Spare A Thought For Poor Old Arsenal

3-0 DAHN!

I have been following this thread with some interest, and almost posted after the mid-week win in Turkey when Arsenal beat Galatasaray 1-4. Because after the tone of some of the posts it seemed like a bit of payback from Arsene Wenger, not that he would have lowered himself of course.

Now I'm no great fan of Arsenal, as it happens I'm more of a Spurs man myself, but I am most definitely a fan of Arsene Wenger. I think that he brings a touch of class to English football in his personal deportment and statements, besides which he is perennially successful with the Arsenal team which he has assembled. Perhaps not as successful as some Arsenal fans wish that he and Arsenal could or would be, but nevertheless more consistently successful than most other Premiership teams. I believe that the man deserves plaudits not only for the team that he has assembled, but for what he is doing for football in England.

So it goes without saying that when I read Patrick Collins article in today's ''Mail On Sunday,'' it not only reinforced my views on Arsene Wenger, but also expressed them in a way that I am incapable of doing. If you are intrerested in reading the article it is here . . . 


. . . but for the full article, which includes video clips, it is here . . . 

www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2873052/Arsene-Wenger-s-jeering-Arsenal-supporters-shows-fans-attitudes-increasingly-belligerent.html


I honestly do wonder why on earth Wenger bothers to carry on, because I wouldn't think that he needs to. Presumably he must be either well compensated for his efforts, or (the more likely option in my view) he just loves Arsenal. But the biggest slur on his character (and on this occasion he did respond with the threat of legal action) was when he was accused of being a paedophile. Now that was quite disgraceful.

But even his greatest critics must agree that he does certainly carry on . . . irrespective of everyone and anything, and when he does eventually decide to call it a day then at that point English football will be the poorer for it.

I m sure Arsenal do their 'fair share' of charity work, probably no less or no more than other clubs, and probably because they think they ought to be seen to be 'doing something', and in that respect they are no different to any other premier league team.
I don't particularly dislike Arsenal btw, I don't really give two hoots about any of the top teams, I posted the video to show just how idiotic some football fans have become, in this case it happened to be an Arsenal fan, but it could easily have been a follower of any team.

I meant in terms of the relationship between club and fans - and becoming another sterile boring corporate club owned by 2 people who have no interest in the club itself.  Half of my girlfriend's family are Arsenal fans from North London - all have working class jobs, none can afford to go and watch them anymore apart from very, very rarely when 20 years ago they could go every week.  It's just part of the gentrification of football and I have no interest in that; it has no character; it just doesn't matter if those players are turning out wearing Arsenal shirts, Man United shirts, Real Madrid shirts, AC Milan shirts, - it is all the same, there is no differentiation between clubs anymore and no link between players and clubs either and Arsenal have contributed to that as much as anyone else.  Charity has nothing to do with it - I find all the top clubs utterly soulless, not singling Arsenal particularly on that.  What I object to is that Arsenal fans cling to this idea that they are the good one of that bunch - the club that plays the game the 'right way' etc etc.

Man City claim to have created tons of jobs in East Manchester - claim to have invested massively in the local community, give s**tloads of money to local charities.  Doesn't change my opinion that they are soulless waste of space who are completely detached from the history and tradition of English football like all top clubs.  Again I can name 20-30 Man City fans I know who watched them in League 1 and can no longer afford to go - makes it all a total waste of time in my view.  The casual fan and the fan who never goes is of more value to these clubs than the guy who has invested 40-50 years of his life and I have no time for that, renders the whole point of following a football club irrelevant.  Might as well support the Harlem Globetrotters.

On Arsene Wenger - an outstanding manager and a decent guy who certainly doesn't deserve the abuse of those idiots on the railway station or on that youtube link and who is amazingly committed to his vision of football and genuinely deserves the plaudits he gets I think. Any Arsenal fan giving him abuse is a moron.  But he has no respect for the history and traditions of English football and in all honestly I preferred the top level game in this country 20 years ago to the game now so while he deserves credit for the impact he has made on the game in this country it's not progress I like.  I like the game less now than I used to - I genuinely preferred George Graham's Arsenal to Arsene Wenger's.  Not all progress is good - I preferred football when it was more physical, more emotional and more messy.  Football is not a game that gets better to watch with increased technical precision.  I want rock em, sock em punk football with a slight edge to it not a classical music performance.  Robin Friday is my idea of romantic football figure, not Johan Cryuff.

No not the 1960s - simply the early to mid 90s.  And yes I would happily say exactly the same thing about Bristol Rovers.  It is not based on some starry eyed vision of the past which had its own flaws - it is based on finding the proesent state of fotball deeply unpleasant and increasingly soulless.

It's quite simple really - I cannot see the point in the corporate model of football.  What on earth is the point in making an emotional investment in a hedge fund which is pretty much all most football club's are these days.  It is a US franchise model of running a sport - not a British engagement of mutual consideration in which there was a trade off between protecting the culture of a community asset and making money out of it.  I have no interest in that model.  I'm sorry but I just completely reject the idea that there has been no effect on the culture of English football in the last 20 years.  A few schemes here and there do not change the fact that it has become harder and harder for people on average or below average income to live the life of a football fan.  I have simply met too many people who feel completely excluded from clubs they have invested their life into to see the effect as anything other than negative.  The thing has a long tail - what about families? One of the great traditions is the idea that 1/2/3 generations of the same family can go together.  I know several people who could just about afford to go themselves but had to give up when they had families because they couldn't afford to take their kids as well.  Therefore they couldn't give their kids the same experience of watching football that their father and their grandfathers experienced.  To me this is the essence of football in the country - it is the whole point of the game; not flashy multi-million pound signings and gleaming stadiums.  That is what I mean by community and that is what has been sacrificed in pursuit of becoming global mega-businesses.  Fine if they make that decision that's up to them - leaves me utterly and completely cold though and if that's 'progress' they can all go stick it.  I simply don't care anymore and I used to consider myself a Liverpool 'fan' whatever that meant.

I also object to the idea that it's about quality over competition.  The concentration of talent absolutely appals me.  Who on earth benefits from quality players who would be stars at other clubs sitting on the bench for season after season at big clus? Renders the whole thing exercise and totally pointless to me.  It becomes about Sports entertainment, not competition and competition is all that sport is about when it comes down to it.  I mean really if we want to see the best players in the world play agianst each other then why not just do that? 22 players get together every 3 weeks

Finally, I dislike the decline of the idea of football as an 'event'.  The only aspect of top level football that really grabbed me in the last decade was Middlesborough's run to the UEFA Cup final.  It had that unlikely quality, it had an air of once in a lifetime desperation and it was very, very exciting.  It wasn't conventionally 'good football' but it was thrilling, pulsating stuff that stirred the blood.  The reason is because it felt like an event.  Even in my life time I'm old enough to remember when the FA Cup meant something and when you followed sides on European runs no matter who they were and it's because it was a relative rarity.  Football was an event sport; these days it's dreary treadmill.  We can predict who will do what in August.  Oh look it's Chelsea v Barcelona again etc - who cares, there's not much on the line.  Both teams will be playing Champions League football next season so if they lose they'll have another crack at it and the players involved could well be playing for any one of about 8-10 teams who make the Champions League every year.  There's nothing original about it, nothing stand out about it.  It is just a dreary treamill of predictability.  Even when there is some kind of surprise it's on the line of Dortmund beating Barcelona - sorry, it's not that interesting.  The big clubs are way too comfortable - there is just not enough on the line.  Sport works best when there's an element of desperation not when everyone's in a giant comfort zone.

Vinnie Jones? Yes, I generally enjoyed watching him - he's bought into his own stereotype actually he wasn't just an enforcer type he could play a bit too.  Kevin Davies, yes I like him too.  I like old fashioned back to goal strikers who use their physical strength - I liked Brett Angel, John Gayle those type of players and the chaos they could cause.  I don't think football improves as spectacle with increased fitness and increased technical procision.  Take the physical risk out and the technical has no more value than your average Futsal game and with about the same level of passion.  I like that ball being moved forward quickly and directly - I don't like dull, dreary pass-pass-pass possession football.  The most exciting I can remember seeing was the Cole, Yorke, Giggs, Scholes, Beckham United side that was based on a hard as nails midfield and then moving the ball quickly and directly down the flanks - I thought that was thrilling stuff and I hated Man United at the time.  I preferred the game when it was more physical, more emotional (hearing managers talk about the game now makes me want to go and watch paint dry with their 'false 9's' and 'high press' etc), more nasty (and I mean on the pitch - no defence of hooliganism here), less organised, more full of humour and generally more rock and roll.  The modern game leaves me cold both in the way it's played and in the culture around it which is increasingly humourless and hyperbolically angry (hence these guys) or 'how dare you attack my club' etc.  Danny Baker is my idea of the way football should be (both on and off the pitch) - messy, silly, anarchic, irreverant, a bit edgy, warm-hearted and we've got away from all of that everywhere including Rovers.   I went to Man City a month ago with a free ticket and nearly fell asleep it was so dead - the only time in the last 10 years I went to a top level game and had a good time was in Germany where all of that stuff still seemed to exist.  If that's seen as stuck in the past then fair enough - it is an honest opinion.  I haven't drunk the koolaid I was supposed to as I grew up with it, I have less interest in top level football not more.  Now it's more of a backround hum than a way of life. It all seems a bit rubbish, false and plastic to me and I don't think I'd have been attracted to the game now as I was then.  I only speak for me and it is clearly a miniority view but I know a surprising number of people who share at least parts of it.

Oh, I see where you got that from and that isn't what I meant - the comment further up the thread was in no way a potshot at 1960s football which I certainly don't dismiss or denigrate.  I am in absolutely no doubt that the bond between fans and club was stronger in the past, that fan culture was more interesting, that games had a better atmosphere and that all in all it meant more on a fundamental level.  I really do believe that football has become a predictable treadmill devoid of real passion and replaced with a sense of entitlement and over the top anger from supporters.  The culture of football fans now is the rant - these guys are Arsenal fans but they could be fans of anyone really and I prefer an older culture.  The point I was making is that I don't need to go right back for that - I'm old enough to have witnessed a major sea change from the early 90's to feel that (which is ultimately it - you either feel it or you don't; it's not supposed to be a rational argument).

I don't reject stories of the past at all - that's not what I'm trying to get at, nor do I challenge peoples right to celebrate it; that's all we have when it comes down to it.  By all means give me 25,000 at Eastville etc, give me sides that were made up of homegrown players through the club and games that felt like they stood out and meant something.  All of that is great.  I don't think I've ever had any issue with that - no denigration there in any way and you're damn right I'm jealous that I only saw the tail end of that; name me a Rovers fan that isn't?!  Where perhaps I do have an issue is with the idea that players and clubs today are less loyal than they used to be or less honourable than they used to be.  I think that might be where I've taken issue before - not so much criticising a rose tinted view of the football culture perhaps but maybe the views of some of the people and clubs involved.  There were very real downsides to some of those connections - namely that employment arrangements allowed clubs to treat players like crap and restricted the amount they could make out of the game while officials raked in the cash.  I've never heard a player from the 50s/60s/70s say he wouldn't have moved if the kind of difference in money now existed then, which is completely fair enough of course.  I think that's quite an important consideration though when you hear moans from older fans about the attitudes of todays players because much of that was built on keeping players wages artificially down and filling the pockets of club owners even after the maximum wage was abolished.  So it was as much about players being screwed as it was players/clubs being loyal.

The fact is a lot of the players that were idolised were (in modern terms) cheated by the game.  My Grandad's favourite player was Wilf Manion - England star in the 30s and he wound up working as teaboy at Ayresome Park and died without penny to his name (a fate that befell a disturbing number of players from the golden age) when he'd played in front of huge crowds all his career.  Tom Finney recently passed away in relative poverty in Preston - the fans raised money so that he could be put into a decent home when he became infirm.  Things undoutedly improved as time went on but I'm always struck by the number of these players with heroic local reputations who were slung out of their clubs at the first sign of injury/decline and who had to endure pretty hard times post career and in old age; for all the talk of local players and heroic reputations, some of them didn't half find themselves in dire straits and lacking friends when the music stopped. That seems to fly in the face of some of the more sort of cosy communal visions of that era of football.  Now it's not all about money - it's just one aspect.  Another might be the occasional tendency to talk up the honesty and fair play of players when everything I've ever read about players who played in the 50s and 60s suggests it was far from that (starting maybe with Hunter Davis's book from the Spurs dressing room under Bill Nicholson).  I've read stuff by plenty of ex-players suggesting that gambling and match fixing was rife throughout the era - from large scale to small scale stuff; like professionals doing deals with each other near the end of the season to make sure they hit certain targets in their contract (variations on 'I'll let you score if you let me etc') to  players explaining what they'd get up to when the referee wasn't looking (grabbing unmentionables, raking studs down the Achilles, making sure they nailed a player in places they knew they had an existing injury etc).  

But here's the point where I might be misunderstood - I like all of that (well at least on the player side)! It's real and it's human and to me the reality is way more interesting and fun than some of the myths that are attached to it - I don't want hero's with halos round their heads, I want real people with real flaws.  I don't want to believe in a golden age of football in which everyone was honest as the day is long and played the game with 100% integrity and completely for the fans anymore than I want to believe that the point of modern football is for Pep Guardiola and Arsene Wenger to eventually achieve a level of tactics and technique so perfect that there'll be no need for anyone to play ever again; the perfect game will have been played and it will end 0-0 by the way!  I want the messy, anarchic world with real people in which you can have your Geoff Bradford's and your John Charles etc - your gentleman of the game.  But you've also got another side to it all the Billy Smith's, the Nat Lofthouse's, the Norman Hunter's etc - the people who do anything behind the back of the ref to steal an advantage, the players who fought endlessly with Chairman and were moved on all the time because they wouldn't accept being treated like crap.  It's messy and it looked something like real life, something that you could relate to - that's the point.  So I guess where I might have issues with 'rose tinting' isn't in celebrating an era, that seems fair and interesting; it's when assumptions about the attitudes of players are used to criticise modern players. Having read quite a lot by and about these players I don't see a massive difference in attitudes once you take into account norms of the era; I do see a mammoth change in the incentive structures and rules.  Every era has it's good points and bad points (the 80s had an amazing fan culture of fanzines and humour but it had horrendous hooliganism for example) but this one has turned football from a game to a brand.  I'm a football romantic ultimately - I don't think there is any other way to be a fan and sanitised corporate football does nothing for me.

So are you suggesting the whole thing rests on whether Arsenal give a wadge of money to local good causes and run some community outreach schemes? urgo - that means they are a social force for good and any other criticism is invalid.  Is that the basis of the argument?

Because that's clearly not what I mean by community.  Community is not a top down process of benevolence defined by the organisation that's providing it - that's charity.  In itself that's a corporate definition of community; most banks and major companies do these kind of things and most of their communities would be stuffed if they left; that doesn't make everything they do beyond criticism.  I mean community in the sense of people's relationship with each other and with the club; that's a real sense of community.  It's not something you run or operate or invest in, it's something you either have or lose because it's not a one way street.  Man City do loads of stuff in the area I live in - they invest in homeless shelters, they offer free tickets to under privileged kids, they run drugs awareness programs in Mosside, provide books for schools; absolutely loads of stuff.  But that doesn't stop most Man City fans I know complaining that the club feels distant to them, saying they don't care as much and saying they won't be able to take their kids in the same way their father and their grandfather took them.  That's the kind of Community I'm on about - a mutual engagement.  They could solve all homelessness in Manchester and give everyone in my street £100 and it still wouldn't change the fact that they have fundamentally transformed (some might say destroyed) emotional links that have lasted for 3 or 4 generations.  That's behaving like philistine's in my book.

You seem to like the idea of football as some kind of moral device.  Robin Friday = Bad, Lionel Messi = good.  Vinnie Jones = Bad, Johan Cryuff = good, passing = good long ball = bad, Stoke = Bad, Arsenal = good etc.  I don't really get that as an approach to being a fan - I can't see how the game exists in that kind of good or evil frame.  I didn't mean Robin Friday is this great example of humanity; of course he wasn't, the guy was a dick.  The point is, why shouldn't there be dicks in football? Why only want the game to be played by a certain type of hyper-professional? Why does it need to be this morally pure enterprise where the aim is endless personal and tactical improvement? I want football to be something people can relate to - not some kind of magical world on a pedestal. I liked football when it was messy and mistakes driven and played by real people with flaws who people can relate to (Tony Adams is a great example) not media managed brands. Mistakes make for a better game and flaws make for a more interesting world, surely the perfectly played match would end 0-0? The best football I saw in the last year was the final 20 minutes of Everton v Liverpool last season where both sides lost the plot, lost their shape and just went for it like a playground all in game and I remember thinking why don't we ever see this anymore? The managers were going spare on the touchline, no one was in the right position, everyone coughing up posession but you know what the crowd was going mental and that was fun and it was purely from the heart not the head.  The most fun game I've seen this season; Scotland v Ireland at Celtic Park and I'm not really interested in either side.  Technically very average but my god it really meant something to the people on the pitch and in the stands so who cares about the quality and I remember so many details from that game (I can't remember a thing from the Manchester derby I watched, not even the exact score); I'd take a ticket to watch that game over any Premiership match this season.