by Unknown
‘Oh please,’ I’d say. ‘When are you going to install my Internet?’
‘Eet weel be berry, berry soon. I promise!’
2 months later
‘Oh please,’ I’d say. ‘When are you going to install my Internet?’
‘Eet weel be berry, berry soon. I promise!’
Eventually a man came, frowned at my Mac and spent two hours trying to get it online. Soon, however, I had the worldwide web at my fingertips. And at lightning speed too. 512kb! Blimey. It was the Ben Johnson of Internet when you’re used to dial-up. It changed my life, I’ll admit it. Well, it meant I could load web pages faster and at the end of the day, isn’t that all any of us want? It opened up a new world of websites and soon I chanced upon these odd things called ‘blogs’: personal websites, updated on a regular basis, which seemed to be about nothing in particular, and yet they were strangely compelling. Really, what did I care about a lady who kept bunny rabbits in Cambridge? Nothing. Except I found myself clicking back to her Blogspot site. Everywhere I looked, there were blogs.
At the time, I had a very small and rather shit hosting company. I basically re-sold web-space in packages to people and raked in amazing amounts of up to $5 a month from some customers. I decided that to further augment this income I should look into the design side of things. That’s where you could make the big money. And once you got the money, you got the power, and then the women. Except I only wanted the money…and maybe a bit of power. Anyway, the main problem was I wasn’t very good at it. Not bad either, but not great. I could cobble something together, but if you want artistic, fresh and funky, I’m not your guy. If I were an interior designer you’d get a lot of magnolia and a print on the wall of that guy sitting in front of the TV with the TV blowing his hair back. I tried though. To kick things off I thought I’d make a website which would be a bit funny. So was born ‘The Church of Bob’, an odd effort which revolved around the premise that Robert Pires was not only the messiah but an Internet evangelist who was trying to shill people via a donation scam. As you can imagine the appeal was somewhat limited.
I needed something else, something different; something that would last. It struck me that I needed a website I could continuously update, a blog! To do a blog continuously it had to be something that, a) I was interested in, and b) had plenty of material. I could think only of one thing but then I worried about what my family would say if they discovered my penchant for leprous, dwarf, panther porn. Then it struck me. Arsenal, a blog about Arsenal. And what else could you call a blog about Arsenal only … Arseblog.
Right, well thanks for that! It’s been a pleasure but must dash, I’ve got to see a man about a -
Wait right there. I’m not finished yet.
Awwww.
So you see, without that car crash in 1997 there probably would be no Arseblog. I don’t know who that crap driver was, but you wouldn’t be reading this without him. Life can take you in strange directions. I think Arseblog was the very first Arsenal blog. There were other Arsenal websites at the time, Rupert Ward’s, Arseweb, the granddaddy of them all and Chris Parry’s, Arsenal World. There was Boring Boring Arsenal, by the wonderfully named Richard Head. Our old friend at Arsenal News Review might claim to have invented blogging whilst smoking super-hemp in a teepee with The Moody Blues, but a blog needs interaction and comments to be worthy of the name. There was also this site called @FC, the Red Geezer, who wrote the most incredibly biting and funny match reports. It would be a lie to say his ability to look at Arsenal with passion and humour wasn’t an influence. Around the time I started Arseblog he stopped writing his site. Maybe I was in the right place at the right time to fill the gap he left behind. Whoever you are, Red Geezer, if I had a cap, my cap would be doffed to you. I have a nice hat though so I’ll doff that instead.
Some of those sites are still around and some have gone by the wayside, but many, many more have come along and I don’t think it’d be wrong of me to suggest there are more blogs about Arsenal than about any other Premier League team. In fact, I’d put a cheeky bet on there being more blogs about Arsenal than there are about any other subject in the world. Ever. Whatever your disposition, beliefs, loyalties, demands, predilections, nationality, locality or anything else you can think of, there’s something for everyone. We may not agree with some of them, or like some of them; but here’s the great thing about the Internet, nobody is forcing you to read something you don’t like. You don’t even need an off button; you just don’t go there in the first place.
Over the years, through the blog and the Arsecast, I’ve come to know many of these Arsenal bloggers. What is fantastic is the vast majority of them do what they do simply out of a love of Arsenal Football Club. For no reward, and on a daily basis they have provided wonderful, timeless, free content for other Arsenal fans to chew over. I don’t think people realise quite how much work that takes, especially when it’s done in spare time. Joining them in these pages are some writers of a more professional bent who will be well known to readers of Arseblog. Collectively, they have entertained me, moved me, informed me, made me laugh, made me feel sympathy, empathy, anger, guilt, passion, rage, delight and all the other emotions that we get from football itself. The following pages will, I hope, do the same to you, as this unique collection of writing about Arsenal Football Club looks at everything from the club’s humble origins to where it finds itself today, from great players to great managers, from tactics to fans to stadia to kits, amongst many other things. It is my absolute pleasure to present this book to you.
I hope it’s one that you can read, the same way Paddy sang, over and over and over again.
***
Andrew Mangan writes Arseblog.com, the award-winning Arsenal blog founded in 2002. Quite happily married to Mrs Blogs, he is firmly convinced Robert Pires is the dreamiest man on earth.
2 – ONE GEORGIE GRAHAM - Amy Lawrence
It was just after lunch on the 21st of February 1994 when the news broke. At the time the Arsenal Stadium was being set up for an evening match. As the stock at the Gunners Shop was being filled, the match programmes delivered, the turnstiles unlocked, the kit laid out in the dressing room, the flowers in the colours of the visitors displayed in the marble halls, a whacking great red and white bombshell dropped onto Highbury. George Graham’s time at Arsenal was up. Unceremoniously, brutally, up.
With a little bit of distance and perspective it shouldn’t really have been such a seismic shock. Results wise, the team was in free-fall and stood a mere four points above the relegation zone (the last 12 games produced dismal statistics: W1 D5 L6). Performance wise, the players appeared to be trudging through treacle. Spirit wise, Arsenal had been trapped in a limbo of uncertainty for months as the bung scandal, in which Graham stood accused of dipping his hands in the till by accepting irregular payments from a Norwegian agent by the name of Rune Hauge, was under investigation. So when George was finally ushered towards the exit, we should not have felt so stunned. So bewildered. Yet as the crowds descended upon Highbury for a league game against Nottingham Forest, and opened up their match programmes to see George’s face and read George’s words of wisdom (it was obviously too late to change anything) the overwhelming feeling was one of loss.
For all of George’s imperfections – and apart from the obvious brown envelope episode he had undeniably allowed a decline to take hold – he had been in many ways the perfect Arsenal manager. As an ex-player, and part of the 1971 double winning team, his emotional ties to the club were strongly bound. As an Arsenal historian (his study at home was dedicated to the club’s past), he was proud to uphold the traditions set by Herbert Chapman, Bertie Mee et al. As a manager, he was motivated, shrewd and strategic enough to build a team capable of producing extraordinary winning moments. With his suave repartee and smart cannoned blazer, he represented Arsenal magnificently. On that day when he was dismissed, with the bookies taking bets on his replacement naming the likes of Steve Coppell, David Pleat and Walter Smith as
frontrunners, alongside some club stalwarts without the big time coaching experience, the predominant feeling amongst the fans was this: Never again could any manager at Highbury possibly be so “Arsenal”.
Across London, in the office of a football magazine, a cub reporter, enjoying a debut season in the job of watching football for a living, assessed the news. The editor took one look at the cub reporter, who was clearly struggling to concentrate on anything.
“Go home, Amy,” the editor said.
Okay, I’ll admit, it wasn’t my most professional moment, but to fans of a certain age, who grew up with George’s team, who experienced the profound effects of White Hart Lane 87, Anfield 89, Highbury 91, Wembley 93 and Copenhagen 94 whilst they were still learning about life, the universe and everything, the sacking of the mastermind was an enormous deal. Everyone around the place was shaken. Record goalscorer Ian Wright confessed to being “deeply disappointed”. Goalkeeping coach Bob Wilson called it “terribly sad”. And frustrating too, adding, “He’s going to be labelled for the rest of his career when everyone else in football knows that label could be alongside 20 or 30 other people.” That George was the fall guy when the culture of “unsolicited gifts”, as he called it, was prevalent, must have cut him even deeper.
Ironically, the act of cutting clever transfer deals – one of his undeniable strengths in creating successful teams – ultimately proved his downfall. John Jensen and Pal Lydersen, two players delivered to Arsenal by Hauge, did not turn out to be the Scot’s most ingenious pieces of business. The fact George paid back the £425,000 Hauge had given him was not, in the end, enough of a defence. It was over. Arsenal beat Forest 1-0 that night. Chris Kiwomya scored the only goal. The crowd went home to take it all in and wonder where on earth Arsenal would go from here.
Such are the cycles in the life of a football club. One man’s demise is another’s opportunity, and, after a couple of caretakers and a season of Bruce Rioch, a certain Arsene Wenger walked into the Marble Halls, full of his own ideas and expectations. That was the very journey taken by George in 1986. Arsenal had been drifting. After Don Howe’s spell in charge came to a sorry end, Steve Burtenshaw stepped in to look after the team for a couple of months. The Arsenal board were on the hunt for a new leader. George, a young coach with a reputation for having a tough edge, was on a shortlist of four. As an Arsenal man he was the first to be interviewed. The board never bothered to meet the other three candidates.
The George Graham who strode back into Highbury was a very different animal to the Stroller, as he was nicknamed in his playing days. Gorgeous George, the player, had a luxury style on the pitch and an eye for the good life off it. Mister Graham the manager was ready to crack down on exactly the kind of player he had been. He liked stars, but only ‘performing’ stars. He expected dedication, desire, and discipline. On arriving at London Colney he noted that a couple of the more flamboyant players, Charlie Nicholas and Graham Rix, had pierced ears. “If you want to wear an earring it’s compulsory to wear a dress,” he quipped. Point made.
George printed out one of his favourite quotes, from the legendary American Football coach Vince Lombardi, about the three essential components to winning: technique, discipline, and team spirit. He quickly noticed that some of the senior pros in the team were not so strong on the discipline side. Drinking clubs and gambling groups came with the territory in 1980’s football in England. If the slightest reluctance to knuckle down and break a few bad habits was evident, George had no qualms about letting a player go, regardless of status. Renowned internationals like Nicholas, Rix and Kenny Sansom moved on. George began to build his team around a group of hungry young players (Adams, Rocastle, Thomas, Merson) and bargain buys (Dixon, Bould, Winterburn, Smith) with everything to prove.
A new resilience was born; a never-say-die mentality was fostered. It all began with the legendary back four, formed by relentless drilling on the training field. George used to deliberately outnumber his defence, playing 4 v 6 to push them and test them until they could recite the mantra “clean sheets” in their sleep. As George once joked, “Even the bulbs in my garden were in formation.”
The manager’s insatiable appetite for winning rubbed off, and team spirit soared. In the words of the late, great, David Rocastle, they “fought for each other like blood brothers.”
It was never going to happen, but what marvels could have been achieved in recent seasons had George been summoned by Arsene to sort out that defence and inject a large dose of resilience.
Arsenal’s successes under George were so emotionally charged and dramatically delivered we sometimes wondered who was writing these scripts. The Littlewoods Cup in 1987 came after a humdinger of a semi-final, won at the death, in the lair of the old enemy at Tottenham. The first league championship in 18 years was the most improbable finish to a title race ever seen, with the underdogs so dismissed it seemed like a waste of time even boarding the coach to Anfield in 89, only for deliverance to come in stoppage time of the entire season. Two years later Arsenal were the nearly-invincibles, losing only one game en route to the finishing line, despite the blows of a two point deduction for a brawl at Old Trafford and losing their captain for two months when Tony Adams was imprisoned for drink driving. Then came the Cup collection, with a domestic double clinched in the final seconds of extra time in the 1993 FA Cup final, and the Cup Winners Cup won against all odds with a classic one nil to the Arsenal in 1994.
Six trophies in eight years; three of them won with late goals; four of them coming from losing or unfancied positions. All of them requiring the blend of technique, discipline and team-spirit. A banner was unfurled from the Clock End boxes as Arsenal were champions in 1991: “George Knows”.
His reign was not without criticism, however. The old ‘boring Arsenal’ tag was hooked on to his team. That was a particularly harsh assessment of many of the classy ball players he used – Limpar, Rocastle and Wright were anything but boring – but nobody could deny things were going stale towards the end. As Tony Adams put it, “Our league football was dreadful, I think we were in a bit of schtuck.”
George himself always thought his team deserved more respect. “Yes, winning is boring, isn’t it?” he pouted.
History has not been kind to George. The fact he was eventually followed by the doubles and delicious football devised by Wenger and televised with all the razzmatazz of Sky and the Premiership, together with the notion that he left in disgrace because of the bung scandal, means his achievements are sometimes glossed over. More’s the pity. They deserve to be cherished to the full.
When Sir Alex Ferguson was being lauded for Manchester United’s record 19th title, the quote about “knocking Liverpool off their perch” was referenced liberally. But it wasn’t Ferguson who initially defeated the dynasty at Anfield. It was George who delivered the first body blows. It was George who made the serial trophy collectors, the team that had dominated the 70’s and 80’s, wobble and lose their footing at the top of the English game. At the time of his departure George had lost his way. Whether he could have rebuilt his team time and again, as Ferguson did, is one for pure hypothesis. But he is entitled to wonder what might have been.
The comparison with Ferguson also works in the sense that George was the last Arsenal manager able to oversee absolutely every detail of the club and its workforce. No matter how small your contribution to the running of Arsenal, George wanted to know you, and keep you motivated for the cause.
As a teenager, I used to have a holiday job at Highbury working in the Gunners Shop. It was a homely little place plonked onto the side of the Clock End – you could probably fit about 30 of them into the footprint of the Armoury – and was famously run for years by ex-keeper, Jack Kelsey. It was common for fans to work part-time at Highbury then. You could get a season ticket in exchange for a few days painting the crash barriers on the North Bank or touching up the exit gates.
One summer’s day George caused quite a flutter in the Gunners Shop by s
wanning in quite unannounced, having a chat about the items on display and how much they cost, and asking each of us shop-girls about ourselves. As if we couldn’t get any giddier, an ice cream van pulled up outside on Avenell Road and George gave us a wink. “Come on girls, I’ll buy you all an ice cream.”
As we waited for our 99’s, somebody from the flats above took aim at George with an egg. They missed. Egg landed all over a passing lady with her shopping. “Must have been a Tottenham fan,” muttered George, before he went to empathise with the now eggy lady and find out if she needed some help.
On so many levels a similar scene is impossible to imagine today. Arsene Wenger could not possibly keep up with the cast of thousands that work in and around the club now. It would be most unusual to find him wandering around the different departments, trying to find out how people are doing and what they are up to in the good name of Arsenal. Significantly, George did it not only because he could, but because he wanted to.
The history of Arsenal Football Club should never dare to understate his era. There really was only one Georgie Graham.
***
Amy Lawrence is a football writer for the Guardian and Observer and a daily reader of Arseblog for obvious reasons.