But The South Shall Rise Again (and Again!)

One of the most durable traditions of the North of England—more persistently endemic than cloth caps and chips with everything—is a vigorous contempt for the footballers of the South. In the raw, uncompromising cities of Lancashire and Yorkshire and Northumberland the soccer teams of London have long been regarded as pathologically effete. Even the Northern players who migrate to the rich clubs of the capital are generally assumed to have been corrupted by its soft living and diminished by its implied acceptance of the mad heresy that soccer is only a game.

In the large, steeply banked stadiums of Manchester, Liverpool or Newcastle no such delusion can survive. There, players and crowd come together each Saturday afternoon and on many week-nights through nine months of the year to enact a mutually sustaining rite. An important football match in that part of the country is one of the last intense communal experiences remaining in English society, just as the football star is still the truest folk hero, cutting across boundaries of age and cultural background as no pop singer or film actor ever could. He is a magical being without the accompanying disadvantage of remoteness. The tribe can reach out and take its share of him every Saturday.

London is not entirely exempt from this mythology: it has thousands of fans who are as violently partisan as any in Britain. But there is no doubt that the metropolitan environment tends to produce a sophisticated blurring of attitudes, sometimes replacing the values of a religion with those of show business. This sort of thing helps to harden the Northern conviction that Southerners do not feel football where it should be felt, in the guts and the marrow of the bones.

Northerners are not shy about telling anyone who will listen that life is real where they come from and it has made men of them. Their favorite demonstration of this manliness has been provided on the football field. "The South is too soft to stand a chance with our teams" is a boast that has come regularly from club managers as well as from the beery voices on the terraces, and in season after season recently it has been validated by the record books.

The First Division championship, most exacting and accurate test of quality in English football, was virtually monopolized by the North during the '60s. There are 22 clubs in the top division of the Football League, and each plays the others home and away on the basis that a win earns two points and a draw gains one. Those 42 matches, in conditions that vary from snow and ice or mud up to the shin guards, all the way to the baked and jarring surfaces of early and late summer, amount to a marathon that drains the substance from all but the most determined and resilient teams.

Between 1962 and this year, if it was not Manchester United or Manchester City that finished with most points, it was Liverpool or their Merseyside rivals, Everton, or the formidably combative side built at Leeds by Don Revie. In the other principal competition, the Football Association Cup, the story was slightly less dismal for the South, partly because the straight knock-out system employed in cup football gives more scope for fortuitous results and unlikely winners. Nevertheless, in the 20 years from 1950, the Cup went to London only five times.

If there was anything to temper the North's smugness, it could only be what happened right in the middle of those 20 years, in the 1961 and 1962 seasons. Tottenham Hotspur, which competes with Arsenal for the affections of north London, won the Cup in both years, and in the earlier one they did something much more remarkable. They became the first club this century to accomplish the seemingly unattainable double of Cup and First Division championship. The feat had been managed twice before, by Preston North End and Aston Villa, but their successes came in 1889 and 1897, in an era of curly mustaches, long pants and infinitely milder competition. The Spurs' achievement was incomparably more impressive and many good judges suspected that, as soccer's financial rewards and therefore its stresses increased, the double would move permanently out of reach.

The idea that a London club might emulate the Spurs in the foreseeable future was dismissed as utterly fanciful. Any suggestion that Arsenal might be the club to do the double had to be received as a sick joke. Arsenal is, by traditional right, the Establishment club in England, a symbol of solidity and discreet affluence. In the 1930s it enjoyed success befitting its station, taking the league championship three seasons in a row. And even when things began to go wrong in the middle '50s Arsenal continued to put on a brave face. Seventeen barren years had persuaded some that honors were for other people when, in 1970, Arsenal beat Anderlecht of Belgium to win the Fairs Cup, the third in order of significance among European club competitions.

What was relevant about that victory was that it was neither a fluke nor the result of an isolated surge. By now Arsenal was being run by a partnership that was sending out the most confident and best organized team in two decades. Headline writers on the London papers happily dug out their old puns about the Gunners (the club's origins were at Woolwich Arsenal) shooting for the top prizes again. The senior member of the partnership is Bertie Mee, a short, brisk man with a hooked nose and a rather clerkly mien. Mee proved to be an outstanding organizer, and, perhaps most vital of all, a man who knows how to pick a supporting cast and make the best use of it.

Mee's chief assistant, and the man whose coaching is mainly responsible for the present Arsenal team's prodigious efficiency, is Don Howe. He made the team hard to beat, then gave it the knack of winning consistently. Arsenal's football has often been about as stirring as a plowing contest but the points kept accumulating in the second half of the league program, and a crisis in the semifinal of the Cup was weathered after a replay. Then Leeds United, which had set up a commanding lead in the first division only to be crucially weakened by injuries to its best players, was afflicted with the wobbles that so frequently strike at the end of the season. Suddenly Arsenal was even with Leeds and the double was a possibility.