Wait For It

Six years without a trophy, eight years since Arsenal fans attended a Wembley final. The Premier League can take a back seat for now.

As an Arsenal fan raised by a lifelong Arsenal fan, there are stories I know inside out even though I wasn’t born. The 2-0 win at Anfield to clinch the title in 1989 is one of them.

Of course, that particular story is memorialised in popular culture through the success of Fever Pitch, the Nick Hornby novel later turned into a film featuring Colin Firth. Fever Pitch was an exciting discovery as a young Arsenal fan: a story centred on streets (and a stadium) I was familiar with, bookmarked by events I either know about or can imagine without any effort at all, a world revolving a main character with a truly insane and unhealthy fixation that I couldn’t help but relate to.

What I didn’t understand for a long time was, unsurprisingly, how much of the story I actually couldn’t relate to.

For an Arsenal fan growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, who wasn’t there to live it, the story of 1989 is one of glory: an against the odds Hollywood-ending to seal the title.

Of course I could wrap my head around the pain - the games, and indeed trophies, not won - of being a football fan. But I couldn’t feel it, not properly. The title win of 1988-89, and the novel it inspired, is really a story of the 18 title-less years that preceded that May night at Anfield. The agony and the obsession of waiting for almost two decades for something you want more than anything else in the world to finally happen.

Growing up in the early years of Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal, there was no way to feel what any of that must have actually felt like.

Well, I know the feeling now.

I can vividly remember the moment that that dawned on me. There’s always pain following your football club, but it’s most painful when it becomes clear that that pain could end, then doesn’t. On 14 January 2023, Manchester City lost 2-1 to Manchester United at Old Trafford, and Arsenal could (and, in the end, did) go eight points clear at the top of the Premier League with a win at Tottenham the following day.

Between the Manchester derby and that day’s 3pm kick-offs, I was on a tram in a blisteringly cold Berlin, on the way to meet a Liverpool-supporting friend watch his beloved Reds lose 3-0 to Brighton. And on that tram, with Arsenal firmly in control of the title race, I realised: the wait to win the title was now longer than the wait fans had from 1971 to 1989. My dad was 26 when that wait finally ended for him. I was 28 on that tram in January 2023, my brother was 25. Our wait had gone on longer than I had ever imagined it would, and our old man was enduring a wait I’m sure he hadn’t reckoned with: one that had eclipsed the one ended by Michael Thomas.

Three years later, we’re all still waiting.

And yet so many waits have ended in the meantime.

Freddie Ljungberg’s sole win as interim manager ended Arsenal’s longest wait for a win (all competitions) since 1977. One year later, a 3-1 win over Chelsea in December 2021 ended an almost unthinkable seven-game wait to win a Premier League match and maybe even saved Mikel Arteta’s job.

On a personal level, the 3-1 derby win over Tottenham in September 2021, with stadiums reopened after the height of the pandemic, ended a 19-month wait to be at Emirates Stadium again and an almost three-year wait to be there with my brother.

More waits (six years without a trophy, 33 years without a League Cup) could end this weekend. Some (six years since a Wembley final, eight since fans saw one) definitely will.

The last time Arsenal played a League Cup final was the last of 13 finals in 22 years Wenger was in charge. Including Community Shield appearances, he took Arsenal to Wembley 10 times from April 2013 to February 2018, winning nine of those games. That sort of regularity is impossible not to take for granted, no matter how hard you try. Every visit to Wembley is special, but they’re not quite as special when you’re heading down Wembley Way for the third or fourth time in the space of a year, having also done the same a year or two earlier.

Since that prolific run, Arsenal have been to Wembley four times in eight years and just once with fans present. If you don’t include the Community Shield, Arsenal fans have not been able to go to Wembley to see their team since Wenger departed. The club’s one final with fans allowed to attend in the eight years since he left was in Baku, Azerbaijan, around 4,000km (2,500 miles) from London.

That long wait will end on Sunday.

Arsenal players, and the manager, have given the fans so much joy in the last four seasons, but this is their first final. That should just underline how hard it is to actually get this far, let alone win something, in any competition. And whatever anyone thinks of the League Cup, Sunday will be an occasion that everyone involved should relish. Finals are hard-earned and you never know how far away the next one might be.

The wait for the Premier League title can be put on ice for a couple more weeks. For now, it’s time for this Arsenal team to finally compete in a final. It’s time for us fans to finally cheer them on in one. I’ll be doing my best to soak the lot of it up.

Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be.