Lance Beauregarde
Last season I wrote an article about how it is every football fan’s right to slag off their club, and that anyone who thinks otherwise should move to North Korea. In the article I briefly addressed the issue of the conspiracy theory that abounds about a supposed anti-Arsenal bias in the media, and claimed that although there are a few oddballs out there in media world who love to slag off the club at every opportunity, people who talk about a widespread agenda against the club are just embarrassing themselves in the same way Spurs fans embarrass themselves when they talk about their club being ‘on the brink of something big.’
I still maintain that a few dissenting voices to do not equate to an endemic conspiracy, but I recently had a few weeks off work and discovered the wonder that is Talksport’s Adrian Durham. Mr Durham was mentioned in some of the responses to my article and has been mentioned again recently on this website because of his ‘Daily Arsenal’ segment, in which he slags off the club in a decidedly smug manner.
Now, I could spend the next few paragraphs comparing Mr Durham to some kind of hybrid slug/weasel type creature that is so hideous that anyone who so much as looks at it immediately turns to stone, or state that if I could choose between being locked in a room with him, or drinking a bottle of bleach whilst listening to Adele shriek about some bloke who doesn’t love her, I would choose the latter, but to do so would be counterproductive. For one thing, getting my knickers in a twist over his jibes would make me look pathetic; whenever I read comments on this website about how his anti-Arsenal rants are ‘disgusting’ and ‘insulting’, my first reaction is: ‘grow a pair!’ Not only are the people who make such comments making themselves look bad, but they are also playing into his hands. This is, after all, a man who makes his living from being deliberately provocative and controversial, and although he seems to have a particular obsession with Arsenal (which I will put under the microscope in the next paragraph), most of what he says is designed specifically to provoke precisely that kind of reaction.
The second reason why I’m not going to make jokes like ‘what’s the difference between Adrian Durham and a bag of turd? Answer: the bag,’ is because I actually find myself agreeing with a lot of what he says, and most of the criticisms he has levelled at the club are hauntingly similar to comments made on this website. For example, Mr Durham feels that the Arsenal board of directors patronises the club’s fans by charging some of the highest ticket prices in the world despite the fact that club has not won any silverware since 2005. Well, guess what, I feel the same way, and so do a lot of other fans. Mr Durham does not believe that Arsenal have a chance of winning the league this season. Well, guess what, neither do I, and neither do a lot of other fans. Mr Durham criticises Arsene Wenger for his tactical naivety. Well, guess what, so do I, and so do a lot of other fans. Therefore, when people start throwing around words like ‘bile’ and ‘vitriol’ when he makes a disparaging remark, perhaps it is not so much because they disagree with what he is saying, but because of the fact that he is saying it at all, as if Arsenal fans have a monopoly on criticising Arsenal, which of course, they don’t. It’s a bit like saying ‘how dare you insult my wife? Only I’m allowed to do that!’ (For the record, I do sometimes find his comments somewhat laughable, like when he posed the question ‘is Robin Van Persie a bully?’ when the treacherous Dutchman chipped in a penalty against Wolves last season, but, as I mentioned before, Mr Durham is, to some extent, a ‘shock jock’, and I very much doubt whether he is enough of a moron to actually believe that chipping in a penalty somehow equates to bullying).
All of which leads me to the inevitable conclusion that Adrian Durham must be a closet Arsenal fan. They say the line between love and hate is thin because you can’t experience either emotion towards something or someone unless you actually care about it or them, and Mr Durham seems to care a great deal about Arsenal Football Club. Who knows, perhaps they had a steamy affair a few years ago, and now he is struggling to come to terms with the fact that he still has feelings for the club that broke his heart. Maybe Arsenal told him that it needed space, time to get its head together because it was in a weird place emotionally, or maybe he came home from work one day to find it in bed with another man, or possibly, in a bizarre twist, another football club. Whatever the case, I think Mr Durham needs to accept that the bond has been broken irreparably, and move on with his life. He does, of course, have every right to criticise the club, but in the interests of his own mental health, unless he comes clean about the fact that he is an Arsenal fan at heart, it might be better if he keeps his criticisms constructive and leaves the obsessing to those of us who aren’t embarrassed about being fans.
