Chapter Thirteen of Hampton from the Halfway Line

I was concerned about this chapter because of the intense football focus, particularly the business of football; but I find the narrative ultimately beautiful. And who doesn't love a curry?

13

Maidenhead, Berkshire

What can I say about George Graham that hasn’t been said? I’ll just lay it out there straightaway. I decided not to delve into Graham for this particular book project for a couple of reasons. First, from a football perspective, several books have been done about him. I wrote the introduction to quite a good one. So I didn’t want to waste priceless commercial space by being derivative. Second, for the non-football audience, particularly “stateside,” who may pick up this book – for whatever reason – the name George Graham will mean absolutely naught. And even after I had a fair go at personifying him to the world, the average reader still wouldn’t give a monkey’s.

Just ask my wife. I can find reason to drop a Graham reference into practically any conversation, so weighty a tome is this figure in my mind’s library. The unavoidable but clever line often will have to do with a person’s “defense” mechanism. Or about motivation. Or about someone who is feared, revered, or despised. Or doing something precisely because everyone says you can’t. Or every time I hear Frank Sinatra or the Gypsy Kings sing “My Way.” Or about someone who is intrinsically great without having the particular desire to be liked. Or it might have to do with “strolling.” Whenever I see a mum with a pushchair – or, now that everything’s become Americanized, stroller; I think, you know, “stroller.”

But a writer does himself no favors wasting time with obscure commentary in a book intended to attract a diverse audience – a diverse audience of soccer fans, that is. At least that’s what the editor, with whom Rosalie and I are “collaborating,” is hoping for. And the publishers. And Rosalie McMahon who sold the publishers and me (sort of) on the idea. I have my doubts, but, hey, they paid me a fair bit of bob up front. Seriously, though, it is important to me that each new book be somewhat ambitious.

Along those lines, I sometimes feel I’m taking a bigger risk with this book than I took with the novel for young readers. I know at least as much and am as passionate as anyone about this game, yet I’m becoming almost petrified at the notion of writing another word. Leave it out for now, eh?

Well, the subject of Graham came up today – how could it not? – when Novak joined me at the still sparkling Emirates Stadium for the Arsenal-Tottenham derby. A vastly superior Arsenal side prevailed, if nervously, over a ridiculous Spurs side with their snazzy and fashionable, yet (one can only believe) ultimately doomed new manager. There was, as usual, much to discuss at the interval.

And I have to say that Novak can be the most delightful of match companions when he wants to be. That, in spite of the double dose of attention we received at being seen in public together. Good Lord! When I attend the football with my mates or my wife or with some anonymous person from my professional world, rarely am I picked out. Except by familiar faces, season-ticket holders, from Highbury days gone by. Mine is a face and person that blends in to the crowd, I should think, especially at a London sporting event. I’m white, I’m bald, a bit puffy, mildly dodgy, I smoke (in between bouts of quitting), and I wear a leather jacket and blue jeans. I wouldn’t look twice at me.

I admit more people who attend football matches these days read books as well and might occasionally look in on an author event like at the astonishingly immense Apple Store on Regent Street or a signing at Waterstone’s in Piccadilly or pause for thirty seconds on one of those book channels on satellite telly. The Piccadilly Waterstone’s, by the way … the company refers to that location as their flagship. They could very easily call it a battlestar. I do believe scores of Londoners and business travelers and day trippers and tourists have wandered aimlessly in and out of that store, up and down escalators, without even knowing where they were. Brilliant for the book business, admittedly. I once became so lost in that store -- eight floors, innit? – that I nearly cried for my mum. And I was forty-three years old. I knew going in I should have held hands with a buddy.

So, all right, I suppose lots of people who don’t really even read could inadvertently have seen my face on a poster in a Waterstone’s or somewhere.

‘Buy Ben Hampton’s new novel. Lovely stuff.’

Jesus. But … erm … combine my marginal fame, such as it is, with Novak’s vague notoriety, and even the most casual follower of popular culture tends to look our way and smell a rat. A single, mildly recognizable personality in a large cosmopolitan city like London is one thing. But when you see two together you just know that both are something-like famous, because one of them might be and the other one could be and they’re … together.

D’you know what I mean? The fact that there are two of them at the same time is just … significant. Am I explaining this clearly?

It’s like, “that guy looks like familiar. And that other bloke, wasn’t he in the Guardian, something about a film? Certainly, that’s uh (snapping fingers) … he played for Arsenal when they were shit, and uh … whatcha callit … the … the “Revolutions Per Minute” guy. Football. It’s football-related. We’re sat at a match. It must be.”

Every time I looked around, I saw people poking their neighbor while looking our way. Then both of them squint at us, whisper to one another and ask yet another person for confirmation of whether or not they have indeed spotted a celebrity. Or double-spotted. My favorite is when the third person confirms in the negative and convinces his mates that we are no one. So shut up, he says, and concentrate on the queue.

One time I actually heard a woman comment (or did I just imagine it?) that I couldn’t possibly be Ben Hampton because Hugh Grant played me in a movie, and, well, come on. That hurt. And Hugh Grant did not play me in a movie. Colin Firth did. Some would say he’s even better looking than Hugh Grant. I can’t decide.

Once, in the late 90s, I went to a match at Highbury and met Novak, who was in a group of people from Cambridge. We were re-introduced by mutual acquaintances. I first had met him, peripherally, when he was at Arsenal. It was quite nice that day at the old ground and exciting. We managed to sit near to one another at matches in, I believe, ’01 and again in ’04. My new life was surreal, sitting at my beloved Highbury, in superb seats, with an ex-player whom I admired and having him treat me like I was the important one.

Sure, I admired him.

Novak had mostly stayed away since leaving at the end of that ’95 season. His last appearance for the club had been that match in Paris when Nayim chipped Seaman from the halfway line and we lost a Cup Final. Quiz time. Which chapter do I not mention Nayim? Ah, memories. A miserable season. 12^th place. Graham sacked for stealing the supporters’ money before returning it. The end of an era but the cusp, if you will, of a new and glorious one in which we continue to revel and, like gluttons, demand more.

One of the only bits of humor that came out of that Cup Final inevitably involved Novak. Seaman slumped in the goal, head hanging between his legs, alone, disconsolate and, if he has any shame at all, humiliated. A keeper’s nightmare. Who appears in the television picture but his pal and teammate of five seasons. Novak placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder. The goalkeeper looked up for a moment, appeared to grin slightly, then put his head back down. Novak helped him up, and they left the pitch together.

Much later in the evening, I’m told, toward the end of the training room questioning, an alert and industrious Times reporter asked the courageous netminder, “What did Julius Novak say to you in the goal there at the end?”

A chastened Seaman chuckled, “He said, ‘Do not read the papers tomorrow.’”

Hopefully, someone offered a similar suggestion to Big Dave seven years later when Ronaldinho would chip him in the World Cup.

No. I won’t be getting much into George Graham here because the editor and publisher believe that hundreds of thousands of non-footballing book buyers around the globe will purchase and read this book and recommend it to their friends and ring up chat shows about it. And there is too much that is interesting about our main character and too many pithy words that can be written, by the can’t-miss, beloved author, about said hero and the modern culture of football vis a vis the times in which we live. Therefore, too much is at stake – so goes the thinking -- to waste even one paragraph on a run-of-the-mill, if colorfully controversial coach. I’m willing to go along with that, especially that nice bit about the author.

Watching the match before us, it was obvious just how much had changed in English football since 1995. Highbury gone, for one thing. Not one Englishman on the pitch for Arsenal, for another. By Novak’s last season at the club (which, not coincidentally, was Graham’s), foreign players were beginning to creep into the English game in increasing numbers, stamping their refined and overwhelmingly positive influence on our country’s bustling style of play.

But they had yet to be allowed to overrun all of our top English clubs. So there was still an opportunity for a significant pool of non-world-class English players to get priceless first-team experience, particularly, but not exclusively, during competition against the best European clubs. A match against England in 1995 was still a comprehensively dicey affair for any country. Of course, we were periodically shit then as well. The arrangement that is the Premiership has aided in bringing on a temporary, but deadly serious backslide of our national team. We hope it’s temporary.

The England team, from time to time, pops up in the top ten of the FIFA rankings. Realistically, many observers, myself included, put them as low as fifteenth best team in the world. Why did they fall so far? Shall I tell you something you already know? Because the people who own most of the top-flight football clubs in this country are greedy and grandiose egotists who don’t really care about the game. The individuals who have bought the top clubs outright – and those groups who assisted with the financing -- want an immediate, large, safe and perpetual return on their investment. Wouldn’t you?

And how does a big club virtually guarantee largesse for their owners and financers? By qualifying for the land of plenty, the UEFA Champions’ League – every season if possible. And sell a lot of shirts. What we know is that if a club get in to this exclusive society just once, the financial windfall is so great the club can then afford to reinvest in more international-quality players to bolster their squad, thus keeping the overwhelming majority of outsiders where they belong – on the outside. But most English clubs themselves are not getting rich and English football at the grassroots is not being strengthened because owners are still directing too many pounds to players’ salaries. Just the same way they did with the new money derived from the now-defunct idea of flotation back in the late-90s. Of course not every club that makes it to the heights stays rich for life. Can you say, Leeds United? My apologies, but that felt very good.

Now what is the most expedient way for a club in the big footballing nations of Europe (Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Portugal, Holland and, I suppose, England) to better their chances of finishing in the top three or four of their league competitions, thus qualifying for one of the sexiest and most exciting money-spinning operations on the planet? Buy the best players available, obviously. But, because satellite TV giants pay obscene amounts of money to the English Premier League and to UEFA to beam their matches everywhere in the world – even a Wigan Athletic v. Birmingham City match, English clubs can afford to pay among the highest wages in the world and attract the very best players from every footballing nation in the world.

How many Brazilians were interested in playing their club football in England before 1995? Not more than a few. Mirandinha at Newcastle, of course.

Even before the skill quotient went through the roof, surpassing Julius Novak and others in the process, English football was always the most exciting style to watch on television. Mostly because there was never a pause in the action – hammer and tongs from the off.

And for the last fifteen years, following a perfectly appropriate EU ruling, there is no limit to the number of alien workers a European football club can employ or field at any one time. Makes sense. For many years, though, European clubs could field no more than three foreign players at a time. For example, the great AC Milan teams of the late 80s featured three outstanding Dutchmen (Van Basten, Rijkaard and Gullitt) and eight Italians. Inter Milan fielded three superb Germans (Matthaeus, Brehme and Klinsmann) and eight Italians. And so on.

Remember how angry and perplexed Man United were when they had to count their Scottish, Irish and Welsh players as foreigners whenever they played in a European competition? So they had to choose three from, for example, Giggs, McLair, Irwin, Keane, Hughes, Cantona, Schmeichel and Kanchelskis to accompany the English citizens in the team. That was ridiculous, even though it made my mates and me at Arsenal quite happy at the time. United never won the Champions League until this rule was changed.

These days, English-born players who, fifteen years ago when Julius Novak played, might have found a place in the old first division (now the Premier League), must make do in what used to be called the second, third and fourth divisions.

Does Novak believe he could have played first-team football for a top club today? He absolutely does not, and I agree.

These plucky Englishmen, my countrymen, are, without ceremony, bumped down the food chain by foreign players, because the exotic imports are more technically astute, mature and accomplished, at a younger age, than many of their English counterparts.

The clubs are bound to the caprice of their owners and the expectations of financiers. They are not bound to help strengthen the national team so that we can compete with the likes of Brazil, France, Argentina, Spain, Italy and, to a lesser extent, Germany, who have suffered similarly to us. At the moment, to compare the England team with these nations, as far as football, is something more than a stretch.

And, I don’t know if I can believe this (and I honestly don’t care; it just helps make my point), but according to some Portuguese Website, Darren Bent (recently lighting it up at Charlton, now lucky to get a game at Spurs) earns nearly as much in basic wages as Real Madrid legend, Raul. If this is true, then something has gone utterly wrong. I don’t recall ever watching a Real Madrid match where Raul did not score a goal. The man has been a lion for his club, spanning something like 500 matches and has a career strike rate not dissimilar to that of Alan Shearer. Ever heard of him? Yet BSkyB smiles on the likes of Darren Bent.

Our national side’s new, legendary Italian manager, Fabio Capello will somehow have to take a feeble, ungoverned band of primadonnas and transform them into working class fighters, true lions – the England of old, who couldn’t win anything as well, to be honest.

But how about the 1982 World Cup? The year Novak visited Spain, became a Valencia supporter, stalked Marianne, sketched her nude body in an art class and was discovered by Wüppertal, we went out in the second round not having lost a match. A proud side. There’s no pride anymore. Would you pay money to watch England play today? You do; but you shouldn’t. And you immediately feel foolish for having done.

But that’s international football. This is club football we’re watching today. My club. And club football is rapturous. Club football helps shape lives. It helps us focus for a couple of hours a week on something other than the inevitability of our own mortality. Say, a different reason to be depressed.

That used to be me, in a big way, from age twelve to about age thirty-five, through to the time Novak played there. I actually daydreamed about those years whilst sitting next to the ex-midfielder in the West Stand. I glanced at Novak just before the halftime interval. The look on his face said two things to me. First:  he could look out at his former club without memories of abuse from the North London supporters. Second:  he finds the team before him in red and white unrecognizable.

“Are you enjoying it?” I asked.

When I was in my early twenties and dating a lot, I became accustomed to my companions not enjoying themselves. So I periodically check in.

“I’m enjoying the day, your company, the noise, the singing and the skill on display,” Novak answered. “I’m probably enjoying it differently than you and most of the supporters. Sorry I don’t have a ready joke.”

I truly wasn’t expecting such a sickly diplomatic answer.

“A simple ‘No’ would have done,” I said, keeping my eyes on the action. Another speculative Spurs foray thwarted in its infancy. “Oh, the doom of waking every day knowing you’re a Tottenham supporter, I can’t imagine.”

Novak laughed.

“You know what I mean,” he said, returning to my question. “I wasn’t an Arsenal supporter before I joined the club. I was an admirer. And I never hated Tottenham. But as a supporter of whatever club I enjoy watching, I’m afraid I’m fickle rather than loyal. I wasn’t born into that kind of culture.”

“I forget,” I asked. “Do you support anyone?”

“I’m kind of into Cheltenham Town these days on the domestic front.”

“Very noble of you. You’re a better man than I am. Not too familiar with Cheltenham, beyond the Gold Cup of course. I think I might have an uncle in Malvern who supports them – or maybe it’s Gloucester City.”

Robbie Keane blazes wide.

“I think you’d know,” Novak said. “There’s massive hatred from the City end. They believe it should be themselves playing Leeds and Forest. They’ve been, like, seventy years in the same league.”

“Cheltenham don’t play Leeds, surely.”

“What? You call yourself a British football writer?”

“Uh, no! As a matter of fact, I …”

“Never mind,” he cut me off, then boasted with vicarious pleasure. “Apparently, then, you missed our recent win over the very same … Leeds … United? Remember them? Champions’ League semifinalists not too long ago, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Mmm. Name sounds familiar,” I said. “Leeds, you say? Isn’t that up near Pudsey?”

“I believe it is, yes,” he played along like a true Gunner. “Also in the same league as mighty Cheltenham are the likes of Nottingham, Millwall and Swindon. Some pretty recognizable names, I think you’ll agree.”

See how fun football talk can be? We stand, and no one’s hearts are in the applause for a turgid first half.

“The old Third Division,” I said. “Pretty high up for Cheltenham.”

“Taken in context of man’s ability to walk upright, Cheltenham, you’re right; I’d call it a meteoric rise.”

“Absolutely. So you beat Leeds. You must be having rather a comfortable time of it.”

“We’re mired in the drop zone, actually,” he said, “along with poor Luton Town, recently docked ten points.”

“Oh yeah,” I remembered. “Poor Luton. Technical paperwork violations will get you every time.”

“You’d think they’d hire someone to fill out the proper forms.”

“Shame.”

“The shame is … is Leeds, really,” he laughed.

I joined him in laughter over the fall of our old rivals. As an Arsenal supporter, I always believed it to be Leeds who were the most hated club in England, rather than us.

“Right,” I agreed. “It wasn’t the team as much as it was the fans. Filthy, they were.”

“Remember the chant?” he asked.

“Do you mean, WE ALL HATE LEEDS SCUM!”

Two men standing in the row behind us overheard our conversation.

“Leeds fans?” said one of the men, nose horribly broken, who looked a few years older than me. “Scum.”

His mate, of similar age and facial disposition, chimed in. “Two of the bastards mugged my granddad and great uncle for tickets back in ’78. Is that not fucking scum of the earth.”

Novak grinned and said, “Yeah, cheers.”

“Didn’t I hear something about your being a Valencia supporter?” I asked Novak, getting all personal on him again in an American way. On the other hand, he is the main subject of this fucking book I can’t believe I’m writing.

“That’s true,” he answered. “I far prefer them, over the long haul, to any of the other top sides in Spain. There are seasons, like recently when I enjoy watching Villareal or Sevilla or Majorca; but my heart always comes back to Los Che. I’d humbly call myself a supporter.”

“So that came about from your season playing there? The big swansong?”

“Oh, no. Remember the story of my seeing Marianne for the first time?”

“Remember it?” I said. “That’s probably going to be chapter one, mate.”

“Get outta here.”

“We’ll talk,” I gave him an assuring pat on the forearm.

     We stroll around the Club Level as replica shirt-wearing hordes queue for overpriced, but supposedly testicle-free Bockwurst. Neither of us were hungry, having shared a muttar paneer from The Standard Tandoori on Holloway Road beforehand.

“What about Valencia then?” I asked.

“I tagged along on a train trip to Spain with a couple I knew from school,” he said. “The guys my companions were meeting out in the Valencian province happened to be Valencia fans. One of their dads had quite a few tickets for a match being played while we were there. The whole family were Valencia mad.”

“Just for the record. ’82?” I inquired.

“Yeah. The superstar Mario Kempes had gone, and the club were about to enter a major downturn. But they’d won the Super Cup the previous autumn over Forest. They’d had to upgrade the Mestalla Stadium for the World Cup, however, and it went a fair distance toward breaking them.”

Once Novak began filling me in on the roots of his fandom, I recalled that Valencia had beaten my Arsenal not long before that in the Cup Winner’s Cup Final boasting the likes of Kempes and one of Novak’s heroes as a teenager, Rainer Bonhof.

“I went to the match,” he continued. “I was completely overcome by the experience, and Valencia earned a place in my heart. I don’t think I need to explain.”

“You don’t,” I said, as we settled back into our seats. “So how do you like the new ground?”

“Suppose it had to happen,” he said in that wistful way traditionalists have.

We are sitting in the kind of stadium that most of the big clubs of Europe have enjoyed for twenty years or more. Yes, I loved Highbury. It can never be replaced. I’ve written all about it. We’ve all written all about it. You know how I feel. I’m nostalgic. I’m romantic. I’m a sappy, stupid fool about Highbury and all those priceless, never-to-be-forgotten memories that began for me way back in the 1960s. But I’m fifty years old, and this place is wildly comfortable.

Hello, Emirates Stadium. Where have you been all my middle-aged life? After all, we are a ‘European Giant,’ and we will, as long as the market demands, entertain the other celestial bodies of continental football. And Chelsea. This is rarefied air we’re breathing, and we know it. We are smug and we are superior. And many of us suffered for decades to get where we are today.

Today, my euphoria is dampened but once when Novak leans over and asks, “How many British players have you got out there today?”

My answer, had I bothered, would have been zero.

“They’re not foreigners to me,” I answered with Gunner pride. “Not with that little cannon on the badge.”

He twisted the knife, jingoistically. “You do know this is the English Premier League.”

“You weren’t even born here,” is all I can think to say.

“Didn’t you and your friends used to chant that at me?”

I don’t care what he says – or anyone else for that matter. They can all go eff off, the jealous twats. This is a new Golden Age. And it started just as we said au revoir to Novak.

The club quickly built on the rock-solid core planted and harvested by George Graham over the previous eight seasons. The living-legend, Arsene Wenger followed by bringing in Viera, Petit, Anelka, Overmars, Henry, Pires, Wiltord, Kanu, Ljungberg and Sol Campbell; and we’ve never looked back. I’ve just given myself goose pimples.

Except that we do look back, don’t we? Because I’m writing about a player who came just before our current Golden Age – a player who was there at the end of the George Graham era. A period during which, I should like to point out, they were, in fact, not shit.

I admit it. I used to whistle, boo and groan during Novak’s five seasons at Highbury. And, yes, I’ve even booed my latest literary subject directly. Afterward in the pub, you’d hear punters going on about Novak, “He scores two bombs against West Germany and can’t even put away a sitter against fucking Leicester. Where does Graham find these useless muppets?”

On the days or series of matches Arsenal were shit or at least when they played absolute bollocks football, he was an easy scapegoat. Because, face it, nil-nil is not only bloody useless, unless you’re away to Sampdoria in a cup tie and up a goal on aggregate, but, much more often than not, excruciatingly dull to watch as well.

Was he wrong for the side? Yeah, I’d have to say. On balance, I don’t think he made us a better team by his presence. Arsenal are a big club – a rich club located in one of the world’s great cities. And, for me, we were a bit in the wilderness there domestically, for most of Novak’s time, when we didn’t at all have to be. We had one of the best managers in Europe at the time – George Graham – and could have attracted the kind of players we needed to contend for the league championship every year. There was really no excuse for having brought in Novak and some of these others who were nothing more than squad players in my view.

And, for me, the makeup of the squad was all down to wages. The questions are: Who was responsible? The trustees? Were they cheap or too conservative? George Graham? Did he want to show that he could win without the shameless expenditures of the other big clubs? Could he only operate with an egalitarian unit of employees loyal to his cause? Did big-money superstars irritate him to distraction? Did the board not trust him to administer their funds, the supporters’ funds, my funds? Did they trust him and he was stealing?

As Jack Nicholson wondered in Prizzi’s Honor, “Which one-uh-deez?”

Why were we never able to buy Roy Keane or Paul Gascoigne or Eric Cantona or Alan Shearer or some of the European or South American stars who chose sunny Italy or Spain? Gabriel Batistuta or Romario or Hristo Stoichkov or Gheorghe Hagi come to mind.

Why is the Premier League such a destination today for the best players in the world? Can it be anything but wages and the ability to offer top dollar to the best players? Darren Bent earning more than Raul? When Arsenal started paying the sums we could actually afford to spend, there’s been nothing to stop us. It was very frustrating from a supporter’s standpoint.

In light of that, then, you can’t really blame Novak or any of the players, really, for those seasons when we all munched on peppermint Setlers to relieve indigestion brought on by too many nil-nils. George Graham, like so much -- if not all -- of life, was indeed a mixed bag. He lifted us over the moon then steered us over the falls to our deaths.

The second half at the Emirates was excellent, miles better than the first. Berbatov equalized for Spurs. Then the substitute Bendtner sent us into rapture with the winner. I doubt seriously if Julius Novak will ever return.

Chapter Eight of Hampton from the Halfway Line

Day One of the world as we know it.

8

Maidenhead, Berkshire

I was a fan, first and foremost. I think it’s reasonably well known, out in the world, that I’m an Arsenal fan. A Gooner. I support England during the big competitions as well. Course that’s not nearly as appetizing or rewarding. In fact, being a supporter of our national team is one of the more dismal and unbearable pastimes imaginable – an almost unwatchable side for quite some time and now a laughingstock to boot. An overwhelming majority of us in Britain have existed under the illusion that we are a world football power; and we have had to be smacked about the head over and over and over again for forty years now to convince us that we are not. Like fans of cricket and rugby, I think more of us are getting it, finally. Kind of like our grandparents in the waning days of empire.

But back then, summer of 1990, when Novak was set to move to Arsenal, it didn’t take much on the football front to push the entire country into a xenophobic hysteria. One dominating performance, against even a serviceable side, and we could be led to believe that the matches leading up to the actual lifting of the Jules Rimet trophy were just a formality. First we sing “God Save the Queen” then watch all cower before the might that was England. All right, maybe we’re still that way. Of course now we couldn’t even dominate a Malta or an Andorra, and we actually drew at home to Macedonia and away to Israel. Can you imagine what Sir Bobby Charlton was thinking from his seat at Old Trafford for the Macedonia debacle? Macedonia. You know, first decent night since … 300 B.C.

Novak was little known in England before that World Cup. There are many reasons for that – English clubs banned from Europe for one thing. English fans had neither hosted European clubs in our cities nor traveled to watch our teams take on the continent’s best since the Heysel deaths in 1985.

Actually, before that World Cup, I don’t think many soccer fans around Europe even knew he was American. The few times he offered a rare quote to a journalist, on the air or in print, he spoke what sounded like authentic German. He’d not made himself available to his native country’s soccer federation, in the face of desperate home front badgering to do so. His name made him sound sort of pan-Slavik. If it were a Graham Greene novel, he would have been an incognito American sent by the State department to undermine our national game. Not that we weren’t perfectly capable of undermining our national game by ourselves.

He was not one of the stars but an important player nonetheless for a Wüppertal side that had climbed steadily up the Bundesliga throughout the period of the aforementioned ban. Fascinating stuff. They had been a settled, lower division club for years and had come up once or twice to the first division with only a handful of famous wins in the 70s to their name. No one really took great notice of them over here until they came out of what seemed to us to be absolutely nowhere to pip Cologne for the league title in 1989.

I, for one, certainly didn’t give a toss, because my club were in the process of winning our first championship for eighteen years. And that is the last time I’ll mention Arsenal and 1989 and beating Liverpool on the last day of the season at Anfield to win the League.

Took everyone outside of West Germany by complete surprise, did Wüppertal. But the German football public had been watching this club slowly collect useful players and gain confidence and imprint their stylized scrappiness onto the league for just about the whole decade. And they’d had some famous European nights for several seasons, by that time, in a decade well influenced by German football.

Wüppertal won the German cup for the first time during a watershed, promotion season; and over the next few years rightfully earned the reputation as a cup side. As we learned later on, I think Novak had something to do with that. Obviously, he has a hatful of cup medals and near misses to prove it. That’s really no accident. Wherever he showed up, his club became a struggle for teams to knock out of cup ties and progressed in practically every competition they entered.

Having said that, the Arsenal squad he came into were coming off that championship season from two years before, and we were not exactly strangers to cup finals. But there are those who would grudgingly allow that he solidified us in the middle of the park and showed us a thing or two about steel and dignity and calm professionalism. A real George Graham kind of player in the final analysis. Is that what was needed at the time? Debatable, leaning toward doubtful.

Of course, the first thing Novak said to me, when we met initially to flesh out this project, was to remind me that I had not included him in my All-Time Arsenal XI for an interview I gave to the Independent about five years ago. My midfield was Brady, Viera, Rocastle and Overmars.

“You’re joking, right?” he said. “Overmars? Three seasons at the club? Fine. The double. Great.”

I remember feeling slightly stupid. Not that I would ever put Novak in my all-time Arsenal midfield, but that perhaps I should give it another look without quite so much weight given to my joy at how successful the club were at the time of that interview. I’ll think about it. Another thing he said about Mark Overmars was that if I was taking into account how much money we brought in by selling him to Barcelona, then that could be a mitigating factor in his overall value to the club. I wasn’t thinking that. I was thinking about the little Dutchman tearing up the left wing and scoring against Man United to win the title and how happy that made me; and about all the relatively dodgy left wingers we’d had down the years.

But that World Cup. Many journalists and novelists and poets and supporters and people of all walks of life, in England, have written about that World Cup – many because of Gazza’s famous tears in Turin. Whole books have been dedicated to examining exactly why everything changed for football and entertainment and popular culture and priorities and values in this country at the moment our most famous and controversial star lost his rag during the semifinal loss to West Germany.

We all saw straight man Gary Lineker gesture to the bench indicating that the boy was barmy and needed looking after, but most of us ignored that. Typically, of course, Gascoigne was crying for himself (and not, specifically, for his beloved countrymen) because his yellow card, he knew, would suspend him from the final were England to advance. A lot of us knew that. Football people knew that. But even football people cried because they could not imagine England being in the final without Paul Gascoigne. He made them a real team that could stand toe-to-toe with the Germans, Italians, Argentines and Brazilians.

There were some – nearly all of them Spurs supporters -- who couldn’t appreciate England’s World Cup triumph in ’66 because the great Jimmy Greaves was left out. That’s a bit over the top, but I do understand the sentiment. Not one Arsenal player featured in Bobby Robson’s World Cup squad, and they’d won the league a season before.

Anfield. Nil-two. Injury time. Michael Thomas. Somersault. Sorry.

However, millions of Brits, in the collective hysteria that sometimes grips an otherwise intelligent people (see Diana), watched him cry and then stared in grief at the newspapers and the TVs the following day featuring stills of Gazza’s red, puffy, tear-strewn face. Since we lost the match in unbearably tragic circumstances (to which we’ve since grown accustomed), we (not me, but “We”) equated his visible, natural, poignant grief with the crushing sadness and great pride we were feeling for our country. How we had fought the great champions. How unlucky we were. How brave. It was real “we happy few” stuff.

The country’s most famous Geordie did what he could to bring us down to earth, a week later, by wearing fake tits during the team parade in London, but the damage had already been done. Perfectly sensible, middle-class Englishmen and women became football zombies ready to fork over every ‘p’ they earned to join the silly bandwagon. Football instantly became a marketable commodity that would make a lot of people very rich. And, naturally, quite a few charlatans have come on the scene to make a bogus bob or two.

Speaking of scalawags, I wrote a book about my own experiences of being a football supporter and was stunned and overjoyed by the overwhelming response – not to mention the sales that have never stopped to this day. Let’s be honest. My timing, for the first time in my life, was spot on. The reviews and the success gave me confidence in my abilities as a writer and as a literary person, and I was off to the races. I am a writer. I am a novelist. And I am proud and relieved to be able to say that. The resulting comfort allows me to afford today’s ticket prices without taking out a second mortgage.

And I do owe it to football – the pre-Gazza’s tears variety. Because what I wrote about, in my diary-style narrative in the medium of match reports, concerned mostly the agony and pathetic obsession of supporting my club, Arsenal, throughout the 70s and 80s. If you follow football at all then you might know this team today as a world brand typifying speed, style and balletic grace. But, if you read my book, “Out in the Cold,” you will discover that it was not always like that.

My book was about what makes us, as supporters, as fans, participate in an activity of this nature that brings us mostly anguish and various degrees of wet. It was about other notions of human behavior, as well, which led nicely into the writing of my first novel. Thankfully, the obsession element resonated for a lot of people – and not just soccer fans. Many women learned, for the first time, what goes on inside a man’s head. That and a couple other of my books tended to offer the fairer sex unaccustomed insight into the male psyche.

Some women felt that it was actually worse than they'd imagined.

Others commented, “I'm glad to know there's something going on in there."

You might not know this, but Arsenal won the league the year before that world cup, the 1988-89 season. Remarkably, and this is worth noting, they had not done for eighteen years. A lifetime for this damaged young fan, during which I had come to accept the fact that I would die -- a morose trainspotter’s death in a meat pie-soiled anorak -- before ever seeing an Arsenal captain lift a championship trophy.

Now pay attention, please, as I attempt, for both your benefit and mine, to tie the first of what I hope will be a tolerable number of intriguing story lines together. I’m thinking someone will edit out this background bit. For even though I’ve always believed that ‘asides,’ when used cleverly and sparingly, can have a beguiling literary effect, I’m just not sure that … well, we’ll just have to see how it goes, eh? Still early doors.

I don’t think it’s ridiculous to suggest that I was on the brink of turning a corner in my life about the time my subject was turning a corner in his. At least one corner. You don’t want to be turning too many corners at once, mind, especially not in the same direction or you end up … you know. In a perfect world, it’s ‘turn … ease off … go straight on for a bit.’ Consolidate matters. Feed the wheel! Kind of like a race car – to give the idiom a metaphorical “turn.” God.

What I mean is, not only had he and his lover of seven years split up the previous year; not only had said lover given birth to their healthy baby girl not six months after the breakup; not only had Novak finally earned his advanced degrees and been hired by Selwyn College, Cambridge; but – and this is the exciting part – he was ratcheting up his football career several teeth as well by signing with the Arse.

Honestly, who else but an Arsenal supporter would be so presumptuous to venture that a move to Highbury -- from a Bundesliga champion; two-time German Cup winner; European Cup semifinalist; UEFA Cup finalist; Cup Winners’ cup winner and Cup Winners’ cup finalist, all achieved incomprehensibly between 1983 and 1990 -- would constitute a step up? I ask you.

His life had been in revolt at the same time I was taking my first tentative steps toward producing a sustained piece of writing and finally making something of my life. I made the decision to switch from attempting radio drama to attempting straight, personal prose and chanced onto a style that suited me and would carry me forward with eventual (and much appreciated) fanfare.

Marianne Papineau is the other person in this story. The previous Christmas, she had moved with their baby back to Paris. There she would be nearer to friends and relatives and could realize her long-awaited dream of studying principally the work of Camille Claudel at the École des Beaux-Arts. Afterward she would hopefully launch her sculpture career in the Parisian art world. As a side benefit, she would succeed in putting some distance between herself and Novak after she dumped him.

Did I just say, provocatively and controversially, that “she dumped him”?

We’ll put that off to another time. Back to what’s really important here.

Most excitingly for Arsenal fans, we are now in position to determine whether or not players like Novak, between 1990 and 1995, helped pave the way for the club to turn its own corner under Arsene Wenger and arrive ripe for everything the new Premier League was about to lay on a silver platter for the big teams to gobble up.

Novak would describe his years in North London as something like bailing water while waiting to be reinforced. The night of that cup final defeat in Paris would be his Khartoum, his Alamo.

Novak around 1990 was a relatively clean slate to us, a bit under the radar. On one hand, those two wonder goals for the USA in the quarterfinal loss to the West Germans, when he was already reported in the press to have been signed by Arsenal, gave us an impression that we were getting some kind of assassin of our wildest dreams. That was false.

He wasn’t that type of player, as I will attempt to sort out for you. Not a man, if you will, for getting forward.

On the other hand, it was kind of nice to know that deep down somewhere he had that in him – goals, I mean. You don’t score two goals in the World Cup against the eventual champion and then forget how to do it. They may make it look easy on TV, but ask any professional who’s played at the highest level. It ain’t. I struggle even to get a sniff at goal against fellow, aging lager louts.

Even Novak eventually would have to come to terms with his legitimate, and no longer dormant, finishing ability. The video doesn’t lie. He knew where the net was after all. But he knew, as well, and the clubs he’s played for knew, that there were many other valuable qualities that he could bring on board to fortify a team and help them win games. For a club to forever try to position him for scoring chances, in effect putting him in the way of the more consistent scoring stars, was effectively negating those very qualities. Such attributes, in the long run, were going to deliver success to the club and extend his unlikely career.

Among those who make their living shoveling coal down in the engine room, Novak was in the upper echelon. And back then, shoveling coal and carrying water is what most British players were best at doing. He’d never been a goalscorer at Wüppertal. As he matured, he grew in class and developed an uncanny ability to do seemingly three or four different tasks at once. By the time we got him he was quite a reliable player.

He’s admitted to me that if Arsenal had tried to set him up as some sort of early-90s version of Frank Lampard, someone who could dictate play, get forward often and, most importantly bulge the bloody net; then he would immediately have been found out, caught out, dropped to the reserves and released without fanfare.

“That’s not why Graham brought me in,” he said to me at one point. “And he was astute enough to know that a couple of lucky blinders in one match (albeit a match being watched by millions all over the world) was not going to alter his plans.  He knew what I could do, and he stuck to his guns; and he stuck by me.”

And Novak will be the first to admit that Americans in that World Cup were given obscene amounts of time on the ball. The opponents figured these college kids were sure to hand it back to them soon enough without having to apply even baseline levels of pressure. That was generally true, but, as we saw, each of their opponents suffered from unforgivable lapses of concentration that led to an unheard-of number of mistakes, which the yanks were, to their credit, able to convert into really a hatful of goals.

What opponents refused to take into account, however, was that these ‘college kids’ had been recently bolstered by the Midwest-raised Novak and a couple other European-based players with dodgy American citizenship.

“The American boys were committed players. During the build-up, thankfully, those pulling the strings agreed that our only chance to avoid a cyclone of suffering was to assemble and cultivate a resilient side.”

“And crossing your fingers,” I added.

“It can be done, making yourself hard to beat. We did it at Wüppertal. Others pointed to Jack Charlton’s Ireland. Of course, you have to have the players.”

They didn’t win the group outright, as Italy took maximum points, but they scored the most goals. They put three past the Czechs in the opening draw, one in the Stadio Olimpico against the hosts in the commendable loss, then went through with an astonishing four in the second half to knock the Austrians out deservedly. It was shocking the way teams played against them with such staggering disrespect. But, you know, a very poor world cup.

West Germany? They watched, along with the rest of us, the Yanks’ unlikely progression to the quarterfinal stage – the U.S. of course having seen off a profligate and distracted Costa Rica two-nil. Still the Germans were arrogant enough and more than talented enough, I suppose, to underestimate them just as imprudently as the sides that came before them. And it very nearly led to a humiliation which could not possibly be described in words – except perhaps by one of those really long German words that sound like five words.

Eventually West Germany showed its pedigree – classic David and Goliath stuff, except Goliath won. Kind of like watching Man United home to Burton Albion or someone.

I don’t know if the Americans, with their pitiable reputation at the time, cast some kind of spell over their opponents or what. Kind of like when you’re playing chess against someone whom you know to be an inferior chess player; and then, before you know it, you’ve lost your queen and both rooks. Then you’re kicking yourself for not having paid better attention during a couple of key moments.

Everyone predicted, with good reason, that the Americans would be three games and out with most likely three heavy losses – maybe a draw to Austria given that both probably would have been eliminated by the time they met. Come the day, it was Novak and company who still clung to a lifeline.

And did any punter in the world hit the jackpot by laying money on a ‘USA-3 Czechoslovakia-3’ result? Three-nil up and coasting at halftime, the Czechs. One has to wonder just what the hell they were up to in the dressing room. Pilsner?

The final quarter of an hour was like an old second-division derby or one of those matches on the last day of the season where the loser is relegated, and so all the players run around like their shorts are on fire.

That World Cup, that tournament, was a moment in time that was, in many ways, atypical for Novak. We’ve had long conversations about it and many enjoyable pints along the way. As a journalist, you have to guard against getting too matey with your subject because your objectivity can suffer as a result. You see it happen all the time in news coverage of politicians and government officials for example, as well as less weighty issues in sport. And I’ll admit I’ve become fond of the bastard. Does that change how I write about him? Perhaps. Does it cloud my professional judgment? I certainly hope not, but I’m sure that many critics will have a go at my opinions and analysis. That’s fine. One of my favorite hobbies is having a friendly go at people myself. I welcome it as a means of advancing our understanding of a given topic. If no one were to comment or have a go, then I (not to mention the publishers) would worry.

But his, I’ve found, is a varied and multi-layered story that could be studied from several vantage points and at different depths. It’s history, after all. Sure, it’s not Julius Caesar and the course of western civilization we’re talking about. That’s my next book. But this is what we football fans talk about down the pub or at the office or on the terraces and, hell, even at funerals. We discuss and debate our own version of trends and epochs and man-made disasters. We make them sound more heroic and more important than they really are, maybe. But it’s much easier to get back to one’s real life after musing about your favorite pastime over an ESB or a glass of Montepulciano. Whatever portion of my thoughts here or whatever bits of my interviews with Julius Novak make it into print in the end, that’s basically what you’re getting – pub talk, water cooler talk, match talk … funeral talk.