The club's victory parades down the decades tell stories of changing times
The penalty shoot-out is an instrument of torture best escaped from by finding a reason to walk to a corner shop and letting the London street break the bad news.
During my outward journey, the evening ticking towards eight but the sun still Mediterranean, roars and groans from the pub across the road suggested things were in the balance in Budapest. But as the checkout registered my milk and bread, there was no chorus of car horns outside. The pavement drinkers were subdued as I walked home. Back indoors, confirmation on the screen – Arsenal were not champions of Europe.
So much for Saturday. Sunday, though, still felt sweet. The route of the Premier League victory parade was lined with fans from soon after noon, descending from all parts of Islington, pouring across the border from Hackney. On Blackstock Road, the Gunner’s Fish Bar was open as I’d hoped, still going after more than 40 years.
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Congregants gathered on Clissold Park and the verges of Highbury New Park opposite, where a drum ensemble struck up as the excitement grew with the open-top coaches, making their way from Seven Sisters Road, drawing near.
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There were kids on bus shelters, a few fireworks, lots of flares, many songs and the full range of modern day, north London citizenry, including numerous small children.
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The coaches emerged to raptures through red mist, followed by a fan entourage that was still filing past 15 minutes later.
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To look at that that crowd, to feel its mood, was to almost touch half a century of London change.
The lovely home movie below of the Premier League and FA Cup double winners’ slow drive of 2002 ends up at the old Arsenal stadium, a site since redeveloped as housing, though with the 1930s East Stand still intact, as the club moved to a newer, larger home nearby.
Step further back in time to 1971 and a London in decline. The news coverage of Arsenal’s first ever domestic double triumph – in those days, the FA Cup and the the Football League, Division One – conveys a poorer, paler, more male and more municipal air, with team captain Frank McLintock greeted by Islington’s municipal mayor on the steps of the town hall.
Back then, McLintock, a Glaswegian, was about as foreign as an Arsenal player got. The English football business, even at its richest and most prestigious, was not yet trading on global markets. The Premier League was yet to come. The London crowd Arsenal FC pulls today would have seemed a world away.
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