Date: 1st August 2011 at 10:18am
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Those who read my articles regularly won’t be surprised to hear that I don’t have a problem with fans booing their own team, and yesterday is no exception.

For the most obvious part, it’s freedom of expression; we pay stupidly high ticket prices that goes into the pockets of overpaid and underachieving players and greedy shareholders. If we take the time and effort to go and support these millionaires, we can also let them know how we feel if they’re not trying hard enough.

Sure, a pre-season friendly match in itself does not matter or count towards anything, even if it would be nice to get a bit of a show at the Emirates for fans who often don’t get to go to the bigger games during the season. My point is, I think it would be naive to say the boos yesterday were a knee-jerk reaction to one bad performance.

I wasn’t at the game, and I don’t know for sure if I would have joined in the booing had I been there, but if I had, I would be booing the management for clearly not fixing the team’s problems from last season and many seasons before.

Wenger said very early in the summer that we needed to improve defensively, and that he would be signing a tall and strong centre-back to aid this issue. We’re in August now, less than two weeks away from the start of the season, and we still haven’t signed this player. Instead we’ve sold a left-back, signed three teenagers, and brought in a striker. The saddest thing is, it’s totally predictable.

Fans booed at the last home game of the season at home to Aston Villa, as another home defeat meant another promising season had gone down the toilet. We can’t see into the future, but it looks likely from our lack of activity in the transfer market that we’re heading for another Groundhog Day season, so why wait until the end to signal our discontent?

Hopefully getting angry now will pressure Wenger into spending some money before it’s too late. Myles Palmer seems confident that we’ll be signing three players this week, but considering it seems to take us a whole month just to sign one player, I’d be very surprised if that happened.

Anyway, don’t be worried about being called a bad fan because you care about the performance of the club more than the feelings of a few individuals who aren’t doing your club proud. They need to know it’s not good enough.

 

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