Wednesday night was a wonderful time to be an Arsenal supporter, nay, a football fan in general. The 3-0 victory in Piraeus from Arsenal represented the best of what sports fandom is about: long odds, nervous stomachs, thick tension, ceaseless drinking, and heroic performances, with all of the ecstatic release that they bring with them.
In those moments, all of the trouble over qualification, and the devastating losses to Dinamo Zagreb and Olympiacos (at home, no less) almost seemed worth it. Almost. Now, the wait is on to see who Arsenal draw in the round of 16. Potential dates with giants Barcelona or Real Madrid loom large, and supporters may look at the draw with a mixture of giddy anticipation and bone-deep dread. It’s the way of the supporter, after all.
But Wednesday night’s victory wasn’t just about redemption for the team, the manager, the players, the club, or even the supporters – who were in excellent voice. Instead, Wednesday night saw the most important redemption story of all told on the Saronic Gulf coast: that of the infamous Arsenal third kit. Cursed no more!
If memory serves, the third kit, or cup kit, was somewhat divisive upon its release, but the general trend – at least on my corner of social media – was that it was somewhat less-than-good. I’m not really sure what it is about the shirt. Maybe it’s the incomplete vertical stripes. Maybe it’s the blue-ish stripe in the middle that does it. But the cup kit never seemed to resonate with supporters.
Whatever support the kit may have had in the less-vocal corners of the faithful dissipated completely after a trio of absolutely disastrous outings: the Sheffield Wednesday League Cup loss, the calamitous Bayern Munich game in Germany, and the Premier League game vs. Norwich. Through a combination of poor results and a disturbing injury record, the kit seemed cursed.
The cursed black kit for tonight’s game.
#Arsenal #OLYvAFC
— Andy. AFC (@xandrewto) December 9, 2015
Upon learning that the squad was planning to wear the kit in what was, up to this point, the biggest game of the year for the team, a decided sense of pessimism infected portions of the fan base. Sports fans in general can be a superstitious lot, and even a little bad mojo can change a mood from hopeful to funereal in an instant.
I’ve had to make my own peace with teams and curses, for I am a fan of an actually-cursed team: the Chicago Cubs. To make a long story short, the Cubs have been cursed to never win a baseball championship since 1945 (and they haven’t won one since 1908, but the curse is only responsible for 70 of those years). To this date, the curse has stuck, and there have been some pretty strange circumstances that have allowed it to perpetuate.
However, it’s 2015, a more enlightened time – American politics excepted. And curses belong to the unenlightened. I suspect Olivier Giroud doesn’t believe in curses. He must be a rational man, perhaps even a man of science. Only such rock-solid faith in the rational could have allowed him to be the curse-breaker, to thoroughly disprove the curse of the third kit, to redeem the cup kit in the eyes of the faithful, even the superstitious.
Now, with qualification assured, we Arsenal fans are free to embrace the third kit, and to throw off the shackles of our Dark Ages thinking. We can tell ourselves that the kit was never cursed, and rationalise away the trio (a trinity, perhaps?) of catastrophic outings that preceded the latest glorious one. We can tell ourselves that curses don’t exist, that such beliefs are a relic of our darker, less rational selves.
Or maybe, just maybe, Olivier Giroud is just a mystical curse-breaker, with powers even he has never dreamed of. It’s the Christmas season after all, a time where we can suspend disbelief for a few moments, and pretend that magic is real, and that anything truly is possible if we just believe and wish hard enough. One hat-trick later, and our wishes have come true.
