BRIGHTON 0 ARSENAL 0
Football is essentially a winter game, and I’m thinking about it more now that one season has passed into another.
Since the building work on the flat below us has started, we have noticed the appearance of small insects. They crawl out of the rotting wood work and accumulate around the sash window sills, feeding on the mould that oozes into the wet walls.
Time is subjective. The tyranny of the clock asserts itself most vividly in football when a team is either defending or chasing back an advantage from the opposing team. The game pivots on the dialectical relationship of time to value. I’m convinced that this is what must have gone through Vieira’s mind the other day as the clock bounced into the 95th minute.
I used to measure time in the length of a cigarette.
She’s late fifties, inexplicably skinny, always dressed smartly. Marcia wears her trademark black leather jacket and Chelsea boots. She smokes heavily and her laugh is always to the point, infectious, disarming even. She gives me her take as she collects up her post in the shared hallway.
And the take is: Marcia despises the landlords who upped the rent so that Nick had to move out his flat earlier this year. Let’s just say, she thinks they are unfeeling. Marcia has lived in her flat for decades too, and they, the landlords who own the freehold, never lift a finger she says. All they do is put the rent up if they can get away with it, and it worries her as Nick lived here almost as long as she has. The owners do nothing she cautions, other than prance around like they own everything, and it’s clear that they think everyone else is below them, they enjoy this, it’s the only thing they really have beyond what they were lucky enough to have randomly inherited in life.
Every winter, Marcia confides to me with a hint of trepidation — a subtle apprehension revealing a recognisable paranoia about how we fear being thought of as stagnantly unclean, a lingering result of our poor housing, the unhygienic smear of being less, of being unsavoury, unattractive, smelly, scummy, dirty — her flat is full of mould and it gets her down. It crowds in, spreads in clusters through the condensation, spores irritating our noses and lungs. Damaging health, ruining lives. Living in Brighton and Hove many of you will know the deal, having to constantly clean and struggle with the damp.
Do you guys get it too? She asks. Yes. But, even with the rent increase and the buildings dire state it is still the best place Marcia can afford.
At the stadium, the rain and wind whips and whirls around the stands. Occasional raindrops, reflecting the flood lights, sparkle. Paella, Estrella.
Football adds to my sense of our shared time right now, without being overly romantic (and I don’t think this is about that). What I mean by this is that within its structure, football is pro and contra, a totality — many people have observed this, and a good example might be the notion of ‘total football’, although I think this is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek myth. For example, it is fanciful to suppose that one team alone can encapsulate every facet, level, grid, expectation, and outcome of the game. When I gave up smoking (it might just be me, but it is just not the same without the type of classy hash that use to do the rounds) I had some really strange dreams. By far the strangest dream that my nicotine and THC fixated nervous system rapaciously unleashed within my subconscious was a rather unpleasant nightmare which involved the end of football — I know, bear with me.
In preparation for the inevitable failure of our posthuman condition, I dreamt that the board of the club — our club, other clubs, every club — had secretly decided early on during a new faceless manager’s tenure, due to a resumé that boasts some dominating rapid success in a league you’ve never heard of, to build a giant electronic computer brain that would mimic and replicate the manager’s mind. The machine would be a living upload of infinite calculus: player management strategies predicated upon results based financial remuneration schemes endlessly scheming, the broad commitment to statistics for evidencing decisions mechanised, and the influential tiered approach to the interrelated structure of compartmentalised team formation electrified —a type of large AI hadron collider dedicated to ensuring marginal gains upon the taut grid of our beloved football pitch.
Men in smart jackets with knitted football scarfs fed digital footage of obscure players into the giant electronic computer brain. In the dressing room, the computer whirrs, probabilities are calculated, it issues the line-up and dietary recommendations for each player (stop smoking for one) via a till receipt which slowly prints out in the dressing room.
On the pitch, total football: no room, no space, opposing teams and fans physically strangled by metrics eliminating all potential. Elongated stands crammed full of alienated fans estranged from life itself. Silently, they sit in these stands. The spectacle of total football causing their brains to bubble and boil, grey gunk slowly dribbling out of their nostrils.
This in many ways just goes to prove the vacuity of the imagination versus the cold hardness of reality. On a miserable Saturday late kick off, this Brighton squad had us on the edge of our seats, supporting, anticipating, applauding, chanting and cheering for the entirety of this rain-soaked match. The players taking the knee; the intoxicating spectacle of Brighton’s passing game; their ball retention; the pressing, harassing, and dispossessing of the superstar sticker have/needs/wants players; the threat of Cucurella; and the general aggressive grind of the midfield battle (and without Bissouma, the big worry going into this): captivating, life-affirming.
We could have gone top of the league twice this week. Arteta, and Arsenal fans everywhere, will just have to get used to the fact that, as it stands, other teams are now starting to dream of the prospect of a European tour. We are fifth, they are ninth.
Lee / Everyday IPA