One-nil, forever
Joy in the eye of the storm.
This week’s regularly scheduled Redstory will return after this short message:
ATTENTION: ALL ONLINE CITIZENS
Last night, at roughly 6:30pm GMT, a major outbreak of the psychoactive digital disease Arsenal Derangement Syndrome (Arse) was detected globally. There is no need for panic at this time. Arse is only dangerous in very rare cases. Almost 95 of every 100 online football fans are latent Arse carriers and most display light, but often constant and recurring, non-dangerous symptoms.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) say the outbreak started in east London but spread rapidly depending on the recipient’s Sky Sports latency and level of addiction to their mobile phone, particularly the social network ‘X, the everything app.’ Infections are expected to grow exponentially during May, and come down gradually over the summer.
Common symptoms include but are not limited to:
Incessant posting on ‘X, the everything app’
False memories (particularly, in this outbreak, as relating to corner-kicks)
Absolute certainty in the quality, reasoning and objective nature of rhetoric (while demonstrating the total opposite)
A sniffly boo boo nose
A belief that whatever’s gone wrong today, it’s Arsenal’s fault
Blindness to any of football’s problems that cannot somehow be blamed on Arsenal
Complete disinterest in the football club the infected claims to love, unless they’ve been wronged by something that can somehow be blamed on Arsenal
Coincidental shilling for a cheating nation-state
Pee pee in the pants
A WHO spokesperson said on Monday morning anyone who suspects they might be infected should immediately ‘give their head a wobble’ and, crucially, ‘log the fuck off.’ However, due to the psychotic nature of Arse, outside intervention is often required. If you suspect a loved one is suffering from Arse, the WHO suggests you ‘take the infected’s phone away and flush it down the toilet, before smacking them in the head.’ Please be warned this may not be effective.
Arse should not be confused with AVARIS (Acute Video Assistant Referee Idiocy Syndrome) although the symptoms are similar.
A spokesperson for Arsenal F.C. made the following statement: “Hoes mad.”
In other, non-related news, Tottenham Hotspur have announced a partnership with Peppa Pig.
Sorry for the interruption! The internet has reached its nadir, it’s all Arsenal’s fault, and the elephant must be addressed. And I want to acknowledge that by engaging in this bantering at all I too have fallen victim to Arsenal Derangement Syndrome; none of us are above being sucked into the discourse. The algorithm comes for all. I ditched ‘X, the everything app’ a long time ago and curated for myself a sheltered little Arsenal bubble on social media, and I’ve still been reached by the nonsense. I Blueskyed a single Bluesky about the game and now have Spurs fans accusing me of being an incel. The internet is wonderful.
The thing with ditching social media near-entirely is you start to notice how even the Tweeters and Thinkers you once respected have had their brains melted. I don’t mean to pick on anyone, but my favourite example of a Very Smart Person losing their marbles last night was found in Adam Crafton’s post-game thread, linked to me by friends (I respect Adam very much; he is one of the best journalists working in the sport today, and one of very few examples of prominent writers brave enough to consistently challenge state power through their work). Mr Crafton took issue with the VAR check on David Raya ‘not being clear and obvious.’ He concluded his thread with ‘I think it’s a foul.’ Lol.
I could spend an eternity talking about VAR and social media and how even the smartest among us are blinded by the total impossibility of making cogent arguments on ‘X, the everything app.’ I would like to build a big castle of superiority for myself and sneer down at all the silly people bickering on their app of choice, but of course that would be incredibly hypocritical, because I too am suffering the same. So let me get a couple of jabs in before I move on, please.
Look. If it’s a foul, then - and this is a stretch, stay with me - it’s a foul. I find it incredible to argue you’d rather a referee makes a wrong decision in the most high-stakes moment of the season because you don’t like VAR. Football’s laws are subjective and VAR’s central failing is the attempt to pretend they’re not, and that consistency is actually an achievable goal, but this was one of the (many) cases where the system worked as intended. The referee couldn’t possibly see what was going on during the melee, and the video assistant granted him the same level of omniscience fans at home, watching through their slow-mo replays, enjoyed. It was obviously a foul on first viewing, actually. I really don’t see how this incident can possibly be twisted into an example of VAR’s failings unless you’re complaining about the long break in play, which I personally felt in this case stretched out the drama and tension deliciously, and nearly killed me off. I fail to see how the game would be better if the title went to Manchester City (again) because a referee made the wrong decision in a split-second. We’d be talking about that injustice for years. This is not injustice and I struggle to find a single coherent argument that proves otherwise, but I’m all ears. I’m quite neutral on VAR overall which I know is very unpopular, but I think people have forgotten just how awful it is to have a game (a title!) hinge on moments like this when the referee misses something because he’s not a superhuman with eighteen eyes. You will not be happy if we return to that; you won’t be happy, ever, until you log off. Change the rules if you want - I’d be in favour - but understand you’ll just find something to fucking whinge about then, too, because that’s the fuel ‘X, the everything app’ lives on.
And finally: injustice! Let me tell you something about injustice. Injustice is Liverpool having a near-decade of total dominance, earned through sporting and analytical merit, stripped from them because their only rival had the resources of a nation-state, and routinely cheated to pump them in. Injustice is Arsenal losing the 2023/24 title by two points to that same organisation. Injustice is everything Manchester City have done to English football in those years and continue to do. Injustice is not Arsenal being granted a decision when they’ve been ‘doing this unpenalised all year’ in an imagined past you’ve just made up. I cannot imagine a purer form of footballing cuckoldry than rooting for the genocidal nation-state because an Arsenal fan once triggered you on ‘X, the everything app.’ Grow up.
You can buy me coffee if you liked this :-)
Arsenal have been hated all my life and, apparently, for much of the time before. For playing black players, for playing foreign players, for being too soft, for being too hard, for winning, for losing, for existing. My pet theory is the modern iteration - “Arsenal fans are so annoying on ‘X, the everything app’, to which I am helplessly addicted, wah wah” - is pretty easy to explain: so many young people fell in love with the club during the Invincibles era, and that generation were the first to grow up on the internet, and so we’re massively over-represented in online spaces. At a stretch, perhaps it’s historically rooted in Arsenal’s association with the Bank of England, which is the kind of smear that I’d understand morphs and twists through history to become whatever it is today. I don’t fucking know! I’m trying to be generous. I find it extremely difficult to understand hating a football club based on social media banter alone. The only correct things to hate a football club for are, in my opinion, being owned by a nation state, blatant financial corruption or cheating, and being Tottenham Hotspur. But then football fans are not meant to be logical and it’d be a shame if they were. None of this is meant to make sense, and that absurdity makes it wonderful. This is a circus and we love it because it’s a circus.
It’s unbecoming to spend so much time on this when the team I love are so close to something extraordinary, but it’s out of my system now. My great concern is we (me included) spend so much time engaging in the circus we forget to be present with what is happening. This should be the greatest period of joy any of us have experienced in twenty years. This might not happen again for a generation, if it ever does at all. And I’m spending all my time writing about VAR! What a travesty. Let me fix that.
One-nil to the Arsenal, forever. It’s so beautiful to do it like this, to lean into the villainy they’ve placed upon us for reasons real and spurious. Arsenal were soft, pathetic, lacking in the minerals. Now they’re brutal, ugly, an unbearable winning machine who twist the rules to their will. I was not alive for George Graham. I’ve known this steel was a part of us only in an intellectual sense; the Arsenal I’ve known my entire life have been pretty little artists bowled over at the first sign of adversity. I’ve never seen anything like what they’ve become. I’ve never followed a team so defined by their grit, their total unwillingness to go quietly. They remind me so much of Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United, that team I was so desperately jealous of, a team who never had Arsenal’s sense of artistry or stylistic identity because they didn’t need it; their identity was winning, winning relentlessly, endlessly, through all the noise and storms. Whatever happened they’d find a way, they’d find those utterly magical three minutes when Martin Ødegaard took twenty years of hurt on his slim shoulders and said ‘not on my fucking watch’ and danced forward and through. They’d find 31-year-old Leandro Trossard in the box. They’d bundle it in, they’d lock it down. They’d win. We win. One-nil.
I didn’t post after the Champions League semi-final because I made myself ill by crying too hard. But I did write a lot of words, mostly on Viktor Gyokeres, and then in a meandering attempt to explain the immensity of what I was feeling - I’ll leave you with the latter. Here they are.
Twenty years ago, near enough to the day, I was a little boy crying myself to sleep because my parents had put me to bed at half-time of a football game. Jens Lehmann had been sent off, Sol Campbell had scored, and the team I’d fallen in love with were on their way to their first Champions League title. It was a school night and my parents didn’t understand football, certainly not enough to allow a ten-year-old to ruin his sleep. So I missed the collapse and all that came next. All I remember is that weird, pervading sense of near-grief that followed. It’s softened in the decades since, of course, but I’ve never forgotten it. My team missed history and I missed the chance to witness it.
Two decades; two thirds of my life, exactly. In the years since Paris 2006, a Champions League final has grown so far from reach I stopped thinking of it even as a distant possibility. It was a thing for other, bigger and more serious teams, not ours, an unreachable goal of near-mythical status. I wonder when, or if, it will ever feel real. Certainly not today. My throat feels real enough, although I only remember shouting once, when Bukayo stabbed home. For the rest of the game I was a cocoon of tension, hiding in my scarf. I never really believed this could happen. Not when we beat Bayern Munich 3-1, not when we beat this same Atleti side 4-0, not when we looked unbeatable, never: I barely registered it as possible. And here we are.
This is one of those moments I wish I was so much fucking better at writing. I wish I could elegantly capture how I felt when that whistle went and it all came pouring in; I wish I had the skill to shape sentences into an echo of what’s happening inside without it feeling trite or contrived, without doing too much, without fear of judgement or criticism or being made fun of on social media. I wish I could tell you what it meant to me to watch images of people crying through my own tears, of the dancing and joy and disbelief. But I can’t. Football is silly and I feel silly for feeling this way and for admitting it, publicly, and that fear will probably stay with me always. I just hope you know what I’m trying to say.
It’s not ever yet. But it’s so close. And oh it feels so gorgeous to be here, in the eye of the storm, watching the world lose its mind. By the time we come to terms with this it’ll be over.
So look the people you love in the eye. Hold this so tightly. Be together. Cry freely. Laugh loudly. This is so precious. It may be another two decades; it may never happen again. Don’t shut your eyes or your heart and do not let fear obscure the unlikely joy of this amazing moment. I feel so lucky to experience it with all of you, this family in red I’ve found. It’s one-nil, forever. And I love it. I love it.
Anyone help me with a ticket for Burnley? Lol. Please. PLEASE.
For a bloke who doesn’t think he’s very good at writing you sum up the situation on Sunday and the emotion that engenders very well .
The internet has made it possible for millions of people to experience the same event while inhabiting entirely different realities.