New Journal Gunners fan Richard Osley demonstrates the Bale heart

Published: 23 May, 2013
by RICHARD OSLEY

IT looks quite easy but it’s actually quite hard to do a Gareth Bale heart as well as Gareth Bale does a Gareth Bale heart.

Mine is a very poor imitation but I thought I’d at least try. It’s surely the only appropriate end to a season of misplaced crowing and gasping for the final whistle.

Do one today for yourself: take your index fingers and thumbs, fasten them together to form the international symbol of romance and there you go. While you’re doing it think of poor old Gareth. Here is a man who we should all have reservoirs of sympathy for.

For months and months Bale has come up with 88th-minute wondergoal winners and yet he still hasn’t been able to guide Tottenham Hotspur into the Champions League.

Even a terrible team like Arsenal, who Spurs manager Andre Villas-Boas assured us were in a ‘negative spiral’, have finished above Tottenham.
Even in the Gervinho-years Arsenal have managed it.

The truth is that not in recent years has a Spurs player put in a more single-handedly brilliant shift over a season than Bale.

He had me terrified to the last second. Those moony-faced smiles and Bale hearts which greeted every injury time rescue goal were haunting us. He was everywhere. I’m sure I saw him on the 253 bus the other day, grinning, and Bale-hearting me from the back seats.

And yet through it all – somehow – it’s Arsenal. Again. I can’t explain it. Why is it always Arsenal? I can’t really tell you.

But Bale, brilliant Bale, heads to the Europa League instead, a competition who everybody says they don’t want to be in but Chelsea seemed desperate for us to watch them win.

No wonder the Arsenal fans, the blood rushing with excited relief, went into overdrive with the Channel 5 jokes on Sunday, disgracefully unleashing the in-your-face crowing like they had known all along how it would finish.

Even against Newcastle, the Gunners were ambling around as if they had missed every single news bulletin that had reminded them that they needed to win.

Nothing was guaranteed. It really did feel like a toss of coin.

The unquantifiable fans’ joy after Koscielny’s memorable decider was misunderstood by outsiders as if the Arsenal supporters believed fourth place amounted to a trophy. It wasn’t that at all.

It was just an unmedicated we-win you-lose virus that most football supporters, like no other group of people in the country, retain from the moment they first beat a sibling at snakes and ladders aged three.

It’s stupid, but both sides of the divide have the capacity for raising the stakes of immaturity in this never-ending quarrel.

It is simply that reaching the St Totteringham’s Day milestone has an insulating warmth which allows Arsenal fans to forget for an evening that their team is way short of a title-winning assault.

The club are in need of strengthening despite a spirited end of the season.

That’s clear. But finishing above Spurs for so long – and it’s worth remembering United and Liverpool have both let their  neighbours outpace them at different times in recent years  – still retains an importance in these streets. Yeah, it does. 

The fact is, regardless of the empty trophy cabinets at both clubs, kids born in north London in the late 1990s have never known anything else from the rivalry.

They are old enough to join the army now, drive cars, go to uni and vote for crazy people in elections.

Some will have bred little junior Gunners and junior Spurs of their own by now. And none of them have seen a Tottenham team finish above Arsenal. That’s quite something.

Suddenly, it all sounds rather cruel. Time for another Bale heart. Spread the love today.