Finishing on a High Note–What Does it Mean?

By: Martin | May 25th, 2009

Well, we finished the season well yesterday, with a 4-1 beatdown of Stoke. The game wasn’t televised here in the States, and I couldn’t find a decent stream that didn’t keep freezing on me, so I can’t pretend to give any great insight into the game. Frankly, given that nothing was at stake, I don’t know how much great insight there is to be had anyway.

Stoke’s not a good team and had nothing to play for yesterday, so we shouldn’t be too over the moon about beating them. Still, a 4-1 win is a 4-1 win, and it’s nice to see the ball go into the net.

The real news, for me, was the behavior of the fans yesterday. After what I think we would all agree has been a disappointing season, the fans at the Emirates gave the players a very warm and enthusiastic reception yesterday. For a fan base often portrayed (sometimes fairly) as spoiled and chilly, it was nice to see. Even nicer was the reception given to Arsene Wenger, who was repeatedly serenaded with songs of “There’s only one Arsene Wenger.”

If you read this regularly, you know I’m an outspoken supporter of Wenger. I think that he’s earned our support with all he’s done for the club, and he very clearly has a plan for how to bring this club back to prominence. He’s come under a lot of criticism lately from some corners of the Arsenal support as well as the shareholders themselves, so it was nice to see him experience some support. Because I think that almost anyone, even those of us who question his moves, love him and want him to stay.

Well….that’s it, then. Another season in the books. An interesting season, an exciting season, but mostly, for us, a disappointing season. I’ll have a four-part season in review starting tomorrow that will probably be way too long, virtually unreadable, and will give you more of what I think about the performances this season, both as a team and individually, so I won’t get in to any of that now.

But I’ll leave you with this. It’s a quote by Roger Angell, the brilliant baseball writer, on why we follow sports. At the end of every disappointing season, when I start to tally up all the hours spent either watching Arsenal play, reading about Arsenal, or writing about Arsenal; and the dollars spent on the new away kit and drinks at the pub where I usually go to watch, and Arsenal failed to win anything yet again, I start to wonder what it was all for. And I always return to this quote:

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

I don’t know about you, but I do still care. And I think that’s enough. (Although trophies would be nice).