It
completely slipped my mind that I’d neglected to post my concluding diary
missive of the season, until my most loyal reader (my Ma) reminded me after
dinner at her place last night – at least I can count on one person to notice
when I neglect to send out a post!
So
while doubtless much of the piece below is way past its sell by date, being
such a pedantic bugger, it occurred to me that even if our team struggles to
maintain a level of consistency, I should at least keep up my end by ensuring
that there’s a corresponding entry for every week of the past season.
Meanwhile
my apologies to anyone who might struggle with the meaning of the title above
but a Friday night session of mainlining chopped liver will often result in the
side-effect of me spouting my Mrs Malapropski Yiddish (it translates to
“Anything but a dragged out, summer long Van Persie story)
Ever
since the season ended, I’ve been avoiding the media like the plague. Apart
from briefly glancing at the headlines when waiting for my morning caffeine
fix, I have barely seen a newspaper. Hence I am hardly qualified to offer an
opinion on any of the latest rumours and gossip.
Apart
from wanting to do my best to avoid all the sycophantic blathering about the
exploits of Chelsea and Man City, my principal motivation for steering well
clear is so as to avoid getting sucked in to a daily diet of transfer saga
claptrap that will only result in an increased level of anxiety over the
Gunners' future.
My
feelings on Robin Van Persie are that while I would seriously hope that the
suits at the club are prepared to do whatever is necessary to persuade Robin to
put pen to paper on a new contract, in order to make a statement of intent, of
the sort that was seemingly achieved last summer by Spurs chairman, Daniel
Levy (in the way in which they were intent on matching Chelsea’s ever more
exorbitant courtship of Luka Modric), I guess that ultimately we have to
accept that “que sera, sera”.
Although
it’s long overdue time for the Gunners to put their foot down and demonstrate
that we have sufficient financial clout to ensure that we’re not perceived as
a “selling club”, where absolutely any of our best players can be poached so
long as the price is right, the truth of the matter is that at the end of the
day there is no point in paying Van Persie an obscene amount of money to renew
his contract, if Robin has already made his mind up that his future lies
elsewhere.
On
the basis that I can think of little that one can buy with a fortune of £200
million that one cannot afford with a mere £100 million (other than perhaps the
odd third-world dictatorship), personally I will be very disappointed if money
is the motivating factor in our simply peerless Dutch striker’s eventual
decision. However, should Arsène be unable to demonstrate to him that the
Gunners will have an improved chance of competing for silverware in the season
to come, as a result of a guaranteed substantial investment in our squad, then
I’m afraid that as distraught as I would be to lose Van Persie at his peak, I
would have to side with him, if he should decide that he has improved prospects
of putting some medals in his trophy cabinet with a move elsewhere; because
despite the fact that Robin appears to have some truly genuine feelings for the
Gunners, if I was in his shoes, I would seriously be questioning quite how long
I am expected to swallow Arsène’s assurances about “the Promised Land” without
any demonstrable evidence of having made any progress towards this objective.
I
received a phone call from a Gooner pal in midweek and was instantly reminded
as to why I’d been avoiding the football media up until now, because after
having requested details of the latest Van Persie gossip, within minutes I felt
my blood beginning to boil, as my mate revealed in one breath that there’s a
rumour about Vermaelen having already moved into Robin’s London home and in the
next that some scurrilous Mancunian estate agent has suggested that the
Dutchman is already building a swimming pool at his new gaff in Cheshire.
This
is probably just a result of some unscrupulous Northern monkey trying to make a
fast buck, by pushing up the prices of ostentatious Prestbury mansions on the
back of the prospect of having Van Persie as a neighbour. Over the years I
have learned to take all such unsubstantiated nonsense with a pinch of salt.
Nevetheless, it’s a hint of the sort of claptrap we can expect over the coming
months and the main reason why I choose to try and withdraw from playing this
particularly stressful game, because it only adds to the sense of anxiety.
Still it didn't stop me from "tweeting" Van Persie, in the vain hope of being offered some reassurance. For while there's only degrees of distraughtness involved in Van Persie's eventual destination, in the unthinkable event of his departure, the sense of betrayal would be vastly increased if he should end up playing against us in the Premiership. My mate reckoned that while everyone's assuming Man City are the only game in Manchester, we might be surprised to see him end up at Man Utd and somehow this would feel all the more galling, knowing that we couldn't match Utd's offer, even with their £350 million debt. If we do end up losing Robin, it won't be nearly so traumatic if he ends up going abroad and we at least don't end up falling further out of love with him everytime we face the daunting prospect of having to prevent him scoring against us!
So
I’ll be spending my summer focusing on the cricket, athletics, boxing, along
with all the various other Olympics' hooplah and doubtless getting drawn into
Euro 2012, when it eventually kicks off (does anyone actually know someone who
intends on travelling to Eastern Europe for the Euros, I certainly don’t?), in
the hope that this might provide sufficient a distraction for me to be able to
ignore the constant cacophony of transfer rumours, until such a time as there
is hard and fast proof of any definitive transactions.
Meanwhile,
as ever at this time of the year, there’s still the none too insignificant
matter of having to rustle up a thousand quid by 1st June, in order to renew my
season ticket and so as to avoid Arsenal Cold Turkey completely, there’s the
prospect of alleviating withdrawal symptoms with a temporary Gooner fix, on 6th
June, in the form of a Q & A session with Ivan “sustainable business model”
Gazides.
I’ve
been to one of these gigs previously, where I was intent on laying into Ivan
about matching the club’s off pitch achievements, with our on pitch ambition.
Yet as hard as I tried to dislike the fella, I have to admit that Gazides is
such an incredibly smooth operator, that along with virtually everyone else in
the audience, I came away from this event, thinking that he’s not such a bad
bloke, with Gazides having successfully snowed us all into believing that we
shared the same desire for the club’s successful future.
However
I sense that there’s an ever-rising tide of dissatisfaction amongst my red & white brethren with the current status quo and an absentee landlord who
appears perfectly happy not to meddle in the club’s affairs, so long as the
cash registers continue to ring loud and clear. From what I’ve perceived, it
seems to me that American accents are ever more prevalent in the corridors of
power at the Arsenal (eg. the "Septic" who’s succeeded Amanda Docherty as the
club’s PR chief) and that Silent Stan has installed a series of “yes men” (and
women) to run his “business” profitably. As much as these suits might claim
that they share our dreams and that they aspire to achieving silverware, it
seems evident to me that this will simply not occur at the expense of our
healthy balance sheet.
Although
there was a loud hue and cry when Alisher Usmanov was originally mooted as a
potential sugar-daddy, I have to wonder if all these Gooners continue to sit
astride their moral high-horse when it comes to this matter. At the end of the
day, I very much doubt that there are many fortunes that have been amassed in
an entirely ethical fashion, whether the money is a result of an association with a modern day
mafia, or whether it dates back to an ancient investment in the slave trade.
In
this respect, are we seriously going to draw a “can’t beat ‘em, won’t join ‘em”
line in the sand, whereby we accept that from here on in, the Gunners are never
going to have anything but the occasional fortunate tilt at a knockout trophy, on account of our point blank refusal to entertain the idea of a generous philanthropist, due to the fact that they all have skeletons in their closets and ulterior motives?
Or
are we going to wait for a knight who’s shining armour is a just slightly more
lustrous (or slightly less offensive) than that of Alisher Usmanov. Here we
have the 2nd richest person in the country (who just happens to be seriously "liquid" at present after having pocketed billions from the flotations of Facebook and Megafon!), who seems desperately keen to align himself
with the Arsenal, but so long as the current regime are intent on resisting his
advances, it’s fairly likely that eventually he will look elsewhere.
Is
it seriously the case that there are Gooners out there of such strict moral
conviction, that they’d prefer to see the Gunners limping along for the
forseeable future, scrabbling every season for continued Champions League
qualification, rather than accept the almost inevitable course of our morally
bankrupt sport? If so, pray tell me, exactly how would it sit with you, should
Usmanov eventually decide to invest several hundred million down the wrong end
of the Seven Sisters Road, purely out of spite?
Personally
I would’ve much preferred to have not seen Chelsea win the Champions League and
be able to lord it over us with their conquest of the big-eared trophy.
Nevertheless, at least there was plenty of mileage to be had along the way, out
of the agonies of the auld enemy. But as I reveled in all that Schadenfreude,
thinking of the relief they must have felt when Bayern scored on 84 mins and
then when Doddier conceded the penalty in extra-time, only for all this hope to
evaporate moments later, in football’s typically fickle and most cruel fashion,
I couldn’t escape the thought that, but for the hapless incompetence of Marton Fullop,at the Hawthornes, it would’ve
been us suffering all the anguish of Spurs parlous predicament.
Mercifully,
after such a bad start to the season and having virtually given up any hope of
maintaining our Champions League run, most Gooners have been satiated by the
opportunity to retain our seat at Europe’s top table. But if it wasn’t for poor
Fullop’s (worst ever?) Premiership debut and two gift-wrapped goals from the
Baggies minder, we’d have probably been up in arms right now, demanding a
revolution!
Enjoy
your Summer
Keep
the Faith
Big
Love
Bernard
PS. I was driving along the Fulham Road this week, a few hundred yards from Stamford Bridge and couldn't resist taking a snap of the truck in front of me, with four chequered blue and white flags and a business sign on the back "We Talk Rubbish"
_______________________________________________________________
Once More With Feeling
I can only begin
to imagine the agonies endured by long-suffering City fans on Sunday,
considering I must’ve aged a dozen years or more, merely due to the anxiety
involved in watching the Gunners falling over their own feet, as we scrabbled
over the line to our 15th consecutive Champions League qualification.
Following out
worst start to a campaign in more than half a century, this has to be viewed as
a success overall. Yet as with the majority of this season’s other significant
issues, all too often it wasn’t the beautiful football that won out, but a seemingly
endless array of tragi-comic twists of fate and a team’s propensity to produce
fewer cock-ups than the competition.
So despite the
plethora of engrossing end of season encounters that stood as testament to the
Premiership’s indisputable claim as the most exciting competition on the
planet, it’s certainly not a gauge of the quality on offer. Or indeed a measure
of that clinical equanimity, which enables the best sides to navigate the
rockiest of roads to success.
Although such an
astonishingly capricious season across the board suggests the Gunners are far
from alone in our failings to this regard, if any further corroboration was
required, we witnessed it at West Brom; where mercifully we ended up wallowing
in the euphoria of having avoided finishing up in Spurs unenviable 4th place
predicament, on the back of a customarily shambolic display, almost totally devoid
of defensive composure.
Moreover, having
travelled up to the Hawthorns expecting the Arsenal to be motivated to fight
tooth and nail, to earn their right to return to the big stage, it was baffling
and a source of palpable frustration watching the Baggies perform as if they
were the side with more than pride to play for. But then sadly this seems to be
an all-pervasive malaise amongst the Premiership’s prima-donnas nowadays.
They’re deluded by their superstar status into believing they only need turn
up, to earn our adoration and their obscene income and often only producing the
goods when their pride has been sufficiently pricked by hungrier, more
committed upstarts.
Vermaelen is a
case in point. If only the Belgian could match Koscielny’s massive heart with a
consistent level of intensity, the Gunners might have the basic ingredients to
build a more resolute defence. There are times when Tommie goes about his game
with the sort of ardor that suggests he could be the Arsenal’s answer to
Vincent Kompany. But then on Sunday, as was the case against QPR, he seemed
bereft of the sort of blinkered focus, until we’d gift-wrapped a couple of goals
and suddenly any such arguments appear specious.
It was brilliant
to see our squad making a point of giving Pat Rice a decent send off. Along
with Ken Friar, dear old Pat must rank as one of the most loyal ever servants
to the Arsenal’s cause. Nevertheless it was perhaps revealing as an indicator
of how Rice is perceived in the dressing room, to see him given the bumps. It’s
hard to imagine any of the players doing likewise with a stony-faced Steve
Bould .I’m therefore optimistic about this changing of the training ground
guard, in the hope that Bouldie might bring some much needed organizational
discipline, thereby eradicating the sort of schoolboy disquiet that appears
responsible for our defence’s tiresome tendency to implode.
Meanwhile with
West Brom eager to usher the Arsenal off the pitch, to conduct their own end of
season ritual and Roy Hodgson’s last rites, there was a decidedly disconcerting
end to our afternoon, as Robin insisted on returning on his tod to take one
last (??!!) bow. Who knows, perhaps Van Persie was merely hedging his bets,
prompting the sort of insecurity that might ensure several million more, on his
offer of a contract renewal. But while I tried to put a brave face on things,
my worst fears were realized in a response that questioned if this wasn’t a
“thanks for the memories” moment of farewell, what possible other reason could
there have been for Van Persie to act in this fashion?
While we fret
about retaining our far too limited number of truly genuine world-class stars
in our gossamer thin squad, we can rest assured that Man City will maintain their
momentum, to ensure two or three options in every position. Although many
principled Gooners might express their indignation at the prospect of our
beloved club selling it’s soul to the second richest man in the country,
there’s also an increasing number of dissenters about Silent Stan and our
absentee landlord’s apparent lack of interest in anything but the balance
sheet.
In this morally
bankrupt sport of ours, where dubiety exists about the boundless wealth of all
of its sugar-daddy patrons, are the Gunners intent on drawing a ‘can’t beat
‘em, won’t join ‘em” line in the sand that guarantees our “also ran” status?
Because other than Van Persie, it could be argued that the only summer
signatory that will truly enable us to compete is that of the Uzbek oligarch, Alisher
Usmanov?
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e-mail to: londonN5@gmail.com
