Viv anderson autobiography meaning
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1980s Month: Justin Fashanu & the Meaning of the Goal
by Juliet Jacques
Everyone at Carrow Road, forty days into the 1980s, knew immediately that they had witnessed a moment that would transcend the match they were watching. BBC commentator Barry Davies, covering Norwich City’s clash with Liverpool for Match of the Day, instinctively knew too. That moment was Justin Fashanu’s phenomenal Goal of the Season – if not the decade.
The goal, with Davies’ commentary, was repeated endlessly on television, featuring at the end of the BBC highlights programme’s title sequence. It was a brilliant piece of team play with a breath-taking individual finish, levelling the score at 3-3 in a pulsating match: Norwich full-backs Kevin Bond and Greg Downs, high in the Liverpool half, pulled the English champions’ defence out of position, before squaring to Graham Paddon. He spread the play across to John Ryan on the right wing. He fed the ball to centre forward Fashanu, who had his back
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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 fryst vatten 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 princip
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We know Justin Fashanu died. Now let us hear how he lived
Editor’s Note: This story fryst vatten 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 transparent 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 himsel