Graham Simons
1986, remember it well? Orson Welles was making one of his final film appearance in ‘Transformers the Movie’, a 20 year old Mike Tyson was devastating the heavyweight boxing division and a certain Scot had taken the hot seat at our beloved club in Arsenal's centenary year.
George Graham, the 1970s hero, had returned to the club where he had made his name. Within a season he would guide Arsenal to their first silverware since 1979 and within three seasons he had made champions out of chumps, courtesy of that balmy summer Anfield night in 1989. While Graham would win a further title two years later, it would be wrong to regard him as a miracle worker.
It's easy to forget that George Graham inherited arguably the greatest crop of youngsters in Arsenal’s history. Sure, he signed some of the best defenders we have ever had and he did mould them into an immovable object but could he have succeeded without the fledging forwards from Arsenal’s youth teams?
Aside from great defenders like Martin Keown and Tony Adams, the spendthrift Scot also had Paul Merson, Kevin Campbell, David Rocastle, Paul Davis, Michael Thomas, not to mention a young Andy Cole, who couldn't get in the team, to call upon.
Graham did have early success but once he had firmly imprinted his style of football upon the club, we became a club that rather than attack from the first whistle in order to take three points, would rather defend deep, too scared to lose two points.
This was of course due to the fact Graham was an extremist in his view of football. While he was lucky enough to have inherited some wonderful attacking threats and thereby win titles, would Graham have had the ambition to recruit the likes of the likes of Rocky, Campbell or Merse if it meant splashing the cash?
These days we have Arsene Wenger - for better or worse another extremist but quite the opposite of Graham. A man who inherited the greatest defence in our history, added a sprinkling of attacking talent and moulded a team to reflect his own attacking philosophy. Since the last of Graham’s players left the club however, Wenger’s cupboard is a bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s.
So here we are some 25 years later, a guy called Tyson is fighting in the heavyweight division but this time he's a Brit, ‘Transformers’ is once again on our cinema screens and we have an Arsenal team with an array of young attacking talent but seemingly incapable of defending a lead. Sound familiar?
