The Hampshire Gooner
I find it funny how some of the Arsenal support these days still find it within themselves to talk up the ‘Arsenal Way’ of doing things and how anyone who dares to suggest that going to games these days is a bit of a rip-off gets told in no uncertain terms to ‘f*** off down the Lane’.
Are we really that big a bunch of brain dead morons? Some of us really do need to wake up and smell the coffee. Ladies and gentlemen, football has moved on and it will never ever change back to what it once was - ever again. Get over it and accept that fact. Nowadays it is not simply the fact that money talks; it is now the only language that anyone within the game understands.
The love for the game of the regular everyday fan dies and it is that simple. When I was first introduced to the game of football, I was five years old. My dad got annoyed with me mucking about in the garden one evening and whisked me off to watch my local non-league side play on a cold Tuesday evening. The game was Enfield FC v Fisher Athletic and the end result was 0-0. It cost my dad £3 and I got in for free by climbing under the turnstile when the guard was not looking. I was hooked though, there and then, just by the sight of the floodlights piercing through the trees of the local playing field by the ground. Fast forward to the current day and that ground has been bulldozed years ago by then club chairman who decided he wanted to sell the place and build a block of flats on it instead for a nice bit of profit.
My first Arsenal game came a few weeks later, when we played Newcastle at home in a league game. The game ended 1-1 and Paul Gasgoigne missed a penalty for the Geordies that day. I remember my dad telling me that the guy who had missed the penalty was reported to be worth £1m. How could a guy be worth £1m and not be able to score a penalty, I remember thinking. The cost for me to get in that day was £3 and I sat on the wall down the front of the old East Stand at Highbury. I must have been no more than 3ft tall but I still managed to get a great view of the game for £3. No buying tickets months in advance on the credit card in those days. Fast forward to the modern day, and that ground has also been bulldozed years ago by the club who wanted to sell the place and build a block of flats on it instead for a nice bit of profit.
The thing is, it is not just at the top end of the game that people care too much about the profits and not enough about the on-field results and the fans in the stands. It reeks of this at every level of the game from top to bottom.
As Arsenal fans these days, we pay the highest ticket prices in world football. We get treated like mugs from the top down and even get called idiots from our very own club chairman. We question the manager and we get patted on the head and told to go away and be good children as we ‘haven’t worked half a day in football’.
A time comes when you have to say ‘enough is enough’. And if someone doesn’t feel the need to fork out £50 a game plus £35 for travel and, say, another £20 on food, drink etc, then does that make them any less of a fan than anybody else? I think not. There is a global recession on that is seemingly never ending, so at the end of the day there are more important things to be worrying about right now than whether or not RvP will be picking up yet another injury away on international duty.
Too many people at our club earn a fortune for very little work, and that includes the manager, the coaching staff and the players. It has got to the point when you don’t even have to be that good to ask for a more lucrative move elsewhere. Flamini, Hleb, Adebayor and Nasri - what do they all have in common other than the fact that they all left the club for more money elsewhere? The answer is they all won f**k-all whilst they were at Arsenal. Did they propel us to such great heights that they deserved a better contract? Did they, f*ck. They are all average players who came from abroad, had no connection whatsoever with Arsenal FC other than with their bank accounts, and then left as soon as they realised they could add a couple more zeros to those account balances with a move away from the club.
As an Arsenal fan, I have to say I couldn’t give a monkey’s if RvP does not feel the need to sign a new contract. He has been at our club for years, never completed a full season in his life and has a mediocre goals ratio per season, maybe 15 per season, top whack. His salary must already be in the £90k a week bracket and if he is not satisfied with that, then bye-bye Robin. In my eyes he doesn’t deserve what he is getting now, let alone anything more. The guy is only still at our club as we accept his injury failings, whereas any genuine top team would have got him out the front door years ago, as he never manages to complete more than half a season without taking months off due to a ‘minor knock’.
Our current keeper plays a handful of decent games and then talks himself up as possibly being Barcelona-bound at some stage. I have got news for you: the guy is a young, unproven keeper who has a tendency to make big howlers in important games. Simply because the couple of keepers who have played before him between the sticks since Jens left were so awful, he looks like a superstar in comparison. In reality, he is an average keeper at the top level of the game at best. We need to get real as fans, and realise the reality of the current situation at our club.
There is currently just one player out of the entire first team squad who I would care about if he decided to leave, and that is Jack Wilshere. The reason for this is simple: he is young, he has been brought up at the club, and is English with a try-as-hard-as-I-can type attitude. He might not have the skills of a Messi, or even a Cesc, but I would take him over the latter every day of the week as things stand. I want to see more of this spirit at our club in the years to come, and the only way this will happen is if the current manager and back-up staff leave as soon as possible. Take their ideas and tippy-tappy football with them and go run a Starbucks instead with their wonderful self-sustaining models of financial mediocrity. They would swap the cream in your coffee for milk, import it from some second-rate French farmer and charge you twice the price for drinking it.
In my mind, when AFC sold Highbury and moved down the road, they sold most of the tradition of the club that had been built up for many a year. We were sold a lie that made us fans believe that it would be worthwhile in the long run for the greater good of the club we all support. This has not happened.
Other clubs’ supporters have grown frustrated with the way the modern game has gone, and set up their own clubs as a response and have been successful in what they have achieved in doing so. Look at the recent teams started up in Wimbledon and Manchester for proof that it can be done and done well.
Why can’t we do the same? Woolwich Arsenal FC anyone?
