My Trip To The Emirates - The Real Wonderland Of Arsenal
Smashing the Hall Of Mirrors and downloading a whole new world
Well, that was a somewhat chastening 95 minutes, but in Arteta’s words “we have to stand up and look at the bigger picture. The fact we are competing toe-to-toe with Manchester City is incredible”. So, it’s time to embrace the uncertainty, sing in unison and revel in the glory of the season so far because we are on the precipice of greatness. So take a moment to enjoy this weeks (slightly late) Arsenal Wonderland dear reader and remember, you never know, anyone predict Holding to score? Exactly!
Regular readers of Arsenal Wonderland will know I sometimes begin articles with a few paragraphs (in italics) about “The Dog And I”, which is us (the dog and I) encountering and experiencing various situations during our daily drift through the forest. I use this format to prelude the theme of the article. And I write these openings as beautifully as I can. You know, showcase my skills before the business of football writing begins.
Although it’s not actually football writing in the usual sense at all. That’s not a conceit. I just can’t write those stat heavy game reviews or tactical analysis autopsy type articles. I don’t see football that way. A lot of people don’t. But there’s room for those “football vernacular” articles and there’s room for my articles with their expansive eccentric personalities.
My trip to the Emirates got me thinking about football and the wider world and how the signs and symbols we invent create and distort our possibilities. So when I (finally) got back (the dog was glad I returned) I wrote this. Enjoy.
As the stadium filled to overflowing, chants and songs broke out like blossom on a celebration tree. Time compressed under the weight of impressions. Arteta and his crew took their positions. Mikel began prowling the touchline. Gunnersaurus stomped about and people laughed and chatted with regular seat buddies. Pre-match pitch-side interviews wound-up. The players filed out, kicked about, lined up, shook hands. This huge carnival of separate attentions and scenes gelled into one living entity as “North London Forever” caught us all in an acoustic trance and focused our attention toward the pitch and the players as we waited for that incredible intoxicating peep of the whistle.
There are so many of us who follow Arsenal who will never go to the Emirates. Of the roughly 4 million people who watched Arsenal v Southampton only 60,000 actually attended the game. By far and away the most common way of watching football is on a screen. I watch football on a screen. For the first time in two decades I was at the match. Finally. At. The. Match.
Engaging with football through a screen is like engaging the world through a hall of mirrors which distorts and replaces reality with a hyperreality. As I floated along in the river of excited people heading toward the Home Of Football, I realised I’d spent a lifetime being showered with images and ideas with such regularity that I’d assumed this hyperreality was reality. Turns out it wasn't anywhere close.
The hyperreal Emirates parading about in my mind had done an excellent job, until the moment I encountered the actual Emirates. There’s something bewildering about the Iconic, the Symbolic and the Real folding themselves into your consciousness all at once. Reality generates a fountain of complex emotions shaped from the raw material of space, distance, temperature, smell, light and atmosphere all intimately entangled within an ever-changing kaleidoscope of impressions, thoughts, memories and feelings. Arriving at the actual Emirates was like pressing refresh and finding the whole new world downloaded into my mind.
From Highbury Corner the streaming crowd heads up the Holloway Road, past the pubs and chicken shops and 24hour mini-markets and past North London’s terraced houses with their white first-floor facades and yellow-brick uppers, chatting and laughing and gossiping and finishing beers, when suddenly the Emirates is before you like the unexpected entrance to some colossal cave. Some architecture appears forever alien in its location. The Emirates seems to have emerged organically in an ever metamorphosing landscape.
The perspective gets more peculiar as you go inside the miniature colossus. The immense and delicate storm-grey red cliff faces of humanity that blur their way up into the heavens suddenly seem to fall backwards as the attention is funnelled back onto that perfectly manicured green postage stamp of a pitch, wrapped up in the ribbon white lines that define the borders between “Life” and “The Game”.
And there it was, that pitch, right there in front of me, with players spraying balls around and going through warm-up routines. That pitch stood like a shrine, its extraordinary history hidden in the envelope of time. That seriously well-manicured attention grabbing 105x68 metres of green screen, stage, story and canvas, a geometrically perfect slice of flatness onto which we project everything football, that magical slither of space through which we mangle our hearts and souls. That pitch. There it was at last. My pilgrimage was over.
The players took their positions. The excitement grew. The ref blew the whistle and people threw fists to the skies and sang in great choirs as they echoed this enchanting moment across the stadium. And before anyone had a chance to finish predicting just how much we’d win by, BOOM! We were a goal down! What the? Shock. Surprise. A sucker punch.
But it was so quick. Too quick. A season of comebacks and never-give-ups meant hope was still blooming. The Stadium, in one simultaneous realisation remembered its responsibility and began reminding itself that we had Super Mik Arteta and that Arsenal Are The Greatest Team The World Has Ever Seen.
And then, just as we had seemingly convinced ourselves through the power of song that all was well, Boom! We were two-nil down. As that second goal rippled our net the entire Stadium suddenly formed the cantankerous and disorientated personality of an expelled anger-management course attendee. Certain players were singled out and in no uncertain terms were reminded to sort themselves out.
Stadiums capture a huge spectrum of human emotions and then release them like a slow puncture or a steam whistle or a stampede. The Emirates was aimlessly stampeding and it was the players themselves who orientated the disorientated and brought focus to the proceedings by positioning themselves for the third time in seemingly as many minutes.
And we went again, two nil down, points vanishing from our grasp and nothing but a lungful of air and scratchy vocal cords with which to enter the battle. COME. ON. YOU. GUNNERS. COOOOOOMMMMMME. OOOOOONNNNNNAAAAAAAAH.
Time is a very subjective experience. Martinelli’s 20th minute goal could have been in the third minute or two days after kick-off. Everything was so surreal it was hard to tell. The shape of time and the shape of football had altered. The team had a coherence on the pitch that’s harder to fathom in the close-up quick-cut multi-angle TV experience. Witnessing the transitions of play is simpler. Getting a feel for the mood of the team is easier. Grasping just how drilled and fit and fast they are is more immediate. Their weaknesses and faults are much clearer. I gained a more intuitive understanding of what Arteta means when he uses the training pitch as justification for why he’s made certain inclusions or exclusions. It’s obvious to him, being there in the real world in real time with real people.
An incredibly long half-time followed. 2-1. Not the end of the world. Possibilities lingered. Hopes burgeoned. Time disappeared and the teams ebbed and flowed back and forth like a tiny tide on the pitch until Southampton got a corner and our goal quadrupled in size as the ball shrank. 3-1.
There’s something about a great team that means you never give up hope. Arsenal are a great team. There was something in the mood that encouraged me as I got into synchronised singing mode with the immediate stranger to my left. Unconsciously we aligned and began full throated pleas to the gods of football through chant. Ødegaard guided the ball through a forest of needles and StarBoy shone as he equalised on the 90th. Trossard’s attempt off the bar in the 92nd took an eternity to snail its way through space and as it bounced off the bar we understood that we’d have to settle for a triumphant draw.
A then the micro examinations began. From the Emirates to Angel tube station thousands of snippets of conversation penetrated my mind like live podcasts as people tried to make sense of their feelings. Right now we’re living through a curious historical period where conversations and narratives and opinions and points of view are all birthed in the hyperreality of the internet. People take them on board and give them life. Everyone say’s the same things, uses the same words, appeals to the same logic. Like an enormous ethernet cable the snaking crowd refolded the hyperreal into the real and the Arsenal v Southampton game started its journey from actual to myth in real time all around me.
As we wandered through those familiar streets where I had spent so much of my younger days, I thought about football and I thought about the wider world and I thought about my relationship with both. Football is a social space for playful non-violent stadium-based conflict. The wider world feels like it’s becoming more and more an anti-social space for increasingly violent (real and rhetorical) silo-based conflict. I’ll have to return to the screen of course, I have no other option. But I'll be vigilant that the carefully constructed hyperreality I’m experiencing is no substitute for the deeply sensuous and miraculous reality we could share between ourselves.
Thanks so much Elin F, Jonny P, Ems P and Mat T for making my Emirates trip a “reality”. The trip was truly wonderful and I’m so grateful you spectacular people made it happen.
So there you go real, living and breathing fellow Gooners, have yourselves a fine week stuffed with extraordinary perceptions. And of course feel free to share Arsenal Wonderland, the newsletter that knows it’s just a newsletter made up by some fella just to entertain you dear reader. Just you.
Oh for sure though I think I’ll save them for tomorrow night haha
After last night’s schooling this was the tonic that I needed. Thanks Jonathan