Football Twitter, Arsenal and come back to myself
Getting older is a special experience, especially reaching 40. There are highs: a new decade, the possibility of overdone and prolonged celebrations, and then there are lows: your mortality suddenly hits you over the head and it won't. leaving you alone, you feel "past", angry that you haven't done enough in your life and you're not the person you thought you were becoming.
Suddenly, the cliché of a midlife crisis becomes clearer, more understandable, perhaps more desirable. After going through different phases in my 20s and 30s, I wanted to reclaim myself, to become more me, whatever that would end up being. It was football that helped me come back to myself.
Artwork by Shivani KhotI have always loved football. In 1986, at the age of 7, I wrote a match report of the FA Cup final between Liverpool and Everton just for fun (you know the one, with the famous sequence of fans climbing at Wembley). I clearly remember the 1989 title race that Arsenal won at Anfield. I come from Swindon, an average town with an average football team, where I marched against their demotion for financial irregularities in 1990, I went to Wembley in 1993 when they were in the Premier League play-offs, and I attended games at the County Ground during that infamous top-flight season. I read football magazines religiously and had a teenage flirtation with Manchester United. I saw the famously fiery Cantona get kicked out at one of those County Ground games, probably for distracting me so much during warm-up that I got kicked in the face by Brian McClair. I even qualified as a referee when I was 12.
As soon as I got to college, however, my interest in the game dropped, with the exception of international tournaments. Every year I watched the opening match of the day and every year that was enough to satisfy my interest. In 2012 there was the Euros, the Olympics (I went to Wembley and saw the English women beat Brazil 1-0) and, of course, before those two events, the iconic battle for the title between Manchester United and Manchester City. That year I started seeing someone who also liked football. In 2013 we moved in together, started watching all the games on TV and we haven't stopped.
However, the real turning point came in 2018, the year before I turned 40. There was a World Cup. England played well above their weight, traveling to Croatia in the semi-finals. It's been written about a thousand times but eventually we had a team that we could...
Getting older is a special experience, especially reaching 40. There are highs: a new decade, the possibility of overdone and prolonged celebrations, and then there are lows: your mortality suddenly hits you over the head and it won't. leaving you alone, you feel "past", angry that you haven't done enough in your life and you're not the person you thought you were becoming.
Suddenly, the cliché of a midlife crisis becomes clearer, more understandable, perhaps more desirable. After going through different phases in my 20s and 30s, I wanted to reclaim myself, to become more me, whatever that would end up being. It was football that helped me come back to myself.
Artwork by Shivani KhotI have always loved football. In 1986, at the age of 7, I wrote a match report of the FA Cup final between Liverpool and Everton just for fun (you know the one, with the famous sequence of fans climbing at Wembley). I clearly remember the 1989 title race that Arsenal won at Anfield. I come from Swindon, an average town with an average football team, where I marched against their demotion for financial irregularities in 1990, I went to Wembley in 1993 when they were in the Premier League play-offs, and I attended games at the County Ground during that infamous top-flight season. I read football magazines religiously and had a teenage flirtation with Manchester United. I saw the famously fiery Cantona get kicked out at one of those County Ground games, probably for distracting me so much during warm-up that I got kicked in the face by Brian McClair. I even qualified as a referee when I was 12.
As soon as I got to college, however, my interest in the game dropped, with the exception of international tournaments. Every year I watched the opening match of the day and every year that was enough to satisfy my interest. In 2012 there was the Euros, the Olympics (I went to Wembley and saw the English women beat Brazil 1-0) and, of course, before those two events, the iconic battle for the title between Manchester United and Manchester City. That year I started seeing someone who also liked football. In 2013 we moved in together, started watching all the games on TV and we haven't stopped.
However, the real turning point came in 2018, the year before I turned 40. There was a World Cup. England played well above their weight, traveling to Croatia in the semi-finals. It's been written about a thousand times but eventually we had a team that we could...
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