Step Across This Line (15 page)

4. THE SOUNDTRACK

Ossie’s going to Wembley

His knees have gone all trembly

Come on, you Spurs.

Come on, you Spurs.

Soccer is a sung game, lustily and thoroughly sung. Teams have their individual anthems—“Glory, Glory” for Spurs, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” for Liverpool—and a collection of other so to speak patriotic songs. Ossie was Osvaldo Ardiles, a member of Argentina’s 1978 world-champion team, who came to Spurs immediately after his World Cup victory and endeared himself to the supporters both by the neat brilliance of his play and by his inability to master the sound of the English language. (“Tottingham,” he called his chosen club or, alternatively, “the Spoors.”)

Ossie went to Wembley to play for Spurs against Manchester City in the 1981 FA Cup Final, and he had, as a teammate, a fellow Argentinian, Ricardo “Ricky” Villa. The game was drawn, but in the replay Villa scored one of the most inspired goals of modern times, jinking and twisting past most of the opposing defense before he buried the ball in the net. Thus Ossie’s final became Villa’s triumph. Ricky won the Cup for “Tottingham,” but Ossie still has the song.

Soccer has many other aural codes. There is, for example, the rhythm of the scores. Each Saturday we hear the results being read on radio and TV, and so formalized is the reading that you can divine the result simply from the announcer’s stresses and intonation. Then there’s the music of the roars. In the middle 1980s I lived for a time at one end of Highbury Hill, the long road at whose other end is the Arsenal stadium. Match days, when the crowd surged past our house, were often a little wild. (Once somebody stuck a flayed pig’s head on the iron railings of my front yard. Why? The pig didn’t say.) But I could always work out how the game was going without leaving my study, just by the way the crowd roared. One kind of roar—uninhibited, chest-beating, triumphant—invariably followed a goal by the home team. Another, groanier noise indicated a near miss, a shrieky third informed me of a near miss by the opposition, and a dull grunt, a flayed pig’s head of a grunt, would follow a goal by the visitors.

There are also the chants, non–team specific formulae adapted by each set of supporters for local use. I once took Mario Vargas Llosa to White Hart Lane, and he was bewildered and delighted when he realized that the fans’ cry of “One team in Europe! There’s only one team in Europe!” was being chanted to, more or less, the tune of “Guantanamera.”

That year, Spurs had a right-back called Gary Stevens. A rival soccer club, Everton, also had a right-back called Gary Stevens, and, to make matters worse, both players had at different times played right-back for England. Thus, to Vargas Llosa’s further mystification, another version of the “Guantanamera” chant went “Two Gary Stevens! There’s only two Gary Stevens!”

All together now: “We all agree . . . Arsenal are rubbish!” Or, when your team is winning well: “Are you watching, are you watching, are you watching, Arsenal?” Or, in the same circumstances, but more ambitiously: “At last they’re gonna believe us, at last they’re gonna believe us, at last they’re gonna believe us! . . . We’re going to win the League.” (Or, if more appropriate, “Cup.”)

Or, vindictively, after one’s team has taken the lead, and while pointing at the visiting team’s supporters in their corral: “You’re not singing, you’re not singing, you’re not singing anymore!”

5. DAVID AND THE GENT

One week before the Worthington Cup Final, Tottenham’s French superstar, the gifted left-winger David Ginola, had scored a solo goal in a league match that was almost a replay of Ricky Villa’s famous Cup-winning masterpiece. Ginola has movie-star good looks and Pat Jennings’s hair: tresses long and silky enough to win him a featured role—this is true—in a L’Oréal television commercial. (“Because I’m worth it” became, in Ginola’s heavily accented version, “Because I’m worse eat.”)

There is no doubt that Ginola is worth it. His skills are even more lustrous than his locks. Ginola can shimmy like your sister Kate. His balance, his feinting, his tight ball control at high speed, his ability to score from thirty yards out, or by waltzing past defenders like the great matadors who work closest to the bulls, make him a defender’s nightmare. Two criticisms have been made of him, however. First, that he is lazy, a luxury player, uninterested in the hard graft of the game. Second, that he dives.

Diving is a form of gamesmanship. A diver pretends to be fouled when he hasn’t been. A great diver is like a salmon leaping, twisting, falling. A great dive can last almost as long as the dying of the swan. And it can, of course, influence the referee, it can earn free kicks or penalty kicks, it can get an opponent cautioned or even sent off.

The course of the 1999 Worthington Cup Final between Spurs and Leicester would be greatly altered by a dive.

An earlier Spurs star, the great German goalscorer Jürgen Klinsmann, also used to be accused of diving. Spurs fans screamed “cheat” at Ginola when he was playing for Newcastle United. England fans booed and howled at Klinsmann when he plunged to the ground while playing for Germany. But when the two of them signed for Spurs, the fans understood that these noble spirits were in truth more sinned against than sinning. Oh, now we saw the subtle pushes with which cynical defenders knocked them off balance, the surreptitious little trips and ankle-taps in whose existence we had so vocally disbelieved. Now we understood the tragedy of genius, we saw how grievously Ginola and Klinsmann had been wronged. Was this just our self-serving fickleness? Certainly not. Reader, it was because the scales fell from our eyes.

As for the other criticism leveled at Ginola, that he was lazy, that all changed when, during the course of the 1998–1999 season, Spurs acquired a new manager. His name is George Graham, and he was known, when he was an elegant player (one of the stars of the Scotland team), as “Gentleman George.” As a manager, he has acquired a less cultured image as the hardest of hard men, a man whose teams are built on the granite of an impregnable defense. In a few short months, he has transformed that well-known joke, the Tottenham defense, into a well-drilled, stingy unit. He has taught the back four to imagine they are joined by a rope, and now, instead of running in opposite directions like Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops, they move as one.

What would a grim fellow like George Graham make of the blessed butterfly, Ginola? It was widely believed that the L’Oréal model would be the first player Graham unloaded after taking charge at Spurs. Instead, the winger has blossomed toward greatness, and nowadays he and Graham sing each other’s praises almost daily. The manager has inspired the player to work hard, and the player has, well, inspired the manager the way he inspires us all. “Do something extraordinary,” Graham now tells Ginola before each game, and it’s astonishing how often Ginola obliges.
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Oh, there’s one more thing about George Graham. First as a player

and then as a manager, he made his name, and won a shelf of trophies, at Highbury. Spurs have hired the former manager of their archenemies, Arsenal.

6. DECLINE AND FALL

How did such a thing come to pass? The answer lies in Spurs’ recent history. They last won a major trophy, the FA Cup, in 1991. After that the club’s fortunes started a long, depressing slide. Boardroom incompetence had landed Tottenham in serious financial trouble, and the team’s star player, England’s moron-genius, the child-man Paul Gascoigne, as famous for bursting into tears during a World Cup game as for his exceptional talent, had to be transferred to Lazio in Rome, Italy, to help pay off the club’s debts.

The “sale” of Paul Gascoigne was a traumatic event for the fans. Gascoigne was what we thought of as a true Spurs player, fabulously gifted, a playmaker at least as influential as the late John White. Now Gascoigne, too, had been struck down, and was gone.

As the club declined, the fans were left with their memories. Spurs have had more than their share of genuinely great players: the lethal goalscoring partnership of the “goal-poacher” Jimmy Greaves and Alan Gilzean (he of the “cultured forehead”); the stealthy beauty of the play of Martin Peters, a member of England’s 1966 World Champion team. Later Tottenham teams offered us the high-velocity skills of Gary Lineker, a Leicester City player many years before he joined Spurs, and the long-range passing accuracy of Ardiles and Villa’s English teammate Glenn Hoddle.

(This same Hoddle was fired from his job as coach to the England national team because of a series of confused remarks he made about reincarnation. By jumbling together the languages of Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and spiritualist mumbo-jumbo, he managed to give the impression that he believed disabled people were to blame for their disabilities; but in spite of the predictable tabloid uproar, I found it hard to condemn poor “Glenda” for what seemed more like stupidity than malice. I remembered the grandeur of his game in the old days, and the joy it had given me, and I hated to see him turn out to be such a doofus. “At the end of the day I never said them things,” he mumbled miserably as he shuffled off into the darkness, making one wish he could still leave the talking to his feet.)
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The low point of Spurs’ fortunes was reached in the 1997–98 season, when the team’s owner, the computer-industry millionaire Alan Sugar, appointed as manager a Swiss person called, alas, Christian Gross. He never managed to command the team’s respect or to attract first-rate players to the club, and under his regime Tottenham came close to losing their elite Premiership status.

At the start of the present season, the team looked even worse, and Gross was duly sacked. Five days after his exit I saw them thrashed 3–0 at home by Middlesbrough, a team that the great Spurs sides of the past would have effortlessly demolished. The Tottenham players and supporters were utterly demoralized. Then Alan Sugar, to the consternation of many Spurs fans, turned to the ex-Gunner, Gentleman George.

George Graham had taken some hard knocks of his own. In the last decade there has been much concern about the growth of corrupt practices in soccer. There have been allegations that Far Eastern betting syndicates have sought to influence senior players to throw matches. In France in 1997, Bernard Tapie, the multi-millionaire proprietor of the country’s then-champion side, Marseille, was found guilty and jailed on charges of match-fixing and corruption.

As a player, George Graham was a member of the Arsenal team that did the Double in 1971, thus emulating the Spurs’ great achievement. (They’ve since done it again, damn it, just a year ago; and they played so brilliantly, so much like a classic Spurs side, that I was forced to set aside a lifetime’s prejudices and cheer them on.) As a manager, Graham led the Gunners to two League Championships and four other major honors. But in the mid-nineties he, too, faced accusations of wrongdoing. He was found guilty by the Football Association of receiving “bungs,” under-the-counter cash payments worth approximately £425,000, made as “sweeteners” during the course of big-money transfer deals. In spite of all the success he had brought to Arsenal, Gentleman George lost his job.

However, he’s a tenacious character, and he slowly fought his way back into the big time. By the time Sugar made his approach, Graham had become the manager of another Premiership club, Leeds United, where he had put together one of the most promising young sides in

the league. But the lure of one of the country’s traditional “big five” clubs proved irresistible, and he came back to London.

If some Spurs fans mistrusted him, the speed of the team’s improvement has shut them up. Tottenham still don’t have a great side; as I write this they’re stuck in the middle of the Premiership table. But getting to Wembley is the most glamorous event in a club player’s life. George Graham must take the credit for bringing a little of the old glamour back to depressed White Hart Lane.

7. A RESULT TEAM

A man on his way to the big game passes a pub near the stadium and grimaces at the sidewalk, which is ankle-deep in used plastic beer glasses and empty cans. “That’s why the game will never catch on in the States, right there,” he says, a little shamefacedly. A second man chimes in. “That, and the food,” he says. “The meat pies, the fucking burgers.” The first man is still shaking his head at the garbage. “Americans would never leave this mess.” He sighs. “They wouldn’t stand for it.”

A third man, passing, recognizes the first and greets him gaily: “You’re like bleeding dogshit, mate—you’re everywhere, you are.”

The three men go off happily toward Wembley.

Inside the stadium, the field of play is covered in two giant shirts and a pair of giant soccer balls. There is much razzamatazz—great flocks of blue and white balloons are released, and giant flares begin to burn as the teams arrive—and this has plainly been learned from studying American sporting occasions. But as ever, the point of being there is not this sort of thing but the crowd. You’d have to be made of stone not to be affected by the communal release of shared excitement, by the simple sense of standing together against the world, or the opposing team, anyhow. The chanting swells and surges from one end of the grand old stadium to the other. Next year Wembley is to be demolished and a new third-millennium super-stadium built in its place. This is almost the old lady’s last hurrah.
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The game begins. I quickly see that it isn’t going to be a classic. Leicester look distinctly second-rate, and although Spurs settle first into a rhythm, they don’t inspire full confidence. In the twenty-first minute Sol Campbell, an England international player, completely misses a crucial tackle, and Leicester are kept at bay only by a fine covering tackle by Spurs Swiss defender Ramon Vega, another player whose form has improved dramatically since Graham arrived.

My heart’s in my mouth, but Ginola gives me something to enjoy: a couple of fast, swerving runs with no fewer than three Leicester players trying to shut him down, and one moment of breathtaking ball control, in which he pulls down an awkwardly high ball with one touch of the outside of his right boot, and passes it away almost instantly, the speed of his artistry setting up a dangerous Tottenham break.

No goals in the first half. In the second, however, high drama. In the sixty-third minute, the Tottenham full-back Justin Edinburgh is crudely tackled by Leicester’s blond-thatched Robbie Savage. Irritated by the clumsiness of the tackle, Edinburgh stupidly reaches out with an open hand and smacks Savage somewhere on the head. Blond hair flies. Then, after a comically long pause, Savage executes a perfect backflip of a dive and collapses to the ground.

The referee, Terry Heilbron, has been fooled. He cautions Savage for his unfair tackle, but then shows Edinburgh the dreaded red card for his “foul” on Diving Robbie. Edinburgh has been sent off, expelled from the game, and Spurs are down to ten men against Leicester’s eleven.

“Cheat, cheat,” chant the Spurs fans, and then boo. The noise made by thirty-five thousand or so soccer fans booing in unison is unearthly, monstrous; but in our hearts we fear that the day may be lost. And for the next several minutes, as Leicester City charge forward, our fears seem justified. In the Spurs goal, Ian Walker has to stretch hard to catch a loose ball. Then Leicester burst through Spurs’ depleted defenses again, and this time Vega is cautioned for a “professional foul”—the deliberate fouling of a player whom he couldn’t have stopped by fair means.

It’s all Leicester City, but slowly—and this is an indication of the steely confidence Graham has engendered—Tottenham regroup. Their fans sing a rousing chorus of “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” to encourage them, and, surprisingly, Spurs begin once more to have the better of the exchanges. David Ginola on the left wing is having a quiet game by his exalted standards, but Leicester are still being forced to use two or even three players to stop him. This means that, in spite of being a man down, Spurs actually often have a man over on their right flank, and it is down this flank that their best attacks now come. The Tottenham right-back Stephen Carr is making more and more threatening runs. The England international midfield player Darren Anderton (once nicknamed “Sicknote” because he got injured so often, but fit at last these days) is also beginning to show, with his trademark long-legged stride and his dangerous floated crosses. Spurs main goalscorer, Les Ferdinand, is looking livelier, and so is the team’s duo of Scandinavian stars: the Norwegian striker Steffen Iversen and the Danish midfielder Allan Nielsen, who has been picked only because the team’s new signing, the England player Tim Sherwood, is ineligible, have a shot each, and then combine fluently to allow Nielsen another shot, well saved by Kasey Keller.

Meanwhile, Leicester’s Savage, clearly rattled by the boos that fill the stadium whenever he touches the ball, is involved in another bit of rough stuff, but gets away with it. The game goes into its last five minutes. If there is no result after ninety minutes’ play, there will be half an hour of extra time, and if the scores are still level, the game will be decided by penalty kicks. (Soccer fans hate the arbitrariness of the sudden-death penalty shoot-out. We always hope it won’t come to that.) In the eighty-sixth minute, Ian Walker moves to the edge of his penalty area to gather a loose ball, slips, misses the ball completely, and allows Leicester’s Tony Cottee to send it bouncing and bobbling across the face of Tottenham’s undefended goal. Amazingly, there isn’t a single Leicester player on hand to tap it into the empty net. Walker scrambles back into position. Tottenham’s moment of greatest danger has passed.

The game enters the last minute of normal time. Leicester, already playing for extra time, take the precaution of bringing off the much-reviled Robbie Savage, who would be sent off if cautioned a second time, and the way he’s been playing, he’s lucky not to have been shown the red card already. On, in his place, comes Theo Zagorakis, captain of Greece’s international side. Before Leicester have time to settle down to the change in their formation, however, lightning strikes.

A whipped pass from Ferdinand in midfield releases Iversen, whose fast run down the right catches the Leicester defense cold. He cuts in toward goal and shoots. It isn’t a great shot, on target but weak. Somehow, however, Kasey Keller fails to hold the ball, and palms it feebly right onto the forehead of the charging Allan Nielsen. Boom! As the Univision commentators would say, “Góóóóóóóóóóóóól!!!!!!”

It’s all over in an instant, and Tottenham have won 1–0. And then there are the celebrations to enjoy, the presentations, the jeering.
You’re not singing, you’re not singing, you’re not singing anymore.
The oddly three-handled Worthington Cup is held high by each Tottenham player in turn. In victory they suddenly stop looking like rich, pampered superstar athletes and become, instead, innocent young men bright with the realization that they are experiencing one of the great moments of their lives. The massed joy of the Spurs fans is itself a joy to behold. Never mind the scrappiness of the game. It’s the result that counts.

George Graham is famous as a manager of “result teams,” teams that will somehow grind out the result they need without bothering too much about providing entertainment along the way. I can’t remember when the term was last applied to a Spurs lineup. It’s an Arsenal kind of concept. “Boring Arsenal” were also “Lucky Arsenal,” because of their habit of stealing games like this one. Well, who’s boring and lucky now?

As I left the ground, beaming foolishly, a fellow Spurs fan recognized me and waved cheerily in my direction. “Gawd bless yer, Salman,” he yelled. I waved back, but I didn’t say what I wanted to say: Nah, not Gawd, mate, he doesn’t play for our team. Besides, who needs him when you’ve already got David Ginola; when you’re leaving Wembley Stadium with a win?

April 1999