Mark Burman
(Ed’s note – Pieces have been piling up here at Gooner Towers, during a busy period when I haven’t been able to get three exclusives posted every day. So all those that have submitted articles, please bear with me. Will make every effort to clear the backlog by the weekend. This one was submitted last Wednesday.)
You hear that? That ominous thudding, like the goblin drums in the mines of Moria, in your head. The sound of something terrible approaching. I have tried to shut it out for the past 4 months or so but I keep hearing it. You do too, don’t you?
I jacked in my season ticket, the one I waited 5 years for, this season for a variety of reasons that go with that never ending noise. I started hearing it at Wembley, maybe I’d heard it in the pub watching a 4 goal lead dissolve at St James’ like so much pixie dust but I’d left at 4-3. (Thanks Alan for keeping my half time text saying the points were in the bag - you’re a pal)
Actually Al did once say ‘Savour the double’, the way one savours a beautiful love affair, a great meal. Savour it because it might be a while until the next but not this long - not with such a great team strutting their stuff.
And now watching the banner run across the bottom of Sky Sports like some great digital raspberry, the one that says Adebayor to the Spuds, Nasri to the oilers, Song banned for being a dick and absolutely no one to us - I can console myself with the pleasure of watching little Fabs turn out for the Catalan gods tonight. It’s just going to get better isn’t it?
Anyway giving up the season (technically I cheated and transferred it to my ten year old who will hopefully still love me at the end of season debacle) was a strange experience, a kind of middle aged male bonding with other depressed sods who have done the same. The bloke who sells the fruit at the station, the bloke watching his kids play in the park - all of us thinking ‘Sod it, had enough, don’t need it”
Once upon a time there would have been Highbury to console us. You could have sat there knowing the team is sh*t and realizing that generations had sat there before thinking precisely the same thing or revelling in the glory of the opposite or just staring at the East Stand or the houses down Conewood St or the big clock. All of us bound by a shared past; the ghosts of greatness and dimness. The fags, stale beer, bad burgers, farts and floodlights. Fairs Cup, league wins, cup scrapes – the lot.
That’s not nostalgia that is the irreplaceable d.n.a. of a club and its fans and all you can do now is walk your dog and let it deposit a turd on where the pitch was. Further down the road, in our new home many of those trappings of the past are there. Everyone has tried really hard to gussy up an elegant, but soulless arena with reminders but they may as well be 50 foot high neon signs screaming ‘Won nothing’, ‘screwed up everything’ - thank you for your support. All bound by the continual nothingness.
We moved to that place to compete with the biggest of the big boys. To enter the era of elite football and make the Mancs gnash their terrible teeth and the Chavs shake their terrible claws and the Spuds squeeze their terrible spots but now we’re just like that lot-serial screw ups. A team that resembles a ten year old in his big brother’s best leather jacket ten times too big. Boo, watch them run. Watch that emaciated first 11 play Liverpool.
That’s if the tourists aren’t blocking the view to snap away at their unique match day outing. To experience the essence of contemporary Arsenal at the Em let me take you to our end of season whimper against Villa. At 2-0 down I went walkies around the lower concourse and there were quite a few of us there. Middle aged men kicking cups, stomping on chips, screaming at the screens and moaning at the stewards. And every steward shook their heads, looked glum and agreed about- well everything. The dismal football, the rip off prices, the blind refusal to buy and so it went and out I went and I haven’t been back.
Every football club has a story it tells itself throughout its history and throughout a season. Chelski have a spiffy new manager, Man Citeh can spend money like the last coke addict dropped into a Colombian coke factory, Man Ure have a winning manager and some go faster signings, Liverpool have King Kenny and have spent – maybe not wisely but boy have they spent. Us, well we have the eternal story - a 125 years an all that but no new story for this season.
Our story is getting dog eared and tattered and most of all boring & maddening - like that scene from The Thing where everyone is tied together and the wire gets jabbed into the blood and out it leaps and everyone screams but they are tied together and they are DOOMED!
That’s us that is - trapped in a painful, relentless horror show encapsulated in the certainty that WE WILL WIN F*** ALL. This time in neon letters 100 foot high. Adebayor may as well get on his broom stick and write it on in the sky as we huff and puff against Liverpool.
Our story cannot change because Wenger will not change. And the characters resemble those beautiful, gilded creations of F.Scott Fitzgerald - golden talent and ability but fatally flawed and always failing.
It’s not that any of us, apart from Myles Palmer, hate Wenger. We love him. Love him for all he’s done and for his all round Wengerness. But right now and for the past 3 seasons he has been practicing sado-management upon us. Maybe the real Wenger is trapped in a 4th dimensional zone somewhere beneath Highbury.
Maybe Wenger hates us? Maybe he is teaching us a Zen like contemplation of patience and frugality learnt in Japan. Maybe he locks himself in a room and rails against the injustice that is the ‘loadsamoney of Citeh and Chavski? Kicking water bottles all the time.
Just as he thought he’d outlasted the obscene billions of cash injected Russian bling football so the oil gets turned on at Eastlands. Maybe he’s terminally depressed because he knows last season was the worst disaster of his Arsenal career?
A summary of all that had been going wrong wrapped in the confirmation of waning powers. A complete inability to rouse the sorry little sad sacks from their Carling Cup balls up and win a handful of games that would bring us a title. That was a miserable disgrace and we’re still playing the same emaciated football post Brum C.C.. There won’t be a chance as good as that again for years and he failed, they all failed- big time. No excuse was good enough and the only genuine salve offered to us was the chance to finally buy right and buy big as that wretched season slunk to a close and I went walkabout in the Emirates as the team went walkabout on the pitch.
They/we booed at the end of last season, they/we booed in pre-season, they/we mouthed off away to the Toon - that’s the hard core support that is - the most loyal, the most fervent and there are going to be more boos and groans and demands to spend long after the transfer window slams shut with a thud that will echo through our heads.
He’s not going to buy is he? He is not going to buy priceless experience, title winning quality or that expensive trophy signing that says we’re Arsenal and we’re big boys now get back out there and win something. It has become a sin to spend big, a sin to pursue all 4 trophies because that overstretches the squad and a sin to covet top talent (as price is no indicator of quality according to Arsene - agreed when it’s Jordan Henderson but usually price is precisely the indicator of top quality).
