It sunk in when I was on my way back to London. I thought: done the business. Thank you very much. Let’s get back home. The famous Desmond Morris idea. Get in there, hit them hard and get the hell out of there. I was so proud of the players. I’ve got nothing but admiration for them. You work at it during the week and make sure it can happen and they were fantastic and they did it.
I always remember George Graham coming to the back of the coach. He never came to the back to have a drink with the boys. Never ever. So when he came to sit at the back and to drink with us, obviously you know it’s a big moment. It was a fantastic journey back. Cars beeping. Everybody out of the cars. Flags flying all the way down the M1, M6. It was incredible. I do remember the start of the bus journey back. But I don’t remember getting home.
We were supposed to be having food but that went out the window. Food wasn’t my problem, but beer was. That was my job. It was a party atmosphere with everyone on the bus singing and celebrating.
We’re all at the back of the coach singing songs and banging the window at people who were beeping their horn. ‘Look at this lot over here!’ We’d all go over to the side of the coach, waving. People were hanging out car windows. Stood out the top of sunroofs. They’d slow down and they’d overtake again and were waving again and it was brilliant.
I didn’t want the coach journey to end. I wish we could have kept going, got delayed on the motorway for six or seven hours. I don’t think we’d have even known. A convoy of cars beeping all the way. When we got back North London was alive. It was a fairy-tale night.
The police met us at the end of the motorway to give us an escort to the club, which was kept open for us.
I knew the guys in Winners, a club in Southgate. At that time it was predominantly a snooker hall that all the pros practised in – Cliff Thorburn and Kirk Stevens would be there each day practising ahead of tournaments and Alex Higgins would come the odd time. Snooker was huge then. It was a fun place to be with a lovely bar. I knew they would put on a decent night for us but in those days I had to run out and ring ahead from a call box to ask if they would look after us when the lads got back. By the time we got there word got around and there were huge crowds outside. It was like Hollywood movie stars trying to get into a premiere. We got in there and it was pandemonium. So happy, so giddy. We had a fabulous night, which went on and on and on.
Snooker all night. I lost my blazer, gave it to a supporter. I got it back many years afterwards.
I was in a restaurant the other day and a chap came up to me and said: ‘I was in Winners that night and you gave me your tie and I’ve still got it.’
It was really early hours that they came home. A couple of years ago when I was having a clear-out in the garage I found David’s and Mickey Thomas’s jackets from that day and one of their ties. I got them dry cleaned and sent Mickey’s one on to him.
Once we dropped the lads off in Southgate we went to Colney to drop off a few of the staff and Tony Donnelly and I stayed in the bus to go back to Highbury with the kit. We went down Highbury Hill about 4 o’clock in the morning and there was a street party going on. Once the crowd saw the team bus they went mad. We unloaded the kit, I bought all the newspapers on the way home. It was a long day. I used to take the trophies. Nobody at the club was there to take the trophy so I took it home for safety. I had it at home and brought it back on the Sunday. I’ve got pictures with the kids. I didn’t tell anyone it was there though; I was so nervous about having it.
When we came out the club it was bright. Paul and Tony stayed with me and then everyone went home. I had to get ready to go to the airport. I went by taxi and collected Dave O’Leary and we were gone by lunchtime.
Looking back, my wife and son had missed the whole thing. It had been his birthday the day we won the league. He was tired, he was young. My wife took him to bed and they both fell asleep. The phone started exploding in the house about half past ten at night. She was thinking, what’s gone on here? People from everywhere were ringing. Have you heard? Have you seen? The next day I went to give my son my medal but he was more interested in his Thomas the Tank Engine. I had to go to Dublin that day to go and join the Irish squad. I got on a plane that morning and everybody started clapping. A person at the ticket desk told me he was an Arsenal fan and said if I wanted to drive the plane I could. I got off the plane in Dublin and Man United fans – they weren’t even Arsenal fans – were patting my back saying, Dave, we’re so delighted for you. There was a few happy people but also there was a couple of very unhappy people in the camp. Seeing Ray Houghton and John Aldridge, I don’t think they were over the shock.
We got back really late. I was back at work Saturday morning; I left more or less as Alan came in. My friend Martin stayed at our house, and when I got back from work he said, ‘Oh, I’ve been run off my feet!’ Alan was a bit worse for wear and Martin was answering the phone, everyone had been calling and ringing the bell. He was fending people off.
I was so excited to see Lee when he came home but more relieved than anything after all that worry. My wife had been at the golf club watching it on television there and when they won she bought drinks all round and it cost me £500. There you go. That was my experience of Lee winning the league. After all the years going to the park, watching him play as a boy, putting the nets up, taking the nets down, it was wonderful.
The next day we went to Lee’s with our friends Martin and Clare, who had driven to the game with my wife Penny. Lee had got the old VHS. He’d got the match. We watched the game again. Lee kept stopping on his good bits! Come the evening we decided to have a barbecue at my house and invited all the lads.
Alan’s face was a picture. Honestly, when he opened the door to see us all there he thought, for God’s sake. He didn’t think we’d come!
God knows where I got food from because in those days I don’t think supermarkets opened all the time. I did feed everyone but Alan wasn’t feeling very well and he said, ‘Off I go to bed.’ He went off and left me with all these people. Perry Groves went into my bathroom and put bottles of bubble bath down the toilet and flushed the chain and there were bubbles coming out the toilet.
Grovesy was rearranging things and being annoying like he could. He was obviously drunk but I was also quite ill that night. I’d got a bit of the shakes. Obviously too much alcohol and I went up and lay on my bed and eventually the lads went.
I didn’t realise what we had actually achieved until we did the open-top bus on the Sunday and then you start to realise you are league champions. That means something pretty special. The other day my wife said to me, ‘Do you remember the phone calls I got when the game was going on?’ I had completely forgotten. During the game my wife’s sister-in-law called up and said, I’ve had a funny feeling something’s going to happen in this game. Then we get a free-kick. I take the free-kick and Smudger scores. Later on in the evening as the game is still going on she calls again and says, ‘I’ve had that same feeling.’ I mean, people are going to say that’s so made up it’s absolutely ridiculous. It was incredible. I didn’t know that those feelings were going to produce those two goals. Maybe it was fate. I don’t know. I’m going to believe it. I couldn’t care less what anybody else thinks if I’m honest. It’s fantasy stuff, isn’t it? It was our destiny. As time goes by you start to realise what Arsenal Football Club is really all about and by the time you finish and retire it sits in the heart. It’s always there.
When we came in for the open-top bus ride on the Sunday morning Tony Adams was sat on the steps of the Marble Halls because he’d been out all night. He’d lost track of time. I think he’d got here about 7 in the morning. He just came in from a night out; he was a state.
I was on my way in to Highbury and there was Mickey driving up Drayton Park and he pulled over and said ‘hop in’. He was the last one to arrive. I jumped in and got a lift. Everyone recognised him. I remember as he came in the car park at the Clock End he clipped the gate. I was like, how did you score that goal? Ha ha.
At Highbury we were doing some annual renovation on the front of the stadium and we had the whole front of the East Stand scaffolded. Scaffolding is designed probably to hold half a dozen guys and two pots of paint. On the Sunday morning, the parade left from the stadium to Islington Town Hall and I was on the front steps with the chief of police coordinating which players were going to go on the bus and which players’ wives. Then all of a sudden, the chief of police said to me, we’re going to have to move quickly. I said, why? He said, turn round and have a look on the scaffolding. There were hundreds of people trying to get a vantage point to see the team leave and we looked up and the scaffolding was actually moving and swaying and whipping away from the stand because of the sheer weight of people. The policeman said to me, ‘Go and tell George Graham now. Unless we move in two minutes the buses will go, players or not.’ We got everyone on and luckily everyone came down the scaffolding to follow the buses without any incident.
I was up on someone’s shoulders and I’ve not got a clue who they were. This guy was just walking me round. He had a bulldog on a lead with an Arsenal shirt on. There were people everywhere. Hanging off lamp-posts. Four or five people like sardines sitting on a window ledge.
I came back to life then. That was the best. I don’t know how many people were there at that parade. It was incredible to see everybody there and us with the league trophy. I had a hat on someone gave me: ‘Mickey did it’. It only took a minute and Mickey went and did it. I’ve still got that little baseball cap. It was crazy.
They said there were 250,000 people lining the streets. I actually realised that day what a huge club it was.
I remember someone was hanging off a tree and they jumped on to the top of the bus. Everybody was laughing and joking. Normally you’d go and get him out of there but it was: all right, mate, how are you doing? We said, look, you’d better get off at the next stop and he was having photographs and a laugh with the lads. Things like that really hit home.
That was another big, big high. I’ve never seen as many people around Highbury and Islington in my life and I think it was a shock to everybody. I love the scenes in Fever Pitch when the goal goes in on the night, of all the people flooding round Highbury and they filmed that bloke on the taxi. It really hits home to me how much it meant to the people of that area. It was mad. There were people hanging by one arm out of windows. I remember they just kept throwing cans of beer up on to the bus. At the town hall they’d constructed a couple of planks hanging out the window and we were sort of climbing out this window on to some sort of platform. Health and safety would have had a nightmare. We were just leaning over with thousands and thousands of people below us and how anyone didn’t fall off I’ll never know.
I remember saying to the lads, I’m going to sing a song. I remember the gaffer going, ‘Get him off that balcony.’ He said, ‘Grovesy, you’re tone deaf. You can’t sing.’ I went pfft. Frank Sinatra hasn’t had 250,000 fans. I just had them in the palm of my hand. It was pretty surreal to be honest.
As a player you’re almost cocooned in your little world but suddenly you see the pleasure that it gives to so many people around the place. That’s what brings home the enormity of what you’ve actually achieved.
All those lovely shots of the boys on the bus with the crowds. David O’Leary and I watched them in a hotel in Dublin on the news. I didn’t get a medal because in those days you had to get 14 matches under your belt to qualify. I got a silver tray from the chairman. But I still felt part of it because we had shared all those years together. Besides, the title was decided on goals scored and I got one against Everton that season.
I’d had shorts on at Anfield because it was a hot day and when we went on the open-top bus my legs were black and blue, because after the goals and after we’d won we were all diving around the plastic seats. After the open-top bus we all went to TGI Friday’s in Covent Garden for something to eat. I was still feeling a bit queasy at this point, not knowing I was pregnant. The next day Alan met up with England, and the England doctor, who was also the Arsenal doctor, had to give him an injection in his bum because I think he’d got a bit of alcoholic poisoning. It was a mad few days.
I had the biggest emotional crash you’ve ever seen. I’d never been that high before as far as football emotion is concerned. It was just a peak. It was incredible. It was overwhelming. So coming down over the next couple of days it was just dreadful. So low. So depressed. I couldn’t understand it because I’d never experienced it before like that. I’ve since spoken to John Lukic about it and he said the same. You learn as you go through your career that when you’re up there there’s only one place to go and it’s just a matter of time before you start to come down to reality. So there was a definite learning curve of how to deal with the ups and downs of sport emotion.
I’ve got the game in its entirety on VHS. When I’m a bit down or I need a bit of a lift for whatever reason I’ll shove it in there and wind it on to 88 minutes and then press play. I sometimes put Fever Pitch on and watch that film because you get a supporter’s viewpoint. As players we’re very privileged to be on the playing side of it but you miss out on some of the supporting side of it, which I think is the most important. Because when I talk to people who went to the game I want to hear their stories.
I went off a cliff. You have the build-up and the momentum of trying to achieve something and when you’ve actually achieved it and you’ve got it in your hands you’re sort of going over the edge. And that’s where I found myself. What’s the next thing? I don’t know how to describe that. Now the memories are always there whether you watch it on TV or whether you replay it in your head. I don’t watch my old games – that’s for my children and, God willing, the grandchildren in future if they want to get a few tapes out and have a look at what the old bloke did. To win the ultimate in British football, I’ll take that.
The best team over the whole season wins the league. If you have ever won a cup final that’s the most memorable day. I thought we had a bit of both there. It was a shoot-out for the biggest prize out there. I just don’t think there’s anything to top it so far in football.
Even now I’m not sure if Mickey knows how big it is. I don’t think he knows how to deal with it. I’m not sure. It’s almost like he hasn’t come to terms with the whole thing, what’s happened to him. Or to us. It is just the impression I get.
It is quite strange. I’m a private person. I don’t like the fame side of the football world. It’s even hard talking about it sometimes. But it was a bit weird when you’ve got people looking at you wherever you are in the country. I thought: wow. I don’t think I can get used to this. That was tough. I don’t think I’ve ever got used to it. I wouldn’t say it’s a burden because it’s never a burden to score a winning goal and to see your team win the championship. But fame and me, I don’t think we mix. I just like the quiet life really to be honest. Just as long as I’m appreciated that’s all that matters to me, more than anything.
You might laugh at this but having won a lot of youth team trophies, winning felt pretty normal. When I started to speak to people like Dave O’Leary he was like, what are you on? This might never happen in your career again. Don’t you realise what you’ve just done? What we’ve just done? I’m going to say it was the best. I happened to be there. I get so many people even to this day who talk about it. It’s iconic. It’s just a moment in time. With Hillsborough you had something else in the equation and it was powerful. I just was enormously grateful that I was there on the day to lift the trophy up after 18 years of hurt.
There’s a certain place that you’ve been to together. I don’t want to get too deep but I’ve been to hell a couple of times in my life already. Other people have been to the same hell that I’ve been to so once you’ve been to the same hell you can identify and you can enjoy and laugh about those kind of things. Only people that were at Anfield that day and in that dressing room can laugh and joke and appreciate the story that we wrote. I’ll always be grateful for that. It was a magical moment in my career and I’m really grateful that I shared it with some great pals and some great winners. Great stuff.
A lot of us were mid-twenties. We had a long time to go in our careers – those back four lads did especially – but I think we sensed something, which is quite unusual, because at the time you are enveloped by the occasion and by the passion and you’re not able to take a step back. But I think we realised that it can’t possibly get any better than this. How can we trump this moment? And I don’t think anything did. Even for those boys that went on to win the Double under Arsène Wenger, in terms of one-off matches, that was it. The Sergio Agüero goal for Man City against QPR is the most famous in Premier League times. It was an amazing moment for City to clinch the league in the last seconds. But of course what makes ours stand out was it was a standalone game. It was the two teams vying for the title at the end of the league campaign. Everybody else had packed up. Gone home. Gone to the beach. It would never be allowed to happen now but that’s how it panned out so you’ve got a huge audience watching this shootout. With all due respect, the City game can’t compare.
I was lucky enough on Sky to cover the Man City game when Agüero scored the goal. That’s nothing like it. It was a great finish. But these were the two top teams playing. The season is finished for everyone else. This is the last game. You’ve got to go to the best team in the country for the last how many years and win by two clear goals to win the league. Honestly, if it was a book and I was sitting round the pool on holiday and I read it and that was the end I’d throw it in the pool. Someone would say ‘What are you doing?’ And I’d say ‘I’ve just read the biggest load of shit I’ve ever read.’ It couldn’t happen again ever. It’s impossible.
When we do meet each other nowadays there’s a warmth there and a happy feeling because you’ve shared that one huge moment. It is a bit of a zeitgeist – right place, right time. You could have rose-tinted spectacles if you like with nostalgia but I think the fans look back and go, ‘Wow.’ Because we were working-class boys, predominantly English and Irish, just local lads who’d been the best players in their school team, best players in their district team, best players in the county team and then obviously worked their way through different avenues. We came together at that moment in time. You have to be lucky in your career and I feel lucky I was there the same time as George Graham. I don’t care what anybody says, he made our careers. He turned us from players with a little bit of ability and desire into a top-quality group who won titles and won cups for Arsenal Football Club. That era was all down to him without any shadow of a doubt.
George changed Arsenal Football Club, for sure. We hadn’t won the league for 18 years. The club really wasn’t one of those that was included amongst those with a chance to win the league, and George changed that. He changed the mindset. He changed players who were hungry and he got us believing. He got everybody behaving with class. He moved the club forward massively. Everybody who comes to the club develops an affection that lasts a lifetime.
We were one of the last British-based teams to win the league. So that in itself tells a story. Football from there has evolved to a very cosmopolitan sport, people from all nations. Back then the only foreigner on the team sheet from outside Britain and Ireland was Bruce Grobbelaar. The core of that game itself was a British game. From then on football seemed to develop, to gain more attention, to where we are today with the Premier League watched across the world. You’d like to think that we had a part to play in that.
Maybe we’ve changed the way that people look at football.
I really think it put football back where it belongs. Football just lifted and I don’t think it’s ever looked back. I go up and down the country and you talk to people and everybody knows where they were that night. They’ll say, oh, I was sitting in a bar in Spain with a lorry-load of Everton fans. They were going mad when you won. Or, I was in a pub with a load of Man United fans. If you live in Exeter or Accrington or Rochdale, if you’re old enough you remember that game. We talk about it as the goal that changed everything. It’s the game that changed football, believe me. This changed football and I’ll tell you the reasons why. This was on a Friday night. Football was going nowhere. We’d just had the biggest disaster in football. There was fighting on the terraces. Football was leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths. People weren’t liking football. People were scared to go to football matches. You wouldn’t take your kids to football matches. Then this game comes on a Friday night. When was there ever a game on a Friday night live? Millions of people are watching. I think it changed football. I really do. Then after that, the following year, England go to the World Cup, they have a massive success and football starts flying again.
A lot of people when they meet me always remember that goal. They remember what they were doing at that time. They still tell me now. You’ve got the Evertonians who love me because of that. You’ve got Mancs saying the same thing. I even got some Spurs supporters who say it. So it is unique in that case.
I come from a family of five boys and all of them supported different teams – one was Chelsea, one Tottenham, Man United – but since I met David everybody followed Arsenal after that. The whole family was so proud. We quite often watch Fever Pitch here. Ryan has the DVD. It really sparks a lot of memories of David and of that time. For the kids and I, we look at everyone from then as part of our family.
When you watch the coverage again from the game there is hardly anything after the match. Jim Rosenthal did the interview with Tony down on the pitch. Then back up to the studio, Elton Welsby with Bobby Robson, his one and only guest in a little poky studio. ‘Well, Bobby, what do you make of that?’ ‘Oh, fantastic performance from Arsenal. Absolutely wonderful.’ ‘Oh, thanks, Bobby. Goodnight.’ It was one of those. Time for News at Ten. The treatment we’d give it on Sky now. We’d be on air still dissecting every single minute of it!
At the time the only change you were envisaging was the all-seater stadia coming in. You could never forecast how the game itself would change. Italia 90 was a watershed. Obviously with the onset of the Premier League, names on the back of the shirts, players arriving from all over the world, you sensed something was happening. It was all getting a bit more glitzy. Gradually you could see different innovations coming in, but that’s when it all began.
I was glowing in the aftermath that summer. Just thinking about the season. Playing the game over in your head. Looking at the video. It was a brilliant summer. We went to Las Vegas and did the old California road trip. At the Grand Canyon I came across some Arsenal fans who were obviously on a high still. ‘Oh, hi, Smudge!’ No selfies back then you know.
Football and television became very important to each other. Before that season it was a cartel. It was BBC and ITV and, between the two of them, football didn’t get anything for their product. They thought they were doing us a favour by promoting us. Football needed and wanted television and it was ITV who decided they were going to break the cartel. We finally completed a four-year deal in 1988. It was £44 million – £11 million per year for the 92 professional clubs. So they got the whole of the old Football League. Of course, the very first season of that television contract they hit the jackpot because who would ever think that it would be the final game between Liverpool against Arsenal and the league would be determined by the last kick of the season? They had around 14 million viewers. Of course, we did have to expand and it was only when all of a sudden you had the foreign players coming in that everybody suddenly said it’s the dawn of a new era. The average wage around the late 1980s would have been £200–£300 a week. They’re getting that a minute now I think. Ha ha.
Our guest that night at Anfield was Greg Dyke, who worked in television. It was Greg and I who were really at the sharp end of putting the television deal together. At the end of the game I said, Greg, you’ve got to come down to the dressing room and, of course, as soon as we went down to the dressing room the champagne was flowing and we both got drenched. Our suits were drenched and I put my arm round Greg and said, you see this, you got it cheaply. It really was the launching pad in many respects and, of course, nobody was to know at the time that in 1992 Rupert Murdoch would come along and launch Sky television and then, in Alan Sugar’s famous words, blow everybody out the water. That game in a way probably brought home the value and the relationship of football and television.
I do remember being numb with shock and excitement and the sense of privilege of actually being there. We all said once we had got our job done and our reports filed that we will never experience anything like this again. We could not conceive of football providing such a finish as that ever again. It was ten years to the day when Manchester United won the treble in Barcelona with a finish of comparable drama. All of our minds then went back to Anfield. What is it about this game that produces finishes like this? We now know that game was the beginning of football as ridiculous excitement. I don’t know why but football since 1989 has produced an awful lot more of those I-cannot-believe-this moments than it ever did before. If you look back at the iconic games like the Stanley Matthews Cup Final of 1953, it was just a football match, seven goals were scored, and good old Stanley Matthews won a trophy at the end. It wasn’t a match like Barcelona overturning a 4–0 deficit to beat Paris Saint-Germain 6–5 with a dramatic turnaround. That game at Anfield was the beginning of pinch-yourself drama in football.
If you are a person who is generally moved by sport then it doesn’t need to be your team for the thrill of a startling spectacle to make your spine tingle. Sport matters because it makes you feel things. It makes you care. Famous upsets, heart-warming comebacks, tales of the unexpected – it’s all part of what has gone on to make football so ubiquitous in our modern social landscape, so magnetic that billions are spent and foreign investors home in on this manically lucrative industry. But they were simpler times back then. It sounds silly and melodramatic but I felt I even learned a life lesson that night at Anfield that always stayed with me. People tell you things are never going to happen, that odds are weighted so strongly there is no point in even hoping, that outlandish dreams are impossible. But that’s not always true, is it?
I don’t think there will ever be another game like it. First against second and winner wins the league basically and that hasn’t happened in my memory. For me, the feeling of 26 May 1989 was so intense that I didn’t really notice the next season. I was still thinking about the last season. I just had this glow from that moment on.
I didn’t really want them to start winning again until 1991, which was good as that’s when they did start winning again, when winning became more of a part of the club’s culture. I think your relationship with leagues and trophies changes a little bit. Which is as it should be for a club the size of Arsenal. You should be expecting them to win things. I’d gone from being 14 in 1971 and I was 32 in 1989. It’s a big chunk of your life and you’re a different person but the one thing that’s stayed the same in that thread is the football. It was the one thing that connected my 32-year-old self to my 14-year-old self. There was nothing else really.
The reason Fever Pitch started in my head was I thought about how many games I had stories about. Some of them seemed to me to say something about Britain at certain points in its history. Some of them had something to say about being a certain kind of kid or teenage boy or young man. Some of them had something to say about football and none of them were just the scores, so I thought, maybe I can try and write it as if it were a match report but each match report is about actually about something else. The point was the feelings and the context. Writing about the Anfield game for Fever Pitch I knew that I had to bring out everything I had in terms of the writing for that piece. Because it was one of the emotional sensors of the book.
I’ve often been told about Fever Pitch being part of the shift in perceptions in English football. It’s hard for me to see. I think that the big thing was Sky, and Rupert Murdoch had much more influence on the game than my book. Italia 90 was important. Not least because it had been quite a while since any tournament had been played during the evenings in the UK. 86 was in Mexico. You had to stay up. You had to be a proper football fan to watch England play at midnight or whatever. 82 was horrible anyway and you know we hadn’t been there in 74 and 78 so 1990 was very important for the rebirth and the relaunching of football. The way it was shot as well. Do you remember all those slow-motion shots of the agony on people’s faces in the crowd when Italy went out on penalties? The game entered a new era media-wise with Italia 90. It’s interesting that Sky came in so shortly after 89 because it’s often struck me that sport is one of the few things that’s any use to cable broadcasters because we’ve got enough rubbish films and enough rubbish television programmes. What we need is something where we literally don’t know what’s going to happen next. We have to watch it at the time. It’s no good watching it on catch-up. It’s like a battering ram into people’s homes. That drama is so intense that it cannot really be repeated in any other art form.
When I wrote Fever Pitch I knew there were lots of people who read books and went to football matches. There is a sort of accusational myth since that I wrote Fever Pitch and then a load of middle-class people came to football. But in fact I was a middle-class kid who became interested when England won the World Cup in 66. I think that’s when the game’s roots changed because suddenly George Best and all of the mavericks became popular culture superstars. Anyone who was 10 or 11 then grew up with the game in a way that maybe their parents wouldn’t have done. My book was probably an expression of that partly. I wanted to represent fans who felt very, very connected to their team and who lived their lives in this way. Consumed by caring about something that they couldn’t control.
When Arsène Wenger came and Arsenal reached a different peak all the players lived in North London, in Hampstead and Regent’s Park, and after the game they would eat in a local restaurant and it was very hard to get a table there because the players went there. But there felt like a lot of connection between fans and players in ways that were not the same as the 1980s team but were certainly an adequate replacement. Arsène seemed to have signed players who wanted to play for the club and wanted to stay there for a reasonable period of time. I think now it feels like it has accelerated off into future football where you’re not sure whether any player will be there next season and how much would I care if all 11 of them left? Not that much. The club will find 11 good new footballers. There are a couple who you could base a team around but the idea of having first of all the home-grown players like David Rocastle and Michael Thomas and so on, but also the other players – the back four, Alan Smith – is something else. You got the sense that they were fantastic but you weren’t going to lose them to Juventus or Barcelona. I never felt like Alan Smith was going to go to Barcelona. I didn’t think that Steve Bould was going to go to Juventus. It felt like they were playing at the best place for them and that this was the top of their game and there was a sort of happy merging of the needs of players and the needs of fans.
For anyone who was old enough to live through some of the very dismal years preceding 1989 the shock and pleasure of the win is something that always locates you back in the time. We’ve had lots of pleasures since but they’re much more diffuse. If you think about the Invincibles season I don’t think there was even quite a moment like that in the entire season. You just think, well this is a good team. They’ve won again. They’ve won again. They’ve won again. Even in the good times it’s very hard to find that pinpoint intensity of Anfield. I don’t think many fans have ever experienced it.
When I joined Arsenal as manager we did so much travelling that I began buying books and magazines on the club’s history. That’s how I started with my memorabilia and I used to go to programme and book fairs at a hotel in Russell Square on a Sunday to pick up rare things. I have quite a lot from the 30s and even before then. It’s quite fascinating how the club came over the borders into North London. How they built Highbury. Who the first chairman was. Some of the great managers. The philosophy. Herbert Chapman didn’t do any coaching. He just picked a team and it was down to the trainer and the physio. There was probably three staff and Chapman would just sit in his lovely oak-panelled office upstairs. Luckily I had that for a few years. To have those magical moments makes you feel nice but in time you’re forgotten about and then the world has got a new hero. But, of course, you enjoy the memories. You love it.