Published: 19 March, 2015

ARSENAL by Richard Osley

BONO, fudging Bono. He made it worse, didn’t he? Sitting there in the Royal Box, clapping away when the final whistle went. There our glorious Arsenal failures were, deflated and downhearted after nearly pulling off a Champions League miracle in Monaco, and who does the camera zoom to? Bono. We’d just had the awful experience of listening to ITV’s Andy Townsend endlessly advise Arsenal to pump high balls into Monaco’s huge centre-halves; this dozy advice interspersed with a sprinkling of his partisan go-ons.

Then, after this soundtrack of sheer nonsense, we get Bono. Bono, right there, in the moment of defeat, clapping.

It was like a horror novel. Really, life, if you wanted to slap us all down for crowing about beating United in the Cup, it would have been more than enough to simply scalpel Arsenal from the Champions League with the horrific burn of that false hope we all felt in the last 10 minutes. That would have been enough for one night. 

But oh, no, a demonic wind somewhere blew Bono our way, too. When you witness that, it feels like shamed karma for loaning out our mate Podolski to Inter Milan or banning selfie sticks. I bet Bono, with his violet glasses and his hair, calls it the Round of 16, too. Think of little Santi Cazorla: his craft and skill deserves a place beyond the second round in this competition. He must have dared to dream, like we all did, that something amazingly good was going to happen. The disappointment of defeat must have been raw. The whistle goes. He looks up. He sees Bono, clapping. Tell me that’s fair.

SPURS by Catherine Etoe

I ALWAYS find it cheering to listen to a football phone-in show in the minutes that follow an embarrassing defeat. It’s a trick passed down by Gran. 

“The good thing about football is there’s always someone worse off than yourself,” she’d say while pointing at the photo of the Blackpool FC-supporting branch of the family on the mantlepiece and laughing like a hyena. Anyway it worked a treat on Sunday. Within half an hour of hearing an Everton fan bang on about how Roberto Martinez should “do one” I had moved on; all we’d done was lose to Moan United – Evertonians are fretting about relegation. 

This radio phone-in malarkey doesn’t work for everyone, of course. I recently suggested it to an Arsenal fan as a way of getting over his Champions League agonies every March. “Think of it as your yearly pick-me-up,” I said, “a bit like getting the cat wormed”. This particular Gooner said he was jolly grateful for my advice but suggested that I stick it where the sun don’t shine because he preferred to indulge in a 48-hour Joshua Tree listenathon whenever Arsenal crashed out of the Champions League. Quite why he thought listening to U2 could pick him up was a mystery to me until Gran told me she’d spotted Bono in the crowd at Monaco on Tuesday night. She initially thought it was Elton John but, as we all know, he supports Watford so was probably in Wigan on Tuesday. But I digress. The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter who you are or who you support, if you’re a fan you’ll probably go through some sort of agony every season. 

The trick is getting over it.