…and early seventies, when I first started watching football, I was always reading about players who, as the sports-journalism cliché put it, had become “a target for the boo-boys”. These players were hapless individuals who, usually through a whole string of undistinguished performances for an underachieving team, would always attract the wrath of their own fans, no matter what they did – and what they did was usually inept, partly because their confidence had been shot to pieces. Jon Sammels, who played for Arsenal between 1963 and 1971, was, it was widely believed, driven out of the club by the “boo-boys”; later, the malcontents at Highbury aimed their displeasure at David Price, and Lee Chapman, and even, at the end of his time at Arsenal, Michael Thomas, the man who scored the most famous goal in Arsenal’s history. For long periods over the last forty years, in fact, we seemed to have had more targets for the boo-boys than we had idols. Emmanuel Eboue, who came on as a substitute in the game against Wigan last Saturday, but had to be substituted because the crowd were on his back to the extent that he could hardly stand up, is thus the latest in a long and ignoble line of Arsenal players stretching back to a time long before I was born.

 In the last few days, however, there have been several articles describing the treatment of Eboue as an entirely modern phenomenon, a result of increased ticket prices, a new breed of fan, etc etc. A man in the Daily Mail went so far as to claim that in the good old days, “supporters’ pride would not allow open displays of dissent. It was considered treachery, because it betrayed a weakness to rivals, and any player’s shortcomings would be swept away in a roar of encouragement.”  I am beginning to wonder whether the real problem with football is not a new breed of fan but a new breed of football journalist; some of the people who comment on the game now either have no memory of anything that happened before, say, 2002 (a real disadvantage in sports writing, which needs context), or they actually had no interest in the game before being given their current job.  In the Guardian earlier this year, the reliable Harry Pearson actually became quite nostalgic when writing about the “boo boys”.  “What a delightful phrase that is, conjuring up for the more elderly among us the smell of Oxo and Old Spice, the rattle of half-time number-boards and the sound of the Harry J All-Stars’ Liquidator being played over a PA system so feeble and tinny it may just as well have been a bloke with a Dansette and a megaphone.”  So there you have it. Booing your own player is either something that was invented yesterday by yuppies, or a practise that’s been going on since before Match of the Day was first broadcast in colour.

The reasons poor Eboue was so shoddily treated on Saturday are many and various. A lot of Arsenal fans wouldn’t like him much even if he scored twenty-five goals a season; he’s perceived to be something of an embarrassment, a rare example of a player who both feigns injury and causes injury to others. And the Emirates Stadium is not a happy place at the moment anyway – in fact, it has never been particularly cheerful. The move to the new stadium coincided with, maybe resulted in, the breakup of a great side, and we are now paying much more for much less.  The football this season has been a pallid and frustrating imitation of the stuff we were watching even twelve months ago – every year, it seems, experienced players leave, to be replaced by younger, currently lesser talent.

The real problem with English football is that there is no new breed of fan. The average age of spectators at a Premiership match is forty-three; when they boo, they remember Sammels and Chapman, if they’re at Arsenal; or Gareth Hall, at Chelsea;  or Torben Piechnik, at Liverpool; or countless other players with two left feet up and down the country and the decades. They will boo until their vocal chords have withered away.

…or so ago – right around the time that my first book Fever Pitch was published – the atmosphere in our football stadia began to change. Hooliganism, at least inside the grounds, began to disappear, and, regrettably, the noise levels began to drop. This was an inevitable consequence of a number of things: the Taylor Report into the Hillsborough disaster, which put an end to the vast, intimidating terraces where the most vocal supporters gathered, the drastic increases in season-ticket prices that forced out younger fans, and so on.  Because of the coincidence in timing, Fever Pitch itself used to cop some of the blame: according to some of the less rigorous thinkers on the sports pages, the publication and success of the book prompted a lot of middle-class sissies (because who else would read books, apart from middle-class sissies?) to push out the proper fans and take the game over. I used to fret about this – had my book really played a part in wrecking football?  But it seemed to me, even at my most paranoid, that in the end Rupert Murdoch’s money and an agonising disaster had had more to do with the change than I could claim credit for.

 At Thursday’s Arsenal AGM, Arsene Wenger seemed to complain about the lack of support at home games (although he was talking, specifically, about the dismal atmosphere – which matched the dismal performance – during the first half of the most recent match), and, after all these years, Fever Pitch got blamed all over again. John Cross in the Daily Mirror thinks that the Emirates “has become a place for too many corporates and the Nick Hornby brigade of ‘new trendy fans’ with the older, more vociferous ones being in the minority.” Fever Pitch was published in 1992, and the bulk of its sales took place between 1993 and 1995, when the paperback was published. I don’t believe that these “new trendy fans” really exist, or at least, not in the way Mr Cross seems to think. (The corporates, of course, clearly do – there are all sorts of boxes and Club Level tiers full of them.) But even if they did, how long do they have to attend games for before they’re no longer new and trendy? Because they must have been watching Arsenal for a minimum of ten years now. Reading sentences like that is like listening to mistrustful, small-minded villagers who won’t talk to “newcomers” because they only moved in twenty or thirty years ago.

  I am fifty-one, and I’ve been going to Arsenal for forty years; the average age of a Premiership spectator is, according to a survey a year or so back, forty-three. If football is to survive, then that probably needs to come down a decade or two, which means welcoming newcomers, rather than pouring scorn on them for not having been before. In most areas of life, converts are welcomed; that’s how sport and the arts stay alive. Not football, though. “Where were you when we were shit?” is the chant of the sneery tabloid sports journalist, and it looks as though it will stay that way forever.

…became Prime Minister in 1996; Arsene Wenger became manager of Arsenal in 1997. Blair saw off four Conservative leaders: Major, William Hague, Iain Duncan-Smith, and Michael Howard. Arsene Wenger has seen off six Spurs managers: Gerry Francis, Christian Gross, George Graham, Glenn Hoddle, Jacques Santini and Martin Jol. Of course, Wenger is not directly responsible for the failure of these managers in the way that Blair defeated his opponents, but Wenger’s success made Tottenham’s underachievement in the last decade or so even more galling for Spurs fans, and both Christian Gross and Jacques Santini were undeniably intended to be in the Wenger mould. Arsene’s shadow has cast a gloom all the way up Seven Sisters Road for quite a while now.

 Christian Gross was Tottenham’s Iain Duncan-Smith, and not just because they were both bald – they were both hopeless, too.  (As a baldy, I would have taken a secret pride in either of them being any good; instead, they merely reinforced the unconscious association of baldness with haplessness, at least when it comes to public office.) Martin Jol was William Hague, with his likeable ordinary-guy routine that, in the end, wasn’t quite enough.  And George Graham was their Michael Howard, the old-school hard-man who was supposed to win through cracking the whip and telling everyone to get back to basics. My big fear, as an Arsenal fan, is that Spurs might have found their David Cameron in Juande Ramos, not least because economic circumstances are affecting Wenger in the same way that they’re affecting Gordon Brown: the ruinous cost of the Emirates Stadium looks every bit as damaging as the credit crunch. Worse, really. We don’t seem to be able to buy the footballing equivalent of a bar of Dairy Milk at the moment, let alone a four-course meal at Nobu. Ramos’s Sevilla team was dazzling, and if he can achieve a similar style at White Hart Lane, it might just be enough to push Arsenal out of the top four. A lot of Arsenal fans, me included, have enormous faith in Wenger, but this season he seems hell-bent on playing an entire Premiership season with a whole squadful of seventeen-year-old inside forwards, and that faith is going to be tested to the limit.