Span of History

17 September 2006

Manchester United 0 - 1 Arsenal
86' Adebayor

Let's take a break from this deep talk, these poor analogies and wild declarations that I love to push on you, my gentle reader. I'll get back to them soon enough but I want to bring it all down for a little bit and get back to football. This weekend is huge everyway you can look at it: we have four games between the Yankees and Red Sox in two days - their last series of the season because the Sox are basically out of any kind of playoff contention. In the background, we have American football until Monday; college on Saturday the 16th, and NFL on the 17th. Of course, the highlight of this intense weekend is this match that I'm going to focus on - Manchester United versus Arsenal. This is a terrifying game because Arsenal has started this season so miserably (if the season ended now, they'd just barely be saved from relegation - a scary piece of knowledge considering they've been in the top division since 1919, longer than any other team) and because Manchester United are the best team in the league right now. On top of all that, Thierry Henry and Robin van Persie, our two premiere strikers (that means goal-scorers, America) are doubtful for the match. Yet despite all this working against us, there is an element in the match that has missing of late: anger, desire, resentment. Arsenal hasn't been an underdog of late but suddenly we aren't favorites and we want this win more than we've wanted a win since the Champions League final months ago. Manchester United can laugh at us being in seventeenth place but we're out for blood and we don't fucking care whose it is. I got a lot of topics floating around in my head that I want to touch on. I want to talk about football itself: there are a lot of different kinds of "football" all over the world. There's association football, also known as club football, also known as soccer. Dc United, Arsenal, Real Madrid, River Plate, Juventus, these are all clubs and therefore play association football. Then of course there's American football, there's rugby, there's Gaelic football (which is a combination of rugby and soccer) and of course there's Australian rules football. The oldest evidence of the game comes from China, although there were also similar games in Greek and Roman culture. Football gained popularity in England during the Middle Ages, presumably from Roman influence although there is no hard evidence to prove this. There were many times during this era when various Kings and leaders tried to ban football, and in fact it was banned in England from 1324 to 1667. Early editions of the game seem a lot more violent than it is now and seem reminiscent of rugby - there was even a variation called calcio storico ("historic kickball") where you could actually kick your opponent (oh yeah, and hits below the belt? totally legit). I'm surprised that version didn't last longer. Like all cool things, modern football finds its roots in British public schools; in the sixteenth century, a student and eventual headmaster named Richard Mulcaster wrote extensively on a sport that was played between the boys of these schools. As his descriptions contain the first references to what is essentially the modern game, he is generally considered the father of contemporary football. For the next few centuries, the game's popularity would be confined to schools, as most adults had to work every day except Sunday and thus did not have time for recreational sports. Yet throughout the mid-1800s, both football and rugby gained in popularity as amatuer clubs sprouted up throughout the country. As people the world over began to fall in love with the game, it became obvious that an international body to govern Association football, and FIFA (a French acronym that stuck around) was founded in 1904. Remember when I talked about stories visible in sports? This is an example here: we have the history of this sport, sometimes a little vague and sometimes not, stretching all the way back to the Caesars and beyond. This simple game connects our teams today through human history, and I think that's pretty neat. Even if you just look at Arsenal, and ignore the larger context of football, you can see some interesting points. Arsenal entered the top division of English football in 1919: that was the year the Treaty of Versailles was signed, it was the last year Babe Ruth was on the Red Sox, women were granted suffrage, the Cincinnati Reds "won" the World Series - the Prohibition started in 1919! That helps put Arsenal's history in context for us. You can look back at when something happened and connect it to what was going on at that time and suddenly it comes alive: I can almost imagine following Arsenal in 1919 as peace is reached in Europe. In 1971, when Arsenal won its first Double (which I'll explain soon enough), there was a stairway crush at another football match in Glasgow when the Rangers hosted Celtic and 66 people were killed, which I think is the second worst in history - behind the Hillsborough crush in 1989 where 96 people died. Nick Hornby talks a lot about Hillsborough, it seems it made a huge impression on him and British sports consciousness in general. It's interesting because while he discusses Hillsborough frequently, I think there was only one mention of the Scottish disaster - although he would have only been fourteen, so it probably did not make as much of an impression. The Double. 1971. A Double occurs when a team takes first place in the top division and wins the main cup competition in the same year. So for an English team, they need to place first in the EPL and win the FA Cup. Arsenal did it in 1971, the first time the club had ever achieved the distinction (and the fourth time ever up until that point - there have been six more since, three by Manchester United in the 1990s). Arsenal had been experiencing a mediocre top flight life for a number of years up until that point, but with the leadership of Charlie George and the young spark of Liam Brady they walked away with a Double. The Arsenal would do it again in 1998 and 2002, the most recent time it has happened. For the sake of discussion, the club with the most Doubles in the history of football is a Belfast club named Linfield FC. They've doubled 18 times (one more than the aforementioned Rangers). I don't know much about them, and I don't think many people do. But hey, apparently they rule Ireland. So this match against ManU was terrifying. I got the experience of listening to it via webcast which reminded me of Hornby's book once more, as he would talk about listening to the radio intensely. I sat in front of my computer, my eyes staring into nothing as I tried to visualize the game as it was being reported to me. Every missed goal shot, every close save by Lehmann, made me shout in fury or relief. When the game was rollicking towards its conclusion, I assumed that it would end in a draw - giving us a useless one point, but at least we wouldn't lose. And then Fabregas stole the ball from Ronaldo, passed it to Adebayor who then slid it into the goal - I shouted for a minute. I can't believe we won the match, but we needed it more than we needed anything before. The announcers postulated that in a couple years from now, we might look back on this match as a turning point in the season - a point when the youthful Arsenal finally locked its gears into place and brought their game. I hope that's what we're saying in a couple years.