In my wild – drug-free and apocalyptically conformist – youth I used to play a drinking game called “finger’s on”. A group of us would each put an index finger on an empty glass and take it in turns to guess how many would remain, with participants deciding to leave their finger in place or remove it from the glass. “I think there’ll be … five” – cue frantic counting and success or failure.
If correct you were out of the game and poured a little bit of your pint into the glass – the last person remaining was required to drink the concoction in front of them. But the kicker was that you were not allowed to celebrate until you had high-fived each previously successful player in order of when they went out of the game. No glimpse of a smile, not even the slightest raise of one corner of your mouth; if your eyes even so much as glinted with happiness – that was it. BACK IN.
Some players would adopt extreme tactics, Ian opening his eyes as wide as an owl and blowing his cheeks out like a frog. Others – Fraser – just had the ability to stay deadpan for as long as necessary. Some – Geoff – had lost before they’d begun. The rest of us, whether in or out, acted as the most ruthless celebration police.
While you despair at how I spent much of my 20s and I accept quite how banal my autobiography might be, there is a point to this. The sheer joy and relief of not having to drink at the end meant that not celebrating was virtually impossible. When you want to smile – it is very hard not to smile.
As soon as Mikel Arteta bombed off down the touchline to celebrate Leandro Trossard’s third against Liverpool on Sunday you knew this conversation would happen again. Was Martin Ødegaard taking photos of the Arsenal cameraman “celebrating like he’d won the league” or was it just a man in a good mood doing something because it was something to do?
“Just get down the tunnel,” said Jamie Carragher. “You’ve won a game, three points. They’ve been brilliant, they’re back in the title race … get down the tunnel.” You take his point – all this could come back to bite Arsenal when Manchester City inevitably win the league. But it’ll only bite if you care about it biting.
Arsenal are unlikely to win the Premier League, but that probably has more to do with Kevin De Bruyne being good at football than Ødegaard’s amateur photography one Sunday afternoon in February.
What is acceptable? Marco Tardelli putting Italy 2-0 up in a World Cup final is pitch perfect, while Antony sinking to his knees after giving Manchester United the lead at Newport County may be a little over the top. Surely we want variety. If every goal led to the centre-forward playing the role of halibut in an elaborate choreographed fishing re-enactment, it would get tiresome. If everyone went full Temuri Ketsbaia it might lose its shock value a little bit.
You wonder if Arsenal should take their next home win – perhaps against Newcastle in a couple of weeks – and literally celebrate as if they’ve won the league to just stop people saying they’re celebrating like they’ve won the league the rest of the time. Champagne, pre-printed banners saying “Champions”, carrying their kids around the pitch in shirts saying “Daddy”, lift a trophy on a cardboard stage with some fireworks, an open-top bus parade the following day.
Equally admirable would be to refuse to celebrate anything until they next win a trophy. Just remain stony-faced, goal after goal, game after game, season after season and then finally explode in a world of ticker tape.
None of us are objective. The rational, football-loving part of me would rather someone that wasn’t City win the league, just to make it different and interesting – be that Arsenal or Liverpool. But as someone still at the delusional stage of contriving 15 victories for Spurs and a first title in generations, I do not enjoy watching Arsenal celebrate; my unconscious bias bristles when Arteta starts jumping about, or when he takes a slice of overpriced golden steak from the blade of Salt Bae for that matter.
But it’s not as if Pep Guardiola or Jürgen Klopp remain measured. Is it a case of having the medals as proof that their frantic variations on the fist-pump have the desired effect? Should Arteta desist from testing the fabric of his figure-hugging trousers until he has a title to go with it?
Most of this plays out entirely on social media – which doesn’t mean it isn’t real. But a lot of it will go unnoticed by many. Whenever we discuss a fanbase, it’s so easy to stereotype them as a monolithic mass with the same opinions and feelings about everything to do with their club – but that is ridiculous. For some, yelling on social media is the entire reason to follow football. Others won’t even have a login. Some will celebrate every victory with frenzied abandon while the person next to them will panic with superstition at any mention of success until a trophy has been locked away in a cabinet for years.
You could build a sliding scale for acceptable celebrations, depending on the player, the manager, the game, the score, the moment, the stakes (not the steaks, Mikel). There probably is a line: Keowning in Van Nistelrooy’s face springs to mind.
As for the reaction – the real truth is that it is annoying when teams you don’t want to win score a goal. It is annoying when teams you don’t want to win celebrate scoring that goal. A lot of football is annoying. So when it isn’t, when you get the chance to be happy about it, then do it in whichever way you like and accept the fact some people will get annoyed. It’s up to you whether you want to get annoyed about them being annoyed. And it’s up to them whether they want to get annoyed about you getting annoyed about them getting annoyed. I could go on.
