It’s all over the papers again today, nowhere more so than in The Independent. Things are getting tetchy, as they were with Manchester United a few years ago. It’s Arsenal vs. the Referees, against the FA, and according to the press it’s Arsenal who are suffering as a result of it.
So we know about the Sol Campbell situation at the end of last season. We know that we as Arsenal fans think our best defender got a raw deal. That he shouldn’t have been sent off. That it was just a mistake on his part and a gross over-reaction by the official who sent him off and the FA which would not rescind the decision. And it’s obvious that few others, rival fans, commentators, Tony Blair, the Queen, agree with us.
And we know about the Community Shield. That Francis Jeffers deserved everything he got, and ended his Highbury career in the process, and that Sol, again, seems the victim of a gross over-reaction by another referee. That Djemba-Djemba looked on the verge of splitting him clean in half, and that a simple tap in the ass wasn’t half the reaction any of us would have given on the streets or on a Sunday League pitch to such a tear-inducing act of barbarity. But we know at the same time that what Sol did wasn’t right, and I think few expect, after the controversies surrounding his continued appearance for England under this weight of accusation, and the tragedy of his father’s death, that the FA will press too hard to ban him. Maybe one game, just so that justice can be seen to be done. But I doubt there will be any more than that.
And now we know about the great Pires controversy, 2003. Our most creative midfielder sold the referee on a penalty that should never have been, and the world’s gone wild, in what has been a wretched week for us. He fell down when a chance had disappeared into the crowd, and we equalised. Owen’s done it, Van Nistelrooy’s done it. Kevin Philips may have made an even worse indiscretion the same day. But it looked as if he simply fell over. Yet still the referee gave a penalty, and nobody complained.
But when Bobby did it, it sparked an outrage about the very basis of the relationship between Arsenal, the Press and the Football Establishment that’s been bubbling under for a couple of years, but now seems fit to burst into all out war. All of this the day before we go for the hardest game of every season. Away to United, the venue and the match where, historically and statistically the title gets won and lost every single year.
Thinking back to that horrible day in 1990, the last time Arsenal went mad in that demented fracas that cost us points and respect in a brutal punch up, you can only hope the same thing doesn’t happen again. You doubt it will, or could. For all their fire, Vieira’s no Rocastle or Paul Davis when it comes to full-blooded violence. And Ashley Cole’s no Winterburn – he could spark the fight, but you doubt he’d have the power to finish it. But we’re a club reaching boiling point, and in the next few months our team, our club, both on and off the pitch are going to reach a juncture where we either progress or face an explosion that could rip us into bits.
It comes down, once again, to that same one issue, Ashburton Grove. Anyone who thinks it doesn’t affect the players as much as it affects us the fans ought to think back to the beginning of the summer. When Thierry signed on again, when Bobby said he would (despite the rumblings afterward), when Vieira said he would and stuck by it, despite the delay. Each one of them, our three musketeers, talked about the ambitions of the team. Bobby even said that Wenger had told him we’d be buying a new keeper, a new striker and a new centre half. Well, we got Lehmann, but I don’t think Senderos and Papadopoulos were exactly what Pires had in mind. We know why we didn’t get them. The Press Office at Highbury may say otherwise, but we couldn’t afford them until Ashburton has been sorted out, until the long-term financial position of the club has been secured. Good business by Edelman and the boys upstairs certainly, but not enough to sustain us through a season which, in one brutal half hour from Inter Milan, has exposed a failing in the core of our team that would be much more easily solved by buying our way out of it than slowly waiting for the players to adapt. Buying is part of what big teams do - a big part. If there’s a hole you get the wallet out and fill it. Because sometimes the resources you have just won’t cover-over the problem. Maybe they could, 80, 90%, but when it really counts, when the opposition are top-class and really come at you with a plan, like Inter did, that’s when things start to unravel.
So we need some investment in the defence, but more importantly we need the defence of our teams reputation to begin at the top level, in the banks that will provide the funding for Ashburton. Because if they believe in us, then cheques for new players will be forthcoming. And if those new players come, then the paranoia coming from inside Arsenal will ease. And if that eases, the Press will start to leave us alone. It sounds horribly simple. It is horribly simple.
In every journalist who criticises us so vehemently the same connection is being made: Arsenal feel threatened because they are threatened. They complain against the system, because that diverts attention from the larger potential crises that face them. A player being banned shouldn’t be too bad a thing, it happens to everyone, but when you’re resources are already stretched losing Sol Campbell is a crisis. It can cost you a league title. Because there aren’t the players waiting in the background who can successfully replace them. Why not? Because Arsenal can’t afford those players. And it means to the journalists who smirk at our predicament that the screams we direct against anyone who crosses us are screams directed just as much towards ourselves. Against the situation we face. Against the waiting for that one big YES from the banks that will start to give us the muscle to compete in the buying of players as much as in the playing of football, that one aspect in which our first XI remain often exemplary.
That’s where The Independent comes in. James Lawton, of all the football journalists, has been most strict in his attacks on Wenger, on Sol and on Bobby. Today he wrote that the attitude of the Club and its supporters was a slur upon the game, that our paranoia ‘pollutes the game as surely as an oil spill devastates a place of natural beauty’. To him it is as if the prolonged refusal of Wenger to see a foul committed by his team ripples out into the general atmosphere of English football, fuels its general denial of wrongdoing, and its concomitant refusal – that same refusal present in every hyperbolic promotion of the Premier League as the world’s best when every European competition tells us otherwise – to see its shortcomings.
Those are strong claims, and as an Arsenal fan I want to deny them. But somehow I can’t. Many think Lawton is amongst the most blatantly of anti-Arsenal writers. But as someone who’s read The Independent every day for 10 years, I can tell you he’s not. That he has called Arsenal the most beautiful, technically perfect team ever seen in English football. That he believes we are, on our best days, better even than Bill Nicholson’s 1961 double-winning team, comparable to the Brazil team of 1970, as a demonstration of all that is inspiring about football.
But he’s also concentrated on all those red cards, on all the defensive lapses when it matters most, on all the paranoia that can never match the punishment it complains against and seen something terrible in the achievement of Wenger’s Arsenal. Call it uncertainty, because it is that. Like anything beautiful, Arsenal’s way of playing the game is fragile. Ugly, graceless but brutally determined football, the football that has won Bayern Munich, countless Italian teams, Red Star Belgrade, even Manchester United, European Cups that have always eluded us perpetuates because it does not deny that the game can be anything other than it is: imperfect, needing to be won rather than won well.
Beautiful teams, Ajax in the Seventies, Milan of the early 90s, the Busby Babes, Nicholson’s team, they flower for a while and then they die. Although the Busby Babes died in tragic circumstances no one could have foreseen, all those others imploded because there was no way to continue them, resources so temporarily magnificent could not be sustained when key parts fell away. Arsenal are facing that now. That the 2002 double and the form of Autumn that same year cannot be repeated because the club cannot find the money to repeat it. Cannot make do with what they have, unless money comes in to find new links in a chain that as present is only nearly there, not absolutely. And for a team as beautiful as Arsenal, everything needs to be in place. It cannot be, it won’t be until Ashburton is financed, and money is released again.
We are at boiling point until then, ready to fall apart. Ready to face the prospect of losing those players we consider our best. Ready to lose the stadium that is our only way to remain a top-two club in the light of Chelsea’s billions and United’s unbreakable commercial position. Always capable of having our team’s balance removed by suspension and injury.
We can all only hope the banks do say yes. Then everything I’ve said becomes obsolete. Then boiling point goes and we can simply be a wonderful football club again. But until then, win or lose each game we play, we are on edge. And the press, because it is their job to note such things, can only feed on our discomfort.
So we know about the Sol Campbell situation at the end of last season. We know that we as Arsenal fans think our best defender got a raw deal. That he shouldn’t have been sent off. That it was just a mistake on his part and a gross over-reaction by the official who sent him off and the FA which would not rescind the decision. And it’s obvious that few others, rival fans, commentators, Tony Blair, the Queen, agree with us.
And we know about the Community Shield. That Francis Jeffers deserved everything he got, and ended his Highbury career in the process, and that Sol, again, seems the victim of a gross over-reaction by another referee. That Djemba-Djemba looked on the verge of splitting him clean in half, and that a simple tap in the ass wasn’t half the reaction any of us would have given on the streets or on a Sunday League pitch to such a tear-inducing act of barbarity. But we know at the same time that what Sol did wasn’t right, and I think few expect, after the controversies surrounding his continued appearance for England under this weight of accusation, and the tragedy of his father’s death, that the FA will press too hard to ban him. Maybe one game, just so that justice can be seen to be done. But I doubt there will be any more than that.
And now we know about the great Pires controversy, 2003. Our most creative midfielder sold the referee on a penalty that should never have been, and the world’s gone wild, in what has been a wretched week for us. He fell down when a chance had disappeared into the crowd, and we equalised. Owen’s done it, Van Nistelrooy’s done it. Kevin Philips may have made an even worse indiscretion the same day. But it looked as if he simply fell over. Yet still the referee gave a penalty, and nobody complained.
But when Bobby did it, it sparked an outrage about the very basis of the relationship between Arsenal, the Press and the Football Establishment that’s been bubbling under for a couple of years, but now seems fit to burst into all out war. All of this the day before we go for the hardest game of every season. Away to United, the venue and the match where, historically and statistically the title gets won and lost every single year.
Thinking back to that horrible day in 1990, the last time Arsenal went mad in that demented fracas that cost us points and respect in a brutal punch up, you can only hope the same thing doesn’t happen again. You doubt it will, or could. For all their fire, Vieira’s no Rocastle or Paul Davis when it comes to full-blooded violence. And Ashley Cole’s no Winterburn – he could spark the fight, but you doubt he’d have the power to finish it. But we’re a club reaching boiling point, and in the next few months our team, our club, both on and off the pitch are going to reach a juncture where we either progress or face an explosion that could rip us into bits.
It comes down, once again, to that same one issue, Ashburton Grove. Anyone who thinks it doesn’t affect the players as much as it affects us the fans ought to think back to the beginning of the summer. When Thierry signed on again, when Bobby said he would (despite the rumblings afterward), when Vieira said he would and stuck by it, despite the delay. Each one of them, our three musketeers, talked about the ambitions of the team. Bobby even said that Wenger had told him we’d be buying a new keeper, a new striker and a new centre half. Well, we got Lehmann, but I don’t think Senderos and Papadopoulos were exactly what Pires had in mind. We know why we didn’t get them. The Press Office at Highbury may say otherwise, but we couldn’t afford them until Ashburton has been sorted out, until the long-term financial position of the club has been secured. Good business by Edelman and the boys upstairs certainly, but not enough to sustain us through a season which, in one brutal half hour from Inter Milan, has exposed a failing in the core of our team that would be much more easily solved by buying our way out of it than slowly waiting for the players to adapt. Buying is part of what big teams do - a big part. If there’s a hole you get the wallet out and fill it. Because sometimes the resources you have just won’t cover-over the problem. Maybe they could, 80, 90%, but when it really counts, when the opposition are top-class and really come at you with a plan, like Inter did, that’s when things start to unravel.
So we need some investment in the defence, but more importantly we need the defence of our teams reputation to begin at the top level, in the banks that will provide the funding for Ashburton. Because if they believe in us, then cheques for new players will be forthcoming. And if those new players come, then the paranoia coming from inside Arsenal will ease. And if that eases, the Press will start to leave us alone. It sounds horribly simple. It is horribly simple.
In every journalist who criticises us so vehemently the same connection is being made: Arsenal feel threatened because they are threatened. They complain against the system, because that diverts attention from the larger potential crises that face them. A player being banned shouldn’t be too bad a thing, it happens to everyone, but when you’re resources are already stretched losing Sol Campbell is a crisis. It can cost you a league title. Because there aren’t the players waiting in the background who can successfully replace them. Why not? Because Arsenal can’t afford those players. And it means to the journalists who smirk at our predicament that the screams we direct against anyone who crosses us are screams directed just as much towards ourselves. Against the situation we face. Against the waiting for that one big YES from the banks that will start to give us the muscle to compete in the buying of players as much as in the playing of football, that one aspect in which our first XI remain often exemplary.
That’s where The Independent comes in. James Lawton, of all the football journalists, has been most strict in his attacks on Wenger, on Sol and on Bobby. Today he wrote that the attitude of the Club and its supporters was a slur upon the game, that our paranoia ‘pollutes the game as surely as an oil spill devastates a place of natural beauty’. To him it is as if the prolonged refusal of Wenger to see a foul committed by his team ripples out into the general atmosphere of English football, fuels its general denial of wrongdoing, and its concomitant refusal – that same refusal present in every hyperbolic promotion of the Premier League as the world’s best when every European competition tells us otherwise – to see its shortcomings.
Those are strong claims, and as an Arsenal fan I want to deny them. But somehow I can’t. Many think Lawton is amongst the most blatantly of anti-Arsenal writers. But as someone who’s read The Independent every day for 10 years, I can tell you he’s not. That he has called Arsenal the most beautiful, technically perfect team ever seen in English football. That he believes we are, on our best days, better even than Bill Nicholson’s 1961 double-winning team, comparable to the Brazil team of 1970, as a demonstration of all that is inspiring about football.
But he’s also concentrated on all those red cards, on all the defensive lapses when it matters most, on all the paranoia that can never match the punishment it complains against and seen something terrible in the achievement of Wenger’s Arsenal. Call it uncertainty, because it is that. Like anything beautiful, Arsenal’s way of playing the game is fragile. Ugly, graceless but brutally determined football, the football that has won Bayern Munich, countless Italian teams, Red Star Belgrade, even Manchester United, European Cups that have always eluded us perpetuates because it does not deny that the game can be anything other than it is: imperfect, needing to be won rather than won well.
Beautiful teams, Ajax in the Seventies, Milan of the early 90s, the Busby Babes, Nicholson’s team, they flower for a while and then they die. Although the Busby Babes died in tragic circumstances no one could have foreseen, all those others imploded because there was no way to continue them, resources so temporarily magnificent could not be sustained when key parts fell away. Arsenal are facing that now. That the 2002 double and the form of Autumn that same year cannot be repeated because the club cannot find the money to repeat it. Cannot make do with what they have, unless money comes in to find new links in a chain that as present is only nearly there, not absolutely. And for a team as beautiful as Arsenal, everything needs to be in place. It cannot be, it won’t be until Ashburton is financed, and money is released again.
We are at boiling point until then, ready to fall apart. Ready to face the prospect of losing those players we consider our best. Ready to lose the stadium that is our only way to remain a top-two club in the light of Chelsea’s billions and United’s unbreakable commercial position. Always capable of having our team’s balance removed by suspension and injury.
We can all only hope the banks do say yes. Then everything I’ve said becomes obsolete. Then boiling point goes and we can simply be a wonderful football club again. But until then, win or lose each game we play, we are on edge. And the press, because it is their job to note such things, can only feed on our discomfort.
