John Evans
It seems from my last article on this website that some people simply do not like it when others dare to speak the truth. Dare to suggest that the club are showing a lack of ambition and you get labelled as a plastic fan for doing so. Dare to suggest that the current admission prices being charged at our club are at best a rip off and you get told to ‘p**s off down the Lane and don’t come back’. Well let me tell these people who the real plastic fans are in my opinion. Anybody that started to support our club since 2004 and isn’t under the age of 15 is a plastic fan. I have personally supported The Arsenal since 1987 when as a six year old I first attended a game at Highbury with my father. We watched a young Gazza miss a penalty for Newcastle that day in a pretty dire 1-1 draw. I remember gasping in amazement when my father told me the guy that had just missed a penalty was worth a reported £1m. Since that day I have had many ups and downs as an avid Arsenal fan. Many of the ups have been under the current management regime but to be fair many of them came before I had even heard of the name Arsene Wenger.
For the true plastic fans amongst us I would like to take this opportunity to point out the fact that Arsenal as a club did not suddenly appear in 1996 when AW took over at the helm. We did exist pre-Wenger and we will exist after he has departed too. We won the league title in 1989 and 1991 and we did a domestic cup double in 1993 followed by a ground out win in the Cup Winners Cup the season after. We did reach another European final in 1995, over a season before AW arrived and we did sign possibly the greatest ever player to pull on an Arsenal shirt the season before Wenger turned up so we couldn’t have been doing too badly at that time to attract such a high calibre signing as that of Dennis Bergkamp. In 1995 we didn’t have the best of domestic campaigns under the leadership of Bruce Rioch, he certainly was no George Graham but we did still manage to grasp a European spot on the last day of the season and finished the campaign in 5th spot, only one place below the holy grail of today’s top four.
Let us not pretend that the whole club has been built by one man as it would be a lie to do so. Arsene has done great things for the club we all support and who can forget 1998, 2002 or the invincible campaign of 2004, but it is also a fact that for the past seven years since that wonderful season we have at best been treading water and in my eyes at worst procrastinating. As a club we have now had every opportunity to move on a level and have failed to do so time and time again. For all of you out there that still see AW as never being able to do anything wrong ask yourself this one question and be honest when giving your answer. Who else could have managed Arsenal over the past six seasons with the same results on the field of play and managed to keep their job up until the current day? For me the answer is no other man would still be in the manager’s hot seat with the same level of on field results and therefore that tells me that AW is living off past glories, which for me is wrong.
Does the fact that UEFA have recently decided to make fourth place one that is worthy of a Champions League spot for the next season make finishing fourth each season all that much better than what Bruce Rioch managed in his only season as manager? He did finish 5th, not really that much of a difference if UEFA hadn’t expanded the Champions League to make the very name of the competition a lie in itself.
No-one likes to see a successful man go out in a whimper, it makes for sad viewing. I would liken the current AW situation in that way to that of seeing Mike Tyson sprawling around on the canvas of the ring all those years ago trying in vein to put his gum shield back into his mouth when he had just been knocked out by some unknown who would never be heard of again. We do not want to see our once great leader ruthlessly exposed as a has been but when you face facts in the cold light of day that is the way things are looking to me right now and at what point do you have to make a decision for the better of the club?
For my money AW has far too much power within the club he works for. Please do take note of that fact, he is an employee! He does not own the club outright the last time I checked. He seems to have so much influence in the day to day running of the club that I kind of have a vision of him turning up at the canteen at London Colney, running behind the counter to make the bacon rolls for the players and then running off to the till to give the players their change back from their lunch purchases. Why does he need to get involved with the players’ transfer wrangling? Why is it AW that decides what a player is worth in the transfer market? Why does he set players’ contracts and wages? It should not be his job to do so. He should identify along with his scouting network the players that he wants to sign and the rest should be dealt with by someone else. The whole coaching set up at the club needs an overhaul if you ask me as well. Does it look like we could benefit from some real defensive coaching or what? And if we currently have a goalkeeping coach he should be sacked with immediate affect as what the f**k has he been doing to justify his salary since Jens left first time around? By the way if you were on the books of the club as a rookie keeper how bemused would you be right now sitting behind Manuel and then seeing a 41 year old retired ex-Arsenal man get snapped up until the end of the season rather than face the prospect of giving you a run out at some point between now and the end of the season? What a slap in the face that would be.
The simple fact of the matter is that Arsene Wenger is human after all. He has faults and let’s face it he has many. All the people still believing that the guy is perfect have seriously been so badly brainwashed that they need to get checked out at their local GP for any signs of realism remaining in their brain. The year isn’t 2004 and it hasn’t been for seven years people. Wake up and smell the coffee or should that be wake up and smell the vanilla flavoured mocha cappuccino which I am guessing is what most of the ‘everything is wonderful’ brigade currently drink. A cool PC brigade of fans has sprung up on us over the past ten seasons or so, these fans for me are the true plastic brigade that gets mentioned on here a lot these days. They don’t really care about the club that they pretend to support. They might wear an Arsenal scarf into the office on match days but that isn’t because they care about the club’s name that is emblazoned on the scarf, it is simply because it is cool to do so. They pay £1200 out every season not because they care, but because it is cool to do so. Most of them can’t be bothered to leave the office early enough to make kick off on match days but it doesn’t matter to them if they miss the first 20 minutes of the game as they won’t be in their seats for the final 5 minutes of the first half or the first 5 minutes of the second half or the final 7 minutes of the second half anyway. They will spend £30 a game on refreshments because of this behaviour at home games and the club love them for it. They will not moan at games because it is not the done thing to do so. They will also not sing at games either as it wouldn’t be cool to do so either.
In my mind it is these same fans in general that come on to this website during their five minute lunch breaks and read articles like mine, take offence at them and then feel the need to scribble a two line response to it and say ‘you plastic fan, f**k off to spurs as we are better off without you’, blah blah blah. Well let me tell you one thing, I will support this club long after you lot have left and gone on to something else that is then deemed to be the next in thing. It is the true supporters’ opinions that count the most to me and in my eyes a true Arsenal supporter is one that is not afraid to voice his or her own opinions and one that has been supporting the club longer than AW has been in charge for. One that recognises that winning trophies is not the beginning and end of the story but one that recognises the fact that as a club we are respected for what our mentality has stood for down the years. We have had a strong mental side to our game which has been completely eroded in recent seasons. We in many ways have become a laughing stock, the example of how not to do things. More of a Jimmy White than a Steve Davis or Stephen Hendry, we choke every time a winning opportunity presents itself and we go down a notch every time we need to go up one. That is not Arsenal to me. That is not the Arsenal that I got to know and love as a child growing up in the mid eighties. It is a long lost distant relative of the one I got to know as a youngster and it is one that I am pretty happy not to see again as I cannot respect a team that come March/April will choke at the very time they need to stay focused and get over the line. That someone under those circumstances chooses not to attend does not mean that the person in question cares less than someone else that merely attends as a matter of routine, to me the truth is quite the opposite. I know from my own experiences at the ground on matchdays that I care more about the club than 95% of the other people in attendance, some of whom seem to not even care about watching the game in front of them.
Someone responded to my last article and mentioned the fact that players like Henry were champions before they came to the club and that it was not just an English mentality that made us successful. I agree with that point to some degree. It is not about whether or not a player happens to be English or French or Ivorian, it is about the mentality that the player in question brings to the club. If a player is brought up surrounded by winners then there would be every chance that he will also have a winning mentality. But also if a player grows up with players that are not winners and have never won anything in their whole careers then what message does this pass on to that youngster as they grow up? Do we grow winners through the ranks as a club anymore? Certain players have grown up at our club in recent seasons and have not come through with the same mentality that others have done in past years. Song, Clichy, Denilson, Eboue, Bendtner and Diaby - where are the winners amongst these players? Where is the real drive to be successful at all cost with any of them? It isn’t a question of just raw ability, it is for me one that goes deeper than that. Compare this mental strength to that possessed by Adams, Keown, Parlour etc and the comparison is embarrassing. Who cared more? Who went home p**sed off up to the eyeballs after a defeat? Who even gave what the fans were thinking or feeling like a second thought? That for me is the difference between when AW came to our club and what we have now 15 years later and that change in mental strength during that time is the reason why we are trophyless for six seasons and that won’t be changing anytime soon in my opinion.
If AW took a step back, gave up the reigns to some degree, letting go if you like, then I feel we would benefit from it. We need fresh blood with fresh ideas not just on the field of play but in the boardroom of the club as well. We need some new faces on the coaching staff, some organisation at the back will go along way to curing our current annual woes at this stage of the season and someone with some balls on the field of play to get the boys going again when things start to go wrong wouldn’t do any harm either. Cesc is a very good player, not a great one in my opinion but a very good one, but he is certainly no team captain. Neither was Henry or Gallas in my opinion so in reality for me since Patrick left in 2005 we have not had one true captain. Could it be more than a coincidence that we haven’t won anything in this period of time without a recognised leader on the field of play? This is an error of management that AW seems oblivious to and for me this is about his continental mentality where you do not need a leader. I have news for you AW you ply your trade in the Premier League where no champions to my memory have ever popped up without a proven leader amongst their ranks. Get over yourself and adapt to your current surroundings or let someone else do the job better than you and move aside.
I won’t be renewing any memberships for next season but that fact does not mean that all of a sudden I care less than the thousands of people that will renew their various ticketing options for next season. To the contrary I dare to suggest that I in fact care rather more than most of those people taking up the padded seats at the Grove.
