Robert Exley
Ed’s note. To put this article into some context, for those not yet aware, the print version of The Gooner will reach its 30th anniversary this autumn, and publish its final edition at the end of the 2017-18 season.
The Gooner, as you well may know, started life as a printed fanzine way back in the late 1980s at a time when such publications gave a platform to the ordinary football fan’s opinions which otherwise would never have got themselves heard within the traditional mainstream media which existed at the time. The idea of course was not exclusively one which emanated from football fans and, in fact, had been something of a time lag from events in the world of popular music and in particular the punk fanzines of a decade prior.
Technological progress by the 1970s had effectively made the punk ‘DIY’ phenomenon happen – the development of the Xerox photocopier aided the creation of fanzine publications like ’Sniffing Glue’. There was also the ability to record at low cost, like with the Buzzcocks’ independently produced ‘Spiral Scratch’ EP which became something of a pathfinder for other bands, as well as Rough Trade Records being able to develop a form of record distribution across the whole of the UK, which was wholly independent from the major corporations.
By late 1979 however, this alternative form of expression looked so easy that, after the first wave broke through, even idiots thought they could get in on the act. In Lech Kowalski’s famed Punk documentary ‘D.O.A. – A Right of Passage’, the Polish-American film maker on arriving at Heathrow Airport allegedly asked a cabbie to take him to the Kings Road to allow him to view first-hand the hub of London’s Punk universe. The Cabbie apparently misheard him and took him to Kingshold – a rundown estate in Hackney where the only Punks that Kowalski came across were a p**s poor pub band by the name of ‘Terry & the Idiots’.
Throughout the film, the band’s lead singer, Terry Sylvester, comes across as something of a prototype for the archetypal twenty first century Reality TV star. His delusions as to his ‘star quality’ are somewhat manipulated by the film maker and ultimately, Terry Sylvester achieves the attention he’s long craved for all the wrong reasons. Terry however, was something of the arse end of the downward trajectory of Punk’s ‘DIY’ ethos by this point. Punk’s initial wave of energy and excitement had worn off by late 1979 and what was developing in the void which emerged was ‘Oi’ music. Around a decade back, I can remember sharing on an internet Music Forum this piece written by the infamous former Sun Columnist Garry Bushell on the ‘Story of Oi’.
One of the forum members picked up on this particular quote from Bushell, claiming that: ‘Oi was a real voice from the backstreets, a mega phone for dead end yobs’ and quite rightly responded with this retort: ‘why the f*** would you want to give a dead end yob a megaphone?’ What therefore, should self-proclaimed amateur social historians like me and you make of this period of social history? Do we ultimately look back on the like of Terry Sylvester or the more established and successful ‘Oi!’ groups of the period like the Cockney Rejects and conclude that back in the late seventies and early eighties, everything must have been alright with the ‘ancien regime’ merely due to the fact that by this point, much of the angry dissenting voices from ‘the streets’ who were publically handed the microphone to kick against it, happened to have mostly been the voices of inarticulate idiots?
It’s with this in mind that I turn to the recent media comments of both Gary Neville and Oliver Holt regarding fan opposition to Arsene Wenger’s own ‘ancien regime’. One of the best responses to this came from within these pages from a contributor called ‘Markymark’ (surely not he whose brother was in New Kids on the Block, who later played Dirk Diggler in the film ‘Boogie Nights’?). Marky rightly stated that: ‘my childhood memory reflects back to a time when an idiot fan was someone involved in smashing up a Service Station on the M6. Not a young guy with an opinion. Our definition of idiot appears to have narrowed and become far less tolerant’. He’s entirely right. There’s absolutely nothing idiotic about this bloke’s banner at all. Whether you agree with it or not, there’s nothing inflammatory about it and the content is polite enough for family viewing.
Nothing about the banner is self-evidently feeble-minded. Gary Neville was a part of the most successful trophy winning outfit of recent times at Old Trafford – would he or his boss have accepted a decade without having made a credible challenge for either the Premiership or the Champions League, on the basis that ‘just enough’ was done year in, year out to keep within the top four? Oliver Holt reaffirmed Gary Neville’s words in a piece for the Daily Mail, mainly on the basis that Arsene Wenger has done great things in the past. Of course, you could have said the same thing for Paul McCartney back in 1977, but it didn’t make Wings ‘the band the Beatles could have been’ by any stretch of the imagination. Oddly enough, Oliver Holt also holds a fan ‘dual citizenship’ between Old Trafford and Stockport’s Edgeley Park.
From this pair of Manc Reds therefore, you can clearly come to the conclusion that where Chelsea fans belting out ‘Arsene Wenger – we want you to stay’ is heavily steeped in sarcasm, Man United fans singing his praises in contrast are mainly being disingenuous as over the years they’ve come to warm to a man whose sides generally put up much less of a fight at Old Trafford these days, compared to what they used to do to around fifteen to twenty years ago. The unfortunate thing however, is that establishment voices like Holt and Neville - who continually pat Arsene Wenger on the back despite his underachievement in recent seasons - have to some extent successfully managed to conflate reasonable protest for Wenger’s exit (like the man with the banner at Stamford Bridge) with others that have generally been a lot more idiotic and much less sober in their general approach on the matter.
Neville of course has specifically fingered Arsenal Fan TV for criticism on this front and – in all fairness to G. Nev – you can’t exactly say it’s entirely without reasonable grounds. Before laying into AFTV, I have to give credit where it’s due to its founder and front man Robbie Lyle for coming up with what is a fairly original social media idea, which a media giant in Freemantle (parent group of both former ITV company Thames and Neighbours creator Reg Grundy Productions) have actually gone out of their way to replicate with other clubs such as Man United and Chelsea. AFTV’s punk credentials had also too been furthered with an interview with Arsenal fan John Lydon himself back in September 2015.
That said, I don’t seriously think AFTV has done much at all to elevate the level of debate on the Wenger question and discussion on Arsenal future direction in general, compared to what’s already out there in the rest of cyberspace. When you watch the Ty v Claude ‘debates’, Claude’s challenging of Ty’s Wenger delusions is hardly Football’s equivalent of David Frost interrogating Richard Nixon. When the pair go at it, it’s more akin to watching a slapstick fight scene between Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson from the nineties sitcom ‘Bottom’. Among the other regulars, ‘Troopz’ often comes across with all the surliness of an angry pupil from a secondary school remedial class. The tragic thing is, here in his summary on Arsenal’s capitulation at Bayern, he’s actually in the right. Sadly the wheat of his argument gets heavily buried among the chaff with his angry and repetitive ‘fams’ and ‘bluds’.
I don’t doubt that the AFTV commenters are passionate Arsenal fans, but sadly, most of what you see on AFTV seems to be selected crimes of passion for the YouTube generation and many of its detractors have often derided it as merely being ‘car crash’ style click-bait. You see, the trouble with people voicing opinions in cyberspace, is that it’s very much a saturated market place. There’s a lot of talk these days about social media displacing the influence of the mega media corporations, which is wholly misleading because your average social media poster doesn’t get viewed by that many people off the back of their own steam.
The comparison between the new social media voices and those within the older more established forms of media is very much like that of a man on a soap box at speaker’s corner competing for the public’s attention against a man next to him on a podium with a jumbotron screen. The man on the soap box has got to do something pretty wild to get the public’s attention when he’s up against competition like this and his best hope is to perform with the greatest degree of outlandishness. This isn’t just the case with opinions on football, but pretty much anything these days, hence the rise of ‘fake news’ sites etc.
Robbie once explained the point behind AFTV in an interview with the Guardian, stating: ‘quite simply our aim is to give fans a voice… when I started it off you would never ever hear from fans. You’d hear from pundits, ex-players, you guys in the media. You’d never hear from the guys who spend their hard-earned money, emotions and time going to see games’. This comment I’m afraid is a bit disingenuous and self-aggrandizing on his part, as for the last twenty five years at least – following on in the footsteps of fanzines such as this one – the ‘average man on the street’ has had 606, Talksport and endless internet chat forums as a platform for his views on Football.
Personally, my view is that the best place to hear what the ordinary bloke down the pub thinks on Football is generally… well… down the pub. I can only assume that with the rapid disappearance of many local watering holes over the last decade or so, the pub bore and those who for various reasons wish to hear what he has to say for himself (they are usually a ‘him’ and not a ‘her’, I generally find) have all migrated to YouTube and cyberspace. Of course, the internet, mobile filming equipment and platforms such as YouTube have all made things like AFTV possible. Much like how the Xerox machine made the fanzine possible back in the 70s/80s. On the back of this, there’s generally a view that seems to be developing that the internet forums, blogs, vlogs and what have you, may possibly be making printed Fanzines like The Gooner obsolete. Personally, I beg to differ.
If ‘The Gooner’ has a raison d’etre in the late 2010s, it’s to be an entity distant from the establishment backslappers like Oliver Holt and Gary Neville, while being better able to articulate the general mood and opinion than the likes of Ty, Claude et al have managed to do on AFTV in recent years. In football, as in life, democracy of opinion and pluralism are more than welcome, but surely the world can have no place for the pernicious effect of ranting and those who rant (and believe me, in cyberspace there’s been no shortage of that, on any given topic!). In 2017, Punk football analysis isn’t dead. Though please, let’s kill any idea that ‘Oi!’ punditry actually has any merit.
*Follow me on Twitter@robert_exley
