look up at the shining glass of Club Level, where the great and the good quaff free beers at half time. I went once with a well-off friend and missed two goals at the start of the second half trying to down my body weight in complimentary lager. I haven’t been asked back. We duck into the Armoury, the club shop, which is heaving with bright eyed children clutching hundreds of pounds worth of gleaming new gear. We mutter about the prices, try on garish jumpers, pick up branded mugs. ‘Can I help you, lads?’ asks a knowing shop assistant. ‘Just browsing, thanks.’ We put the mugs down, and leave.

Kick off’s only an hour away now. I need to get moving. I have so far neglected to mention that I, unlike the thousands thronging around me, do not have a ticket for the game. I suddenly feel like an imposter – I’m wearing the shirt, I’ve had the fry up, I’m at the ground, but I’m not going to be at the match. I will fight my way back up the Holloway Road like a sad Scottish salmon desperately flapping upriver. I will get on the southbound train at Highbury & Islington, now empty after delivering the match-bound masses. I will go all the way back to New Cross Gate, hoping nobody quips, ‘You’re going the wrong way, mate’. Two men will get on at Shadwell, sit down opposite me and start talking about the early kick off. ‘Fuck’s sake, Liverpool just went a goal up.’ I’m glued to the BBC Sport feed so I know it’s actually 2 nil by now. I could chip in, jovially correct them. Connect. But I don’t. Maybe it’s because they’re not wearing Arsenal shirts.

I watch the game at home with my girlfriend Em who has been unwittingly ensnared into a love for the club through seven years of osmosis. She never wants anyone to be dropped, or subbed off, or criticised. She just wants them to be happy. So do I, as it happens. We win the game 2-0, it’s not an easy ride but we come out with all that matters – three points. Relief as much as joy in the stands, Henry tells me afterwards. Me and Em do our best impersonation of sixty thousand people chanting as one. Our voices ring out of the open window and into the quiet southeast London street below. We scream and hug when the goals go in, trying not to jump up and down too much for the sake of the neighbours below. Full time brings more shouting, more hugging. I ping off celebratory texts to Arsenal fan friends, and some of them reply. Yet more connection. I might have watched the game seven miles away from the stadium, but I felt much closer.

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