There’s a weird thing that happens to me at a game: I stand on the terrace, look down at the pitch, and suddenly I’m overwhelmed by everything. It’s not a fear that overwhelms me, in fact, I’m calm. Rather it’s a sensory overload; I see the wrinkles in the Bayern “fans” that they use to make a clapping sound, three cannon balls in a crest with “AFC” in them waving in the wind, the thump of the ball as it leaves Per Mertesacker’s foot, I can hear one whistle from the crowd of 60,000, I simultaneously note two different sets of chants start up, and I feel the one person who lost rhythm in a sea of claps, all of it at once. It’s at that moment that my brain kind of shuts off and I stop “recording” the experience and just start living it. But fortunately, there are a few moments which are rendered permanently in my brain, moments that are too intense to forget, mixed in with all of the banality.

I remember a pork knuckle before the game. A massive, roasted, hunk of pig with crackling skin and salty brown gravy. I chomp on that and swill a beer while one of the Gooners near me recalls his first ever Arsenal game: Arsenal v Fiorentina, at Wembley. It’s hard to listen, everything around us is just buzzing with activity and everyone is  talking, mostly about the match and our expectations, but I focus in for a moment and note that he had an obstructed view as Fiorentina scored the winner.

None of us are Daily Mail readers who slaver over their simplistic one-line paragraphs, sopping up the gunk they drip off. We are educated people and to a man (and woman!) the Arsenal fans I met yesterday took a look at the lineup and fact that Wenger was resting so many starters and the most hopeful thing they could muster was “well, we always knew the tie was over anyway, let’s just have fun.” In hindsight, being sort of down about the match before hand probably made the result we saw so much better. It certainly relaxed us, I didn’t sense any nerves among these folks, they were all just happy to be with their friends, ready to take in an Arsenal game and enjoying the fine people of Munich.

We head back to a friend’s hotel room in order to get some pre-match drinking in. Shots of Jager and Red Bull sounds like the kind of thing that Frat Boys (lads, they would say in England) would do, but we are all actually very subdued and a real conversation breaks out, the content of which I will not divulge. There’s just five of us, sitting around before kickoff having a talk about the Arsenal and doing shots of Jager.

Then, as if someone had driven an El Camino full of drunks through the front, in pour the exact kind of crowd you might suspect of doing Jagerbombs. They aren’t bad guys, they are just having an insanely great time. And by insanely great, I mean, the type of antics that boys will get up to when drunk and left to their own devices.

Walking up to The Allianz Arena is like walking on the wind-swept steppes of the Russian tundra, in spring. What I’m trying to say is that it was like 35F or something and for a Yank from Seattle, it was freezing cold. I was warmed by the booze but the wind cut through my rosy cheeks and sent a chill straight to my bones.

And yes, at night, the lighting in the arena is quite beautiful but as one of the astute observers among us notes, there’s nothing on the exterior that even remotely says “Bayern”. That, folks, is what having the world’s best commercial deals gets you, you barter the name of the club in exchange for the money to buy players like Arjen Robben.

I’ve seen a replay of the game since, on television, and I think they must have trained every television microphone in the entire park on the “ultras” section behind the goal. Because that place was a proper library. I never once heard the “roll out the barrels” song (the Bayern fans sing) that I heard hundreds of times in the television. They all sat there, quietly, and clapped their little paper clappers in unison whenever they felt like the team had done well.

The Arsenal end, on the other hand, was off the hook. I’ve never sung that much in my entire life. No song was left unsung, no invective toward the referee left un-shouted, no imploring of the players to “go wide” or “stay central” or “PASS THE BALL” was left un-yelled. It was 94 minutes of the away fans driving their Arsenal forward.

I’m not sure it would have been that way had it not been for the first goal. A textbook sweeping move, with a pinpoint cross from Theo, found Giroud who put the ball in the net. We erupted as if the weight of the Arsenal world had been lifted off of us. And in that moment, that one moment, nothing else mattered. There were no thoughts of bills or why you and the missus don’t get along. There was just pure joy.

It was almost as if, with the one-nil lead, we were all free to enjoy the game. We could relish in Ramsey’s workrate, feel the pulse of the game livened by Rosicky, and simply enjoy the no-nonsense defending of Koscielny and Mertesacker. Every saving tackle lifted us further and our voices lifted them. People often complain about the crowd getting on the players or the players not playing to the crowd but the reality is that energy is symbiotic and it can’t be faked.

There were some folks who got down on some of the players, Theo had a very poor night and when he came off the away fans stopped clapping. It was probably a bit harsh, because he did put the cross in for the goal, but like I said, it’s spontaneous and real. No one told us all to hold our applause, we just sort of did it.

I’m convinced that it was our energy that drove Jenkinson to run what seemed like 100 yards from the opposite side of the pitch and block Robben’s shot. It was a spectacular piece of defending from the kid who “has Arsenal curtains” as the fans sang.

And when Ox and Gervinho came on they brought a new energy to the game and the fans responded in kind. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Arsenal scored the second after the subs were made. Ox and Gervinho didn’t do anything particularly spectacular, but they drove at Bayern, tried to break them down, and caused havoc among their defense. We loved it.

And when the second goal came, I have to admit, I couldn’t see what happened. A mass of bodies in the Bayern box one minute, the goal rippling the next. And this time I didn’t really have the presence of mind to even film it. I just lost it. I was in another world. I mean that. Like I don’t believe in transcendental meditation our “out of body” experiences but that was as close to out of body as I can imagine. And just like when Arsenal scored the third against Milan last year, it was the thought that Arsenal could really do this, that a team I accused of throwing in the towel just hours earlier could do what everyone (except the guy one of you is going to link to) thought was impossible; beat Bayern Munich at home by three goals and keep a clean sheet.

They didn’t in the end, the referee did his part making sure of that, but there was just so little left in the tank but the time the final whistle went it was almost a relief.

 

I know that this morning everyone is saying that that game is the blueprint for the last 10 games of the season: that Koscielny should be starting over Vermaelen and Fabianski over Szczesny; and that Arsenal just need to “play like that” and we will certainly get fourth place. But I’m not sure that it’s physically possible for a human being to spend the energy that those boys did last night once a month, much less twice in a week. There was something preternatural about the way they played and about the way we, as fans, fed off them and they back off us.

Maybe instead of expecting them to play like that for the rest of the season, we should go back to the top of my post. I kind of liked that moment before the game when I had no expectations. When I could walk into a game, stand there with friends and just let it all wash over me.

Qq