bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel,

Like many of us I’m sure, I get quite nostalgic when I imagine the smell of fried onions, fag smoke and piss, all mixed together and coming at me through freezing rain while trudging along the Barking Road. This is what going up the footie smelled like before it went all gay, and I spent an inordinate amount of my younger, better days buggering about watching my beloved yet profoundly annoying West Ham. Without wishing to be vulgar, I have always thought that being a West Ham fan is like looking at your genitals and discovering that you’ve contracted some horrible STD: despite being irritating, distressing and frequently embarrassing, you’d never be without them.

Traditionally suspicious of victory, West Ham have snared a massive haul of two trophies in my entire lifetime.  When I was was growing up, however, they were known as a ‘good cup side.’ This meant that, in theory, they were good at winning the FA Cup – and with three victories in only one hundred and fourteen attempts, the facts certainly bear this out. Despite the unlikeliness of West Ham actually getting to Wembley, FA Cup Final day was, for idiot urchin children like us, the summer solstice. Or maybe it was more like a little Christmas, but in May and without presents or joy.  In any case, it was certainly special: for a start, it was likely to be the only live footie you saw all year, which is strange to think about now. Also, this was before keyboards were invented, so you couldn’t just download stuff or whatever. It was unreal, you would look at this fantastic spectacle which was happening only about six miles from your street, and was happening live, now, at that very moment. It was wildly exciting.

Over the actual Christmas just gone, I finally watched the 1979 FA Cup Final, between Arsenal and Manchester United. It is regarded as one of the most dramatic Finals of all time, and, as I discovered while listening closely to commentary by Brian ‘Is There Something You Want To Tell Us?’ Moore, and a clearly drunken Brian Clough, one of the most homoerotic. Those of you who don’t want to know the final score should look away now.

[You'll be wanting to click 'read more' now, for a rambling account of a thirty year old football match]

One of my favourite bits of any Cup Final was during the pre-match singing of Abide With Me, which would bring a lump to the throat of a concrete Nazi.  During this emotionally charged outpouring of 100,000 beered up spectators, the telly cameras would pan around the stadium, alighting on various banners and such made by supporters. Most were fairly standard, some were quite a laugh, but I can’t be the only person who remembers the one produced by Manchester City fans in 1981 that read ‘Ozzie Is A Cunt’ – a reference to an opposition player of repute – and the remarkable offering from, I think, Everton fans in 1985 that said, simply, ‘Beef Curtains’, in letters that must have been eight foot high.

The dynamics of the match itself are easy to grasp. Arsenal = clinical, defensive and physical. United = flamboyant, youthful and nice. United had Gary Bailey. Arsenal had Willie Young. Bailey, a terrified 19 year old drafted in at the last moment as both United’s first and second choice goalkeepers were injured, had vomited with fright immediately prior to walking onto the pitch. Young was a sort of bastard, common at the time on shows like the Sweeney, who had permed hair like a girl or something but would cheerfully head butt your face off for a laugh. These days, footballers look like male models. In 1979, footballers looked like the kind of blokes who hefted furniture up staircases for a living. But Moore can see a deeper beauty in these pale, lumpy Gods. We are informed that Arsenal keeper Pat Jennings has ‘lovely eyes and big hands’, and that his team mate Frank Stapleton has ‘hair almost like a girl’. He refers to Willie Young as ‘Big Willie’ throughout the match with a sort of sigh, and also makes the mysterious claim that Young and toothless Glaswegian maniac Joe Jordan are ‘having an affair off camera’, presumably like Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise during the filming of Days Of Thunder.

The first half was absorbing stuff.  Or rather, made up of absorbing stuff: it wasn’t in itself capable of the absorbative process, like a kitchen towel.  United scampered about all over the place, playing nice attacking football but disorganised defensively. Arsenal content to hold them at arm’s length, occasionally raiding through the midfield via Liam Brady.  Indeed, Moore states after twenty minutes that ‘United look pretty but are failing to get any penetration’, and he is right, but probably not in the way that we by now assume he means. Arsenal score on 23 minutes, with poor Gary Bailey drifting about all over the place and his defence disintegrating in front of him. He has spent the game looking visibly tense, as if worried that he will splinter like a mirror if the ball hits him. Just before half time, Arsenal score again. It’s 2-0.

A football match consists of two halves of forty five minutes each, with an allowance for what is now called ’stoppage time’, where players have been pretending to be injured, arguing with the referee, or generally cheating. Back then, it was still called ‘injury time’, and was to make up the playing time lost when players had had their teeth smashed out, shoulders dislocated, or, in the case of Joe Jordan in this particular game, nose broken by the rapidly descending ginger permed head of Wilie Young. He doesn’t seem to notice, and, as the game gradually rolls away from United, continues to rally the flagging Mancunian midfield. In the 88th minute, following some scrappy play on the edge of the Arsenal area, Gordan McQueen hoofs a speculative shot that beats the lovely-eyed Pat Jennings and brings the score back to 2-1. McQueen is stony faced as he runs back for kick off, because yes United have deserved a goal – in fact, on balance, they are the better side on the day – but obviously that’s it. With seventy seconds remaining, Sammy McIlroy, picking up a through ball from the heavily bleeding Joe Jordan, runs at the Arsenal defence. It’s not a skilfull, jinking run, or anything like that, but, just before falling over, he manages to scuff a shot towards the Arsenal goal. It’s exactly like that bit at the end of Star Wars, except that instead of the measured tones of Ben Konobi going on about the Force, Brian Moore is screeching like a Myspacer. It is agonising. The ball has scudded around the flailing Jennings and is slowly slowly crawling towards the goal line. About four hours later, amid the strangled cries of Brian Moore, whose trousers must by this time be very cramped indeed, and actual screams from somewhere, it dawdles in. Improbably, United are level at 2-2.

I read a report of this match a few years ago, in which the correspondant refers to United players having to be ‘prised apart like boiled sweets’ while celebrating this unlikeliest of turn arounds.  It’s true.  There is bedlam all around Wembley Stadium, in the centre of which the Arsenal players have, to a man, sunk to the ground in disbelief. When the game restarts for what will literally be the few remaining seconds, no one seems to notice Arsenal’s blonde beanpole Graham Rix bounding down the United right. Moore is discussing the prospect of extra time, and how tired the players must be, and maybe if he can get any phone numbers later on. On the pitch, it is clear that Arsenal have kept their concentration. Manchester United have not. Rix floats the ball over the luckless Bailey, who is completely out of position and unable to get anywhere near it, his raised hand flapping like a duster on a washing line, and into the path of Alan Sunderland, who is presented with an open goal from eighteen inches away. And that was, absolutely definitely this time, that.

It was, in every sense, an extraordinary game, and however sad it appears, I had waited thirty years to see it.  I find it a bit odd that I have no recollection of seeing it at the time, although I was very very small.  Still, as mental as the 1979 Cup Final was, it was, for pretty much everyone I knew, nothing compared to what happened next year. The street party after the 1980 Cup Final remains to this day the only time I have ever seen my old dear wrecked up on the booze.

This is what happened in 1980.

And, if you can’t work out the end of the 1979 game, you’ll need this.