Arsenal’s title party – raw and real [Simon Lamrock]

YOUR chosen football club is a nearby place before it is a feeling, and a feeling before it is a result.

Somewhere on some doomed day, that order got turned around for the modern day teenage glory supporters who decided to pick the odious entity known as Manchester City as their favourites.

These are children who couldn’t possibly remember Maine Road, and who were not alive when Shaun Goater kicked an advertising board so hard in celebration that he hurt himself – but nevertheless wanted to walk down Bracknell high street or through The Malls in Basingstoke or enjoyed strutting through The Oracle shopping centre in Reading in a Haaland pressed light blue kit.

England has always seen this. Liverpool in the 1980s, Manchester United in the 1990s: a distant shirt in return for what must have seemed like forever success.

Some of those borrowed loves stuck. Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London who talks of how much he loves this city, can still bring up Liverpool from a Tooting childhood.

The City version is less patient.

Parents failing in the first duty – more important than teaching your kid to swim or how to tie their laces – by allowing a shortcut to success and okaying support for the banking project up north.

Buying up half the club shop will not disguise what you did – those scarves have never been wet. You can’t unbox real support.

Of course the glory-glory kids were always the worst back in the day; crybabies in United tops, struggling to disguise their stuffy BO with Lynx but who had an NES before anybody else.

It’s an age of innocence, so you have to feel a little sorry for what the modern-day equivalents must be going through now, arriving in the playground with nothing but a promise of “irrefutable evidence” that will stop it all.

This is the price of skipping the true meaning of being a fan: it’s meant to come with rain, a bad hot dog, a cupset, deflation and disappointment.

That’s what made Arsenal’s title party in the streets so raw and real.