Snakes and ladders

You will know by now whether Arsenal in Italy on Wednesday carried on from their racily appealing first-leg home victory over Juventus and are now in the semi-finals of the European Champions Cup. Whatever, last week’s emphatic, even euphoric, Highbury show remains one to bottle up and savour as a memento of north London’s old marble palace before the bulldozers crawl in. Arsenal begin next season at a swish new home down the road. It is 93 years since their first game at Highbury — Leicester Fosse defeated 2–1 in September 1913 — after they leased for 20 years the cricket fields of St John’s College of Divinity (promising not to play matches on Christmas Day or Good Friday; nor did they till 1925).

April, and most League matters seem settled. Surely Chelsea are home and hosed in the Premiership; in the championship Reading certainly are; and the Uniteds of Southend or Carlisle are smoothly docked at the top of the two lower divisions. It will be cathartic when Reading kick off in August in the Premiership. To me, the ‘Royals’ shall forever be perennial whipping boys of the antique Third Division South, which they were in the 1950s when a few of us would sometimes defy the probability of being seriously whipped ourselves if our black-cowled, rugger-mad Benedictine housemaster at Douai, Fr Norbert, discovered we had been occasional Saturday truants through the rickety turnstiles at Reading’s dilapidated old Elm Park ground, just a few miles along the Bath road from our monastery school (also, like Elm Park, now dearly departed). As long as those two Third Divisions, north and south, existed Reading were hapless and permanent members — cue our schoolboys’ fantasy joke when, promotion achieved at last, the Reading manager drives home on a delirious high, crashes into a tree and wakes up in the South Berks hospital.