etting to attend a Premier League game in London is no easy task for a visiting American, especially the opening game of the season. And getting three seats together is tougher, especially if you are hoping to sit with Arsenal fans while Arsenal is playing away, at Crystal Palace. Somehow my son Luke prevailed anyway, after endless online searches, and I decided to bankroll the ridiculously expensive endeavor, and my other son Conrad came along, having supported Arsenal for years, even betting on them at times.

 

This all happened in August, 2022, as Arsenal was beginning what would become its best season in twenty years, staying on top of the standings until Manchester City plucked away the league title, painfully, in May, 2023. I was in Canterbury, England, as the season launched, traveling with my wife for our 35th wedding anniversary, and we had invited the guys to join us for a bit. Now 25 and 29, they were not with us often anymore. Conrad was married, which made a full family gathering especially tricky. However, he had broken away from Boston that August, and Luke was able to come from Des Moines, and since Cathleen had encouraged me to join them for some guys-only time, I parted from her in Canterbury and headed to London.

 

Linking up at the Crystal Palace train station should have been easy enough. However, Conrad and Luke had decided, last minute, to make a quick side-trip to Bristol, getting a tourist adventure before meeting me. Unfortunately, they missed their return train, meaning that they had to wait for a later one, arriving only fifteen minutes before kick-off.

 

When they came out of the Crystal Palace station dragging full-size wheeled suitcases, I shook my head in disbelief. There were no lockers at the station, and all taxis were taken, so what could we do but set off on the mile-long hike to the stadium, grinding down the plastic wheels of their suitcases? As the cases clacked along and the crowd thickened, I kept preparing my sons for disaster, convinced that no stadium was going to let fans enter with luggage. To my amazement, though, at the ticket booth we were told to simply throw our bags next to a dozen others stowed behind the counter. Then they pointed us around the looming structure to our designated entrance.

 

As we came jogging up a long hill, we could hear an enormous chorus chanting to the notes of a familiar tune:

 

You are my Palace, my only Palace,

 

You make me happy, when skies are gray,

 

You never know just, how much I love you,

 

Please don't take my Palace away.

 

The three of us found ourselves laughing at the cheery devotion of the Palace fans. Their excitement, even if it opposed ours, was palpable. Five or six teens sprinted by as a policeman shouted for them to slow. We jogged past a heavy-set father and boy, who were huffing along in matching red-and-blue jester hats, then we passed a man hawking scarves that said "Experience The Big Match" with "Crystal Palace" emblazoned on one end and "Arsenal" on the other.

 

At the security check, we had to wait in a crowded line, and we heard a tremendous roar as we pushed through the cage-like turnstiles. Clearly the game had started, so we dashed to the steps that would take us down into the actual seating area. I was in such a rush that I didn't anticipate our entry into the stadium proper, but once we rounded the last corner, we were met by a glorious sight: a sweeping bank of fans lit up by late-afternoon sunlight and, above them, another sweeping rank of fans, topped by an immense curved awning that extended like the bill of a huge baseball cap.

 

To enter that stadium was doubly powerful because I was doing it with my sons. I could see my own exhilaration mirrored back. We jogged down the stairs, past security people in neon-yellow vests that said "Steward." We turned away from the end-of-field seats then wove through the streaming crowd to our place near midfield, under a low flat ceiling raised on iron posts. Everyone was on their feet, shouting. To be precise, all the Crystal Palace fans were shouting, since the only side-by-side seats Luke had been able to find were in the middle of a huge section of home-team fans.

 

We squeezed down a row of hollering men, and as soon as we had secured our seats, a burst of cursing went off. The replay on a giant screen at the far end showed that Arsenal had been awarded a corner kick, but the Palace fans were convinced the ball had come off an Arsenal player.

 

"Bloody hell," someone bellowed.

 

"The ref's a twat," someone added. "Where do they find these morons?" Further curses broke out as one of the Arsenal forwards got a head on the long arcing kick and almost knocked it into the goal. I surreptitiously faked clapping, and Conrad reached over to clamp my hands. Luke raised an eyebrow and lifted his finger to his lips. When we had told English acquaintances that the only seats we could find were among Palace fans, they had cautioned, "Best be quiet, lads. Quiet as church mice." And we did just that, jammed up there between rows and rows of people in blue-and-red striped jerseys. However, each time Arsenal completed a particularly good play, Luke would lift his cell phone to show us the Arsenal logo, a red shield with a golden cannon, and we would grin conspiratorially.

 

I had coached both of these guys when they were in grade school, and I had played pick-up soccer with them ever since. I had also watched, with pleasure, as they joined the same fantasy soccer league and discovered a shared loyalty to Arsenal. As a result, just helping to support their chosen team was a delight—maybe even more so because the three of us were seated in such a sea of "enemy" fans.

 

A new chant broke out:

 

To see the Palace Aces . . . oh the lads.

 

Should have seen us coming,

 

Everywhere was red and blue,

 

Everyone was running,

 

All the lads and lasses,

 

All the smiling faces.

 

Then the crowd roared as a Crystal Palace player stole the ball and fired it down the sideline to a galloping teammate, who almost shook off the last defender.

 

Instead, though, that last Arsenal fullback tipped the ball away and took possession, moving to midfield. A quick pass from him, and an Arsenal attacker broke into the Crystal Palace penalty box to shoot. The ball was deflected out of bounds, which meant we were awarded another corner kick, and this time, one of our forwards got his head on the crossing ball perfectly, snapping it down under the diving goalie so that it bounced into the net.

 

What dismay. The Palace crowd went into a mass fit, throwing hands in the air and cursing. At the same time, we began to hear, down at the far end where all the Arsenal fans were sectioned off, a new chant:

 

Ooh to,

 

Ooh to be,

 

Ooh to be a

 

Gooner

 

Both of my sons grinned widely, and I chuckled, realizing that the heavily accented last word was 'Gunner'—the term for an Arsenal supporter.

 

Later I would ask Luke who exactly put that header into the goal. I'm terrible about remembering such details, but he would confidently remind me that it was Martinelli, the Brazilian wonder boy who signed with Arsenal as an 18-year-old and helped Brazil win gold at the 2020 Olympics. I would also ask my son who scored the second Arsenal goal, and he would tell me it was Saka, the Londoner whose parents emigrated from Nigeria. Like Martinelli, Saka signed with Arsenal at a very early age—only 17—and he was still only 22 when we saw him play, but he had already been named Arsenal's "Player of the Season" a year before.

 

None of that really registered for me in the moment, though, because I was more taken by the sheer experience of being up there in the stands with all the shared camaraderie—the proud chanting, the yearning cheers, the despondent groans. And I was struck by how wonderfully British it all was, this game between a team that originated with munitions workers at the Royal Arsenal in 1886 and a team that got started in 1861 by a group of amateur players who lived near the immense Victorian glass hall created for the first World's Fair— what was dubbed the Great Exhibition.

 

One of the most memorable aspects of the whole experience was not even a part of the game. At half time, an all-male grounds crew ambled onto the soccer pitch carrying pronged pitchforks and began poking at the short, immaculate grass. Sprinklers came on, and the lawn guys walked leisurely in the gaps between oscillating sprays, doing their meditative aerating. Giving such attention to the turf seemed classically British—like an extension of the gardening skills so evident in the little front and backyards of virtually every English house, where tiny alpine flowers cascade down stone walls, bold blooms tremble in window boxes, and carefully-shaped shrubs mark perimeters.

 

My sons remember clearly who shot Arsenal's two scoring goals. They recall not only how Saka fired a bullet-like shot across the field from far right, but that it went into the goal after deflecting off the foot of a particular Palace defender, Guéhi, who was born in Cote d'Ivoire and raised in London, where his parents had immigrated when he was an infant. The boys would remind me of such details later. But what stays with me now, as I look back, is our shared amusement at those contemplative groundskeepers, who strolled the football pitch so meditatively, poking at indiscernible divots. And I remember the grins of the guys as we took a selfie in the middle of the raucous crowd. And then the long barrier of seats that were covered with yellow vinyl from the top of the stadium to the bottom, to separate the home crowd from the visiting crowd.

 

As we exited, lines of stewards were stretched out on each side of that barrier; they wore neon yellow and orange vests labelled "Arsenal Response Team" or "Deputy Safety Officer." They simply stood in the way of anyone who might consider crossing the covered seats. No one made a run for it. However, people shouted taunts back and forth. They yelled and laughed and cursed. And when we stepped out onto the street at last, where the sun had gone down without us realizing, the last thing that stands out to me is a big cluster of joyful Arsenal devotees hopping up and down in the middle of the street, arms over each other's shoulders, chanting:

 

We won the league Anfield.

 

We won it at the lane,

 

Stamford Bridge, Old Trafford.

 

No one can say the same.

 

Mikel Arteta's army,

 

We're Arsenal through and through.

 

We'll sing it in the North Bank,

 

And in the Clock End too.

 

Allez, Allez, Allez,

 

Allez, Allez, Allez

 

Caught up in the celebration and united with Arsenal fans at last, we rocked our shoulders in time with the chant. We lifted our arms. We did a little jig in the middle of the blocked-off road, as Crystal Palace fans streamed past. And that moment of revelry is something the three of us can return to and cherish in the years to come—a shared moment that made us more bonded than we would have otherwise been.