I was one of many who didn’t get a ticket for Paris on May 17. Unlike some, I possibly didn’t really deserve one: I’m no longer a season ticket holder and my away attendance record is poor. In fact the last away game I saw was Galatasaray in Copenhagen in 2000.

However, I did have some generous friends who let me apply on one of their three season tickets. We all applied: one joint application, plus another single for me. We got emails saying, sorry, not this time. Then two more emails: we had one ticket allocated for the joint application, and one for my single. Naturally my sense of decency and fair play meant that I offered ‘my’ allocation to my friends who owned the season ticket. (Their justifiable outrage had I tried anything else might also have been a factor!) But then yet another email from Arsenal: we had been allocated a third ticket! Before you could say “Good old Arsenal” I had forked out £95 for a ferry and then tried to buy the ticket via the Ticketmaster site.

This is where the waters become murky. At this point remember, I have a valid registration and an email from Arsenal advising that I could make the purchase. The Ticketmaster site thought differently. I won’t bore you with the full detail, but over the next several days we wasted many hours and a fair bit of money trying (and occasionally succeeding) to talk to Arsenal and Ticketmaster, first to ensure that a third ticket had been allocated, could be paid for and would be delivered, then increasingly desperately to find out where the hell it was.

The key fact here is that each time more emails were sent out by Arsenal, telling another lucky batch of people that they had been selected to buy a ticket, they also had to give Ticketmaster a database update with these people’s details. (I managed to glean this information from a Ticketmaster employee I spoke to on May 12.) In my case it appears they didn’t get the update in time, so my registration wasn’t recognised, so no ticket.

The match came and went. We lost, so I felt less bad about missing it. But I’d spent £95 plus phone calls, so I wrote to Arsenal on June 16 explaining in laborious detail what had happened, who had said what to whom and when. The World Cup finished, the summer stretched on, but no reply arrived. I wrote again on August 18, to Keith Edelman rather than the box office. This time Keith wrote back. He apologised profusely – four times in five paragraphs! He even enclosed some Arsenal vouchers as a ‘goodwill gesture’. What he didn’t do was investigate the real nature of the problem, give me any information about how details were passed between Arsenal and Ticketmaster, or any assurance that the same thing couldn’t happen again.

I’m still out of pocket, I still missed the game and really I’d still like an explanation. Will I get one? No. Do I have any confidence in the Arsenal box office? No. Will this happen again? Probably. Oh, and if someone called Will Franklin at Ticketmaster says he’ll call you back, don’t believe him.