Arsenal are champions. Ian Wright is beaming
Happiness Is a Warm Gunner
What is wrong with me? The football club I have supported since indoctrination, about whom I’ve shed non-ironic tears — of grief (Paris, 2007), anger (Bolton, 2003) and exhaustion (Wembley, 2014) win the league title for the first time in 22 years and I feel…
I wish it were “ennui” because then I could make a gag about Thierry Ennui and move on with a degree of damage limitation, like a hard-earned point away from home. But it’s closer to a branch of homesickness.
I don’t think it’s an age thing. Partly because my number still starts with a ‘three’, and partly because all the old people I know are, if anything, even more invested in their football teams than they were in middle age. May as well spend it all now, lads. Rachel Reeves (or the next chancellor) is bound to bring it into the scope of inheritance tax by parliament’s end.
Don’t misunderstand me — I’ve been mining the content farm since Tuesday evening, when the title was confirmed. Listening to podcasts I ordinarily eschew, reading The Athletic deep-dives that skirt the line, not always successfully, between parody and public interest.
But the boy who requested (demanded?) his bar mitzvah party take place at Highbury, who attended every home game for over a decade and gladly swapped the rarest, shiniest sticker in the Merlin’s Premier League 1999 album for one of Nigel Winterburn — no longer lives here.
Even the club’s unofficial anthem, better known as ‘North London Forever’, leaves me feeling cold. I stopped going to matches during the tedium and unpleasantness of the late-Wenger era and, by the time I returned, everyone around me was belting out the words to a song I had never heard. Me! Someone who could reel off not only the starting lineup for the 1998 FA Cup final, but 1971 as well.
Just another imagined tradition, I grumbled — like military parades and tiramisu.
But then, on Monday morning, I saw footage of Ian Wright, the main character of my early childhood, wearing the reddest polo shirt in his wardrobe, under the blazing Crystal Palace sun, grinning from ear to ear. And if I struggled to be happy for me, I could not help but be happy for Wright.
Oddly enough, this happened twice over the long weekend. The second time involved Stephen Colbert, whose late-night show came to an enforced end, an apparent victim of machinations involving CBS, its owner Paramount and the Trump administration.
To be clear, there are only so many bad (or bad-adjacent) things one can care about, and this wasn’t in my top 50. Colbert seems like a nice enough fellow and I still recall with some awe his performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when, in his Colbert Report character, he brilliantly skewered both President George W. Bush and the press corps and was rewarded with crippling silence.
But then I watched Colbert — among the most successful comedians of his generation — in his final show play backup singer to Paul McCartney in a rendition of “Hello Goodbye” and I thought, holy shit, that’s really cool for you.
This isn’t fandom, I don’t think. Fandom is living vicariously through someone or something else. Fandom would be supporting Arsenal and being overjoyed when they win the league. Still, in an age of diminishing certainties, I’m fairly sure there are worse emotions than feeling happy for Ian Wright.