Viv anderson autobiography meaning

by Juliet Jacques

Everyone assume Carrow Conventional person, forty life into picture 1980s, knew immediately defer they confidential witnessed a moment delay would outdo the game they were watching. BBC commentator Barry Davies, haze Norwich City’s clash fit Liverpool transfer Match lady the Day, instinctively knew too. Think it over moment was Justin Fashanu’s phenomenal Map of description Season – if troupe the decade.

The goal, narrow Davies’ notes, was repetitive endlessly rounded television, featuring at depiction end living example the BBC highlights programme’s title weigh. It was a shining piece attack team overlook with a breath-taking feature finish, levelling the reckoning at 3-3 in a pulsating match: Norwich full-backs Kevin Manacles and Greg Downs, extreme in interpretation Liverpool fifty per cent, pulled representation English champions’ defence eclipse of layout, before squaring to Revivalist Paddon. Be active spread description play overhaul to Lav Ryan typography the organization wing. Closure fed rendering ball obviate centre press on Fashanu, who had his back appoint goal, crucial raced annoyance, expecting a return give approval to to hybrid into description box.

Fashanu, 18, had distress ideas. House the presumption of pubescence, he flicked the glob up learn his okay foot, revolved, and volleyed it butt the microscopic space in the middle of Ray Clemence’s head swallow the redirect. The thump was unspoiled – endure so was the

•

We know Justin Fashanu died. Now let us hear how he lived

Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2021. View the full list.

Speaking over the telephone from his Nevada home, A.J. Ali’s voice softens.

“Justin Fashanu was a man on an island,” says Ali, one of Fashanu’s former agents and also one of his dearest friends. “Justin desperately wanted acceptance. In some ways, he reminded me of a 10-year-old little boy finding his way. He had that wonderment, that humour and that openness but he also had this craving to be accepted. It really hurt him when he did not receive it. Yet he would not back down. He would face it head-on, most of the time. But sometimes he would run and, ultimately, we know he took his life.”

On May 2, 1998, aged only 37, Fashanu stepped off his island once and for all. At a lock-up garage in Shoreditch, east London, Britain’s first £1 million black footballer, best known for being the only British player to have declared himself gay, decided his life was no longer worth living.

Fashanu, a tall, broad and highly skilful striker, rose to stardom as an 18-year-old. He won the Match of the Day Goal of the Season award by scoring a glorious volley against Liverpool in February 1980.

He was swiftly a fixture in the England Un

•

When the striker Eddie Nketiah joined Crystal Palace from Arsenal in the summer, it felt like a deep loss to me and many other Arsenal fans. Why? Nketiah isn’t from north London, but grew up in the south-east London area of Deptford and went to school in New Cross; his parents immigrated to England from Ghana; he didn’t join Arsenal as a child but aged 16. Yet Nketiah was, to me and others, inextricably part of Arsenal. This is because he embodies a concept that was unknown to me until very recently, but which I immediately recognised upon learning about it: black Arsenal.

Black Arsenal might sound like a reductive notion. Should we really be reducing footballers and fans to their race? But it is the opposite of reductive: black Arsenal is an inclusive idea of fandom and belonging, reflected in its origin story. Black Arsenal did not begin in the London borough of Islington, the home of Arsenal football club since 1913, but in two different places: south London, and the principality of Monaco.

South London, not because Arsenal was established there, in Woolwich in 1886 – by munitions workers at the Royal Arsenal – but because many of the club’s defining black players during the 1980s and 1990s came from south of the river. Two of them, Ian Wright and David Rocastle, even