Celebrations …

Morning.

There were fantastic scenes outside the stadium yesterday as fans congregated to celebrate Arsenal Women returning home with the Champions League trophy. No doubt at this point you’ll have seen all the videos; perhaps one or two featuring some very Irish swearing; Win the dog making an appearance and looking somewhat bemused. She was probably thinking ‘I have to say hello to ALL those people?!’, but at essence of it was a celebration of an incredible achievement.

Players, staff and fans all in great spirits, as it should be for occasions like this. It’s been said many times before that community is at the heart of football, and it’s never more true in moments like these. Celebrating success is the purest form of joy you can get from the game. We all love a goal, winning an important match etc, but when you have the opportunity – and good fortune, because many fans never get to experience anything like this – to come together in a kind of exultant harmony, you have to take it.

I think it’s a privilege we shouldn’t take for granted. There’s so much about football these days that requires us to hold our noses and look the other way. Perhaps that’s not as prevalent in the women’s game, but as clubs have become driven by business interests – in no small part due to how money has become rooted at the heart of everything – fans require more and more in terms of cognitive dissonance. You can recognise everything that’s good about your club, and there is still so much of that, but you have to swallow some bad along the way too.

Arsenal’s Champions League win was everything that’s good about football. The growth of this team whose connection with the fans is at 11/10 right now; the ever-increasing support that has been building season after season; the club’s recognition of that, playing games at the Emirates etc; going from the qualifying rounds to the final, with those remontadas along the way; starting as the underdogs, beating the best team in the world; Kim Little and Leah Williamson’s final whistle embrace; Renee Slegers journey and implementation of a tactical masterclass; Chloe Kelly in the Tollington dancing with the fans; I could go on and on and on. You pick your favourite, stick it in there.

Whether you were there in person or watching from afar, you could see it for what it was.  People coming together to share something very special. To sing songs and to hug and to remember the best bits, and to pay tribute to a team and a manager who have put in an extraordinary effort for a whole season. The aim, of course, is to win the competitions you’re in, to lift the trophy, to wear the medal, to hoist a brown Labrador precariously over a railing, but at the core of this is the knowledge that if you do it, you also make a lot of people happy.

Arsenal did that this season, and yesterday’s celebrations were a chance for the players to not just to consecrate the sporting achievement, but to be lauded for it from those who appreciate their endeavours, and to experience first hand and close up how what they did on the pitch makes people feel. A two-way street of happiness and love and joy and the very best of football. This is why there’s no sport like it, in my opinion.

And then …

… without wanting to bring anyone down, on Merseyside similar celebrations were taking place, and they were ruined by an awful thing happening. Dozens of people were hurt, a couple seriously, when a man drove a car through the crowd. I don’t know how he was able to do that, but I couldn’t help but think that the Liverpool fans were just doing exactly what our fans were doing. Celebrating their team’s achievement, out for a good time with their families and friends, and then everything changed in an instant.

In London we had unadulterated delight and pride on show; a couple of hundred miles away and that same sensation shared by so many Liverpool fans was wrecked. It’s just horrible to think about the people who were hurt and traumatised by that. Obviously we hope everyone recovers well from their physical injuries, but incidents like that leave a wider scar on the community and it’s such a shame their day was spoiled in such circumstances.

The triviality of football rivalry, fandom, banter, whatever you want to call it, is brought into sharp focus by what happened in Liverpool yesterday. That famous Bill Shankly quote about football being more important than life or death is nice to throw around, except when you’re using in the actual context of life or death. Solidarity probably sounds trite, because what can we do? Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of those two fan experiences yesterday demands it.

For many of us, football is an escape. It’s a way to distract ourselves from a world where every day we seem to wake up to a relentlessly depressing combination of the dumbest and most evil shit imaginable. So when that bubble, for want of a better word, is pricked by those things, it feels particularly acute. Fingers crossed for everyone who was impacted in Liverpool yesterday.

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Anyway, for more on Arsenal Women’s Champions League win, Tim and Jamie will have a podcast for you this morning, it’ll be out very shortly – and over on Patreon we’ll be chatting about the final day of the Premier League season in The 30.

For now, mind yourselves. More here tomorrow.

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