Copping One For The Arsenal

There was a big build up to this particular game. Hooliganism was as ever attracting more headlines than the football, probably with good reason when you consider some of the tripe being provided in those days, and Arsenal had gone into this game making a big thing about swearing as the boxed text showed.

The Arsenal fans on the North Bank responded with a humour that was prevalent in them days with a chant of 'we're not swearing anymore'. It last until United took the lead I think halfway through the first half. The North Bank responded with 'swearing is back' before segueing effortlessly into 'you're gonna get your fucking heads kicked in.'

Thing is, despite all the talk before the game of no swearing etc everyone around me cracked up. Although admittedly  big roughty toughty that I was at the time, I was safely ensconced in the Schoolboy's Enclosure starting out on the rite of passage so many of us went on then.

After the game I was with my mate walking down the tunnel at Arsenal tube and this lad pulls me up and starts going on that I had threatened his girlfriend; funny when I was as intimidating as Lux from Graham's Gang, a popular kid's programme then.

Anyway he was giving the verbals while I think I was more worried about not creasing my programme. My mate, as heroic as I, did nothing while crowds filed down to Mind The Gap and catch the tube.

There I am, in the Schoolboys!

With a final shove to the chest the lad, he was a Manchester United fan of course, was gone with his mates no doubt to boast at school in Reading how he had done some Arsenal n their own manor (I learnt the patter from the books!).


By the time we got back to school of course we had chased this group of lads half way back to central London!

Me and my mate carried on our journey home and, I can happily relate, the programme survived!