So Paddy Got Up - an Arsenal anthology (13 page)

Being local, Mum and her brother also used to hang around on a Friday afternoon and wait for autographs as the players arrived to training. In those days, unlike now with the underground car parks and the enormous newly built training facilities, the players would park their cars on Avenell Road. She was always really impressed by goalkeeper Jim Furnell’s car, which was a Ford Capri Ghia. Nowadays, Jack Wilshere’s shiny bright Mercedes-whatever-it-is is pretty much a standard first or second car for a footballer. One of Mum’s favourite away day memories was going to White Hart Lane in 1971. They had never been before and arrived to learn that the match was sold out. So, naturally, they climbed over the fence to get in. As they clambered, they were almost caught by the hooves of a police horse. Contrast this to my first away match, at Craven Cottage in 2003, where I remember wondering if the Tube journey there would ever end. If there were police horses there that day, they certainly didn’t do any wall climbing (nor did I, in fairness … my mother was a far braver young woman than I). Her childhood hero was Ian Ure, swiftly followed by Bobby Gould. My childhood hero, and probably the man that made me fall in love with the Arsenal first, was Patrick Vieira.

Being such a huge Arsenal supporter and coming from a family from which liking football is as much a requirement as having our surname, there is that extra ingredient I’ll have to look for when thinking about the husband and children of the future. I don’t want Chelsea supporting kids – how would I love them? Mum was fortunate enough to have found my dad Alan, who is probably the biggest Arsenal fan I know. When Cesc Fabregas left the club recently, it felt like a punch to the brain. We are huge Cesc fans and my goodbye-to-Cesc blog was the most difficult I’ve written, but I still think Dad summed up the feeling of the sad football fan the best with this comment: “I just get annoyed when people don’t love my club as much as me.” And isn’t that exactly it? Players can come and go, but we can’t. Or won’t.

Anyway, my dad is also an Islington boy, having grown up on Gillespie Road itself. His dad – my Granddad Billy – passed away in December 2005. The fact that Highbury, their local stadium, had been plastered with the words ‘The Final Salute’ ahead of our move to the Emirates that season, seemed very apt indeed. Granddad Billy was a fan, because his dad was a fan. As were his brothers Henry and Fred. My Granny, on the other hand, is from Broughty Ferry in Scotland. Her first match at Highbury came in 1935, a 6-0 win over Grimsby Town. She was on holiday in London with her mum. Coincidentally, Granddad was there at the match too, and was stood in the very same stand as she and her mum. They didn’t eventually meet until 1941, up in Scotland. Very selfish of them that they didn’t meet on that great day for the Arsenal in 1935, thus enabling their first-born granddaughter to tell the world ‘My grandparents met at Highbury!’ but you can’t have it all.

We’re of varying degrees of positivity in this family, with my dad and I probably being the most irritatingly upbeat about our predicament no matter the details. There’s a part in Fever Pitch where Nick Hornby discusses always wanting reassurance from his dad that everything was going to be OK at a match. I know this feeling. I do exactly the same to mine. I can be quite sure of my views and predictions and feelings about a match, but even now at the age of 22, I always need reassurance from my dad that everything is going to be OK. That’s another one for the pros list of being from an Arsenal family. I look at people who have chosen to support this club for reasons other than genetics and I can’t get my head around it. Who do you go to for reassurance? How do you know it is going to be OK? How do you know you have permission to curse and twitch your way through a football match, knowing that everyone will understand that it’s only the gut-shredding nerves making you behave so out of character?

As established in the opening lines of this little ramble, ‘Arsenal and family’ is not just about your actual nearest and dearest. Though there have been many occasions of out and out civil war among supporters in both recent and not-so-recent times, the feeling of being among fellow supporters is a bit special. The home crowd at the Emirates is often on the receiving end of a lot of criticism for not being vocal or passionate enough. This gives me the hump for two reasons: Firstly, because it’s often quite true. There are, for instance, a group of men who sit near me at the stadium and whose voice boxes seem only reactive to the setting ‘whinge’. There’s no other word for it, they whinge. They are whingers. Whinging is what they are good at, and so they whinge. They don’t sing, they don’t shout out anything positive, they just sit there analysing the game like a teacher analysing a child’s report card.

‘SILLY, Jack! Oh for goodness’ sake, this is winnable in the middle!’

Winnable in the middle? Who uses that many syllables at a football match? The other reason it’s annoying is that there are plenty of people who do come away from each match with no voice left. When people make comments like ‘Arsenal’s support is rubbish’, you just have to roll your eyes as hard as when someone suggests we still need a new goalkeeper. When you factor in the vast amount of support we have from overseas as well, I wonder if waking up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday morning because you happen to live half a world away from London, could be considered a sign of passion? Or if being physically unable to get to sleep after a particularly amazing late night of football has left you more bursting with adrenaline than a BASE jumper means you might care just a little bit? Back in London, even Whingey McGrumble behind me is dedicated enough to show up to every match. It might not contribute much to the atmosphere, but support is support.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have only really seen the good times of the Arsenal so far. They’ve given me beautiful memories, more than anyone should really be entitled to in the cruel world of competitive sport. Two doubles (that I can remember); The Invincibles; European nights of beauty; the Sol goal in the Champions League final; Barcelona at home last season, where from the moment I woke up that morning, I just knew we were going to win. David Villa’s vaguely annoying goal only made the comeback even better. I don’t think I could choose my favourite moment, but one that will stay with me forever was being at the San Siro in 2008 when we beat AC Milan 2-0. The lashing rain, the seats so high we might as well have been on the moon, the stinky toilets with the menacingly wet floor, then the goals. There were two men sitting in front of us. At the beginning of the match, they were drunk. Really drunk. So drunk. Pressing their noses up against the partition and making ugly faces at the home fans drunk. By half-time they’d calmed down a bit. They sat, heads in hands, the tension clearly making their beered-up brains heavier. When the full-time whistle came, with everyone else jumping up and down hugging, one turned to the other, tears on his face, and said, ‘If I never see another game of football, I will still die a happy man’.

If you could bottle that feeling of an unexpected win, minus the inevitable hangover, it would be the bottle you keep for a really special occasion that never seems to come along. I knew exactly how he felt, aside from the man part. I cry all the time in matches. My sister is almost as much of a football wimp. I cry when it’s good, I cry when it’s bad. I cried when we were beaten by Barcelona in the Champions League final and I cried when we beat Liverpool 1-0 at home last year. It’s pathetic, but it’s football. There are so many people in the world who don’t care for it. They look down their noses at it as being overpaid, morally bankrupt, beneath good society. Increasingly, they’re quite right. But it doesn’t stop me from pitying them, in the knowledge they’ll never have a chance to feel what it is to be a passionate football supporter.  There are some amazing writers on the sport, of both professional and amateur works, who manage to possess an incredible knowledge of the game without ever pledging allegiance to a single individual team. It’s impressive, and a bit weird. I also know a lot of people who support multiple teams. That’s their choice and good on them for actually managing to find the time and patience to dedicate to so much football. There is simply no way I could handle the stress of more than one. Besides, we are by far the greatest team the world has ever seen so who needs anyone else?

I have one mum, one dad, and one sister. And then I have the Arsenal. I only became aware I had him at the age of six or seven. He’s a total problem child, who gives me sleepless nights and lost voices and stress headaches. Other people really dislike him, and really enjoy kicking him when he’s down. I can complain about him as much as I like, but anyone else trying it will get an earful at best, and a bruise at worst. When he’s bad he’s annoying, but when he’s good he makes the world the best it can possibly be. Friends, jobs, boyfriends and homes will come and go, but the Arsenal will always be there, whether he’s being mean or magnificent.

And that, I think, is family.

***

Sian Ranscombe has been writing her blog ‘From A Girl Who Loves The Gunners’ since March 2010. Her favourite on the current team varies between Bacary Sagna and Thomas Vermaelen, depending on who is less injured at the time.

12 – ARSENE WENGER AND TACTICS - Michael Cox

“The team talk was at 12:55pm and lasted just five minutes while Arsene named the team. No-one was really too surprised or too disappointed; we had seen the way it was shaping up in training during the week. Chris Wreh, rather than a fit-again Ian Wright, was always going to be Dennis Bergkamp’s replacement. At 1:05pm we left. Not once had we discussed Newcastle. We were confident enough that if we played well, we wouldn’t need to worry about them.”

Tony Adams in his autobiography, Addicted, on the 1998 FA Cup final preparations.

There lies Arsene Wenger’s greatest strength when trophies are won, and arguably his most obvious weakness when Arsenal lose a big game. He is not inherently a tactician – he’s not a chalkboard man, not likely to win games based upon an unusual formation decision or a clever, game-changing substitution. He has an overarching ideology rather than a series of smaller policies, and Adams’ final line typifies that.

The definition of tactics

It depends what you consider ‘tactics’. Brian Clough only ever used the word to refer to how he would go about stopping the opposition. In other words, nothing natural or positive his side did was a ‘tactic’, and so tactic became a dirty word, perhaps a predecessor to ‘anti-football’. If you send your side out for a Cup Final without mentioning the opposition, by Clough’s definition, you do not have any tactics. That example from 1998 appears to be extreme, even for Wenger. At that point, the approach was probably justified – Arsenal had won the league, were the best team in the country, and could afford to go out, do their thing and be confident of taking the game to the opposition. It worked rather well. Besides, in that age, English games simply weren’t as tactical as they are now: it was 4-4-2 against 4-4-2. Games were based around physicality and technical quality rather than tactical acumen; and individual battles were more important than a clash of systems.

It is debatable whether such an approach is workable in the modern era, yet Wenger’s attitude seems to have remained more or less unchanged. On the way to winning the World Cup in 2010, Cesc Fabregas compared preparations at Spain with pre-match discussions at Arsenal. “Here (with Spain) they give us more information, definitely. At Arsenal we don’t really look at anything from the other team, we look at ourselves, and that’s it.” It is amazing, and yet not surprising to anyone who has followed Arsenal over the past 15 years. In recent years the side has struggled against managers like Jose Mourinho and Sir Alex Ferguson, who both adapt their team to the conditions of the game. Against lower sides, Arsenal always appear surprised when they come up against a team who ‘parks the bus’. There’s rarely an obvious approach to exploit weaknesses in the opposition. Arsenal essentially play the same way from game to game, and sometimes it has catastrophic results – most obviously in the August 2011 defeat by Manchester United, a barely believable scoreline of 8-2.

“Let me put it in perspective,” began Paul Merson, a pundit on Sky for that humiliating defeat. “There’ll be a lot lesser teams with much less talent than Arsenal who will come to Old Trafford this season, and make it twice as difficult (for United). You’ve got to have tactics. You can’t just have a plan A; you’ve got to have a plan B. Don’t put those kind of players on the pitch as lambs to the slaughter…you can’t keep on putting teams out and saying ‘play the Arsenal way’ – it’s not good enough.”

Plan B

Ah, the old plan B. In a way, it’s nice to hear it in a different context; usually it’s been used to refer to what Arsenal rarely had: that penalty box striker who could allow a more direct game. Here, of course, it is used in a broader sense, but it’s still the idea that Arsenal can only play one way. For the most part, this is true. Except for one thing – two things, in fact. The last two occasions Arsenal can count as achievements – winning the FA Cup final in 2005, and getting to the European Cup final of 2006 – came when Arsenal played football that was much more defensive than usual. Wenger significantly altered his tactics to become a reactive side, one that played 4-5-1 and defended deep, before countering. On the European run of 2006, Arsenal kept ten clean sheets in a row against the likes of Ajax, Juventus, Real Madrid and Villarreal. Admittedly, it meant a slightly more negative style of football, the second leg of each knockout tie finished 0-0. But for that season, Arsenal combined resilience and organisation at the back with real quality going forward. No-one was complaining about the football not being attacking enough when Robert Pires slipped Cesc Fabregas in at home to Juventus, or when Thierry Henry scored his brilliant solo goal away in the Bernabeu.