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To be a Gooner

To be a Gooner is a famous chant of Arsenal fans. FYI the term Gooner is used to refer to an Arsenal fan. I have been a Gooner for nearly a decade now an I have realized that it has had a considerable impact on me in terms of making me the kind of person I am today.

The truth is this and I feel proud to admit that for alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a ‘moron’. I often find myself drifting off, in the middle of a working day or a TV show or a conversation, towards a left-foot shot, curling into a top left corner. Crazy I know but it feels all right. It might not have made me the best person around, but it certainly has helped me delude certain traps of the modern day life, which most people of my age often fall into.

When I first started following Arsenal, I was 14 years old. It is the start of that period in a person’s life when he thinks he is no longer a kid and that he knows a lot when actually he doesn’t. There are a lot of changes happening to a person in this time and all kinds of thoughts cross his mind. It is easy to fall prey to apparently charming but actually hazardous things. I may sound like the “Mr. Nice Guy” but my social circle has had all kinds of people in it. I feel lucky and blessed that I came through that age unscathed especially when many close friends of mine did experience all these crazy things. They thought they were adults and they always tried things that adults were supposed to do. I could easily have been influenced. For the record, I have never smoked, never drunk, never had any kinds of drugs, never committed adultery, and never even fallen in love with some one. Besides my genes, it’s largely down to my mental concentrations being strictly focused on ‘you know who’

I remember when I was first invited by one of my friends to try a drug (known as ‘churs’ here in our part of the world) I do not know a lot about it but it belongs to the family of the infamous drug Heroine. I was 15 years old at that time, in 9th class. I had bunked biology class because I hated biology and the biology teacher. I was sitting with my friends in the woods on the backside of our school. While my friends were smoking ‘churs’ cigarettes, I was wondering why Arsenal had so many draws at the start of the season. If only we had won one game in that winless streak of 5-6 games at the start of the season, we would not have lost the premiership by one point. Man united would not have won the treble (3 trophies; Premier League, FA Cup and UCL) that year. When my friend interfered in my daydream and asked me to try it, its fun; I am sure if I wasn’t thinking that deep about something as beloved as Arsenal I would surely have tried that, and as you know, once tried, addicted forever. I said no at that time and then later on too at many such occasions. Some of them even involved drinking and even adultery at one of the times. Thankfully it was more often than not amid my deep thoughts regarding Arsenal. My social circle until 12th grade was awful at times but thank you Arsenal for keeping me away from all that sh*te that my friends used to get involved in. What is really funny is that my friends never knew about my passion about Arsenal at that time. When at times I meet my old friends from school/college era they are surprised to know that I am so into Arsenal now. Maybe its because I never spoke about it those days. My company in the university was much more ‘civilized’ compared to the one I used to have before.

During my years at the university, I have come to realize that we live in such a society that falling in love with someone is easiest to the core yet making it through is tedious, complicated and highly infeasible at most of the times. Still many people fall in love everyday and most of the times they are left with bitter tastes in their mouths at the end of the day. Such are the social norms in this part of the world. And I am in no way criticizing the social norms here; actually I agree to most of them. I just want to point out the raw ground realities that we have. During my 4 year BS, while almost all my class fellows were consistently falling in love and having issues with girl friends, love over the Internet, dumping and flirting and other such stuff I remained strictly committed to Arsenal. Like all relationships, I might not have had the ideal of times with Arsenal but still the impact of joys and disappointments, like in any relationship, have been more of personal meaning than any other broader ones. Yes, I have had a fair share of many sleepless nights, but that was just me. I have had tears of joy but only those people know it to whom I have chosen to tell. My family, although a little concerned about my obsession with Arsenal is fairly satisfied in terms of my social life as I have never introduced them to something from my social life that would hit them like a train. In fact they trust me. They know that if the kid is wide-awake at 2 am in the morning, it must be a champions league game that he simply cannot afford to miss. They know that if he is talking on the phone at 2 in the night it would be one of his friend, discussing and dissecting the match in progress/just finished.

I remember the only time when I asked a girl to give me her number and that too over the Internet. Apparently she did not want to share and just ignored it. I also forgot about it as I was more anxious about my download speed being lower than normal at that time. I was downloading the video of Dennis ‘the iceman’ Bergkamp’s testimonial game. I remember it very well! Now when I recall it I don’t feel really proud about it. Not because she never shared her number, but because it was a stupid thing on my part to ask for someone’s phone number when we barely knew each other at that time and were thousands of miles apart geographically. If it weren’t for my thoughts being elsewhere, maybe I would have asked her again. Maybe I would have forced her to type something like no I don’t want to share my number. Things could have gone ugly but they did not happen largely because I never asked her again. And I still talk to her sometimes over the Internet, we have a nice level of respect for each other and I appreciate it a lot. Things could have been different though.

During my years at university, it took one of my class fellows just a month to say ‘I love you’ to one of our class fellow girls. And that too was via e-mail. Too bad the girl shared the gist of that email to head of the Department, and the guy got an official warning. But I guess he is doing great these days. Ironically I came to know about this story about six months later, in June when there was no football, season was over and all this sh*te stirring of transfer speculations was on its full peak. It was the year of the Invincibles I remember.

Sometimes when I saw one of my very dear friends (he doesn’t want his name to be revealed here) talk for hours with his girl who he had met on the Internet, I thought maybe there is something wrong with me. But then came some thought into my mind and I forgot all about this immature love and affairs stuff. No prizes for guessing which thought Unfortunately his love did not materialize due to some social implications of the proposed union of the two. I hope god gives him something even better. Amen. But the irony with his love saga is that he was really into it and it will take long time when he gets over it mentally. He worked tirelessly hard to gain the professional status that he thought would pave the way for the proposed successful union. God works in strange ways and may be it was not meant to be like he wished. If you are reading this my friend then all I can say is good luck and that the night is still young and there are plenty of fish out there and you will soon catch another that will fit the social bill of yours

Then there is this friend of mine, Naveed. He is an absolute legend when it comes to falling in love. He really is. I did not know him before his arrival to the university but in his words, he had two really solid fallings in love when he was in Lahore. If memory serves me right his first (not that solid though, and apologies to Waqar) love was with ‘chinki’ (Her real name I must not reveal, she was commonly known as chinki in the hostel) he would day dream about her, write her name as wallpaper on his mobile, write “I Love chinki” on his notebooks, even on his arms at times I think it was more of a crush than love and that is why maybe he never told her about it. His second love was with one of our class fellows who has no alias, so for the sake of description she will be referred to as blahblah or simply blah henceforth. I am not sure if Naveed will agree with me that he actually was in love with her but I know enough about him to safely claim that something was there. The thing started with conversations on the msn and it grew to the extent of them having combined studies in the library after the campus hours. One of blah’s female friends also accompanied them in the library for studies and female jealousy got the better of the wisdom of that friends as well as of her other ‘well wishers’ in the girl’s hostel. They did their part and Naveed and blah split up after a few showdown moments, much to the delight of the so-called well wishers of blah and blah’s friends/seniors. Third one was with a girl from the Internet. He never really meant to fall in love with her. In the beginning they just talked over the msn and he was at time a little flirtatious, Then it started getting serious and not long after that they were having long conversations on the phone. Naveed would spend loads of money on mobile phone scratch cards and I really did not like that at that time. I honestly made my opinion clear about his crazy spendings on the phone. I did not like it one bit. Then one day the inevitable happened. It was around 11 in the night. Every one at my home was fast asleep while I was watching an Arsenal match. It was the doorbell that came as un-welcome a break as one could ever get in an Arsenal match. (My home was at 5 minutes walking distance from the university campus and the hostel where all my class fellows lived) When I went to the door it was Naveed, and it was one of those moments when I hate even the best of my friends. And he said “yar she is in love with me, what should I do now” We went long into the night discussing implications of all this. I mentioned all kinds of things that came into my mind, from minor short-term implications to the one that would involve his future kids listening the story of “how I met you mother” from their father. At the end of the discussion I was sure that Naveed and his then girl friend had lost their minds, but it was only when I reached back inside my house that I came to know that Arsenal had lost it too that night. (West Brom 2-1 Arsenal, 15th Oct 2005) Needless to mention how much sleep I had that night.

Naveed’s saga however was far from over. He continued with that girl for few more months, but things were not pretty between them, each time he would talk on phone with her, he would be more anxious than before. According to him that girl used to cry over the phone a lot because of the fear of them never being together and all that. It was our 5th semester in the university, by far the easiest one of the 8 semesters. Naveed got his record low GPA that semester. By the time semester ended, Naveed had officially called it a day with that girl.

Like most people after every disappointment, Naveed also thought of doing something fun to get over all this and he turned his attentions to the charms of the social network called Orkut. In the next two years, Naveed enjoyed his life on orkut with many girls among whom he fell in love with two of them. Not at the same time, one after the other. First one was surprised and said a plain no when Naveed eventually expressed his feelings about her. Second one has had quite a long saga of yes, know we don’t know. They both were into each other and If I am not mistaken, just a few months ago he has called a day with her too, officially this time. Now Naveed does not intend to fall in love with some one any soon and is focused on his career building process but with a person like Naveed, you never know. I love him for the great character he is and if last few paragraphs have given the impression that this guy is anything but serious, he clearly isn’t all like that. In many aspects of life he is much more serious and mature than most of us. During our time together, I have adopted quite a few good as well as not so good qualities of Naveed. During all his love sagas he has told me almost each and every twist and turn of his love life, and despite being a mythical and charismatic character, Naveed hasn’t been able to inspire me to fall in love with someone.

I have been too focused on Arsenal to look somewhere else. I think it would be appropriate to mention how many girls I have had opportunity to talk to. In real life not many but since I have mentioned quite a few love stories that have initiated from the Internet, I have to mention how many I have had talked to over the Internet. They are certainly less than the ones Naveed has had opportunity to talk and acquaint with. I have never asked a girl for friendship from the Orkut. Although me, Naveed and Waqar did used to have conferences in random girls’ scrapbooks than our own msn That was fun. Anyways it’s been not more than 10 in my entire time as Internet user. And they have been only four with whom I have talked for over a month. One Pakistani girl from Karachi, haven’t talked to her for a year now. One Filipino girl with whom I still talk to, one Indian girl with whom I talked for like a year and a half and the time spent with her was by far the highlight my chatting career, what a nice person. I miss her as she never comes online now, busy in studies in another city. And lastly A Pakistani girl who is currently in Dubai with whom I still talk to. I talked to them longer than I talked to the other random girls that I met online, because they were nice persons to talk to and while I really like them a lot for the good persons they are, I haven’t fallen in love with any one of them and hopefully I won’t in the future. It ruins good friendships.

BTW if you are one of my close friends who know me from real life and you are trying to suggest some bullsh*t, I am as straight as an arrow and you know it

Just in case you (Naveed, Waqar, Junaid and Mooin) wanted to know, two different girls from the Internet, one American and another one Filipino confessed that they were in love with me. Flattering as it sounds I told them thanks but it really is not feasible for us. I am flattered as I type this

Is there something wrong with me? Maybe there isn’t. Maybe I have the right thing that all these unfortunate people around me don’t have. My life rocks. Championships!, Derbies!, European Nights, pinball sexy footie;its priceless stuff! These are tears of joy in my eyes. Instead of having to interrupt one of my close friends in the middle of the night when some one says ‘I love you’ to me or having a horrific night after a break up and clawing on my own flesh in desperation and disgust, I am being awesome 24/7 - three sixty five (minus the silly season).

This one goes to my beloved Arsenal as it always does on each home game at the Emirates.

When no-one else can understand me

When everything I do is wrong

You give me love and consolation

You give me hope to carry on

And youre always there to lend a hand

In everything I do

Thats the wonder

The wonder of you

And when you smile the world is brighter

You touch my hand and Im a king

Your kiss to me is worth a fortune

Your love for me is everything

Ill guess Ill never know the reason why

You love me like you do

Thats the wonder

The wonder of you

Ill guess Ill never know the reason why

You love me like you do

Thats the wonder

The wonder of you

Every day I love you more.

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