— Bob Dylan

THE trouble with being a temporary god is that it makes real life so frightfully difficult to deal with when the godliness has worn off. Icarus Football Club, formerly known as Arsenal, are making wonderfully heavy weather of their abrupt transition from gods to humans.

I watched them play against Chelsea last Sunday and was greatly struck. It was not the fact that they looked relatively ordinary. Rather, it was the way they kept expecting extraordinary things to happen and the way they didn’t know how to deal with life when they didn’t.

Just a few weeks ago it was all so easy. Never, it seemed, had there been a team for which life and football and victory were so easy. They simply didn’t get beaten. They went through a whole league season and more unbeaten — 49 matches in all.

They were a team touched with fairy dust. Nothing they did could go wrong. They expected goals and goals came. They expected opponents to bow the knee and all knees were duly bowed. The side was a stranger to worry, a stranger to gravity, a stranger to mortality. Arsenal seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.

Now look at them, a team hag-ridden by self-doubt. The transformation from the strutting flâneurs of football’s boulevards into a team of worriers and sickeners and twitchers is deeply shocking. They looked lost.

I was reminded of a passage in Midnight Plus One, a very nice thriller by Gavin Lyall, in which the hero, on a high-speed run through France, is “flickering through the night with the precision of a high-powered bullet. It was one of those times when you know exactly, can feel exactly, what the car will do — and the road also. It felt familiar, although it wasn’t. I understood the pattern of it: what it would do next, how tight its bends would be, how steep its slopes.

“It happens. And when it happens, you’re right and you’re safe. But it doesn’t last. And you’re never more wrong, more dangerous, than when it’s stopped lasting and you don’t realise it.”

We comfort each other in bad times with the thought that bad times don’t last for ever. There there, we say, it won’t last, the sun will rise again, time is the great healer, plenty more fish in the sea; and this day, like all other days, will pass. But we have no tradition of forearming ourselves in our times of plenty.

Instead, we assume they will go on for ever. We assume that this is the way things were meant to be and that having got there, life will henceforth be perfect. No one says there there, never mind, you’ll be brought down to earth eventually, the next failure is only just around the corner and nothing lasts for long.

And so we convince ourselves that our brief and wonderful good times are a permanent state. We may work desperately hard to keep them that way, we may not take them for granted at all. But the point is that we have no resources to deal with the ending of a great time.

We can deal with disappointment by vowing to try again, but we don’t know how to deal with demotion from lofty achievements. We think we have succeeded. We think that we have established life exactly as it was always supposed to be. And before we know it — before we have really savoured the pleasure of achievement — we find ourselves struggling along from day to day, just like everybody else. We are disadvantaged and bewildered by the passing of our great times.