So Paddy Got Up - an Arsenal anthology (8 page)

Arseblog was also very engaging. It was an opinion piece about Arsenal that was written every single day; regardless of whether there had been a game the day before – I wanted to read it in the morning. Not really because I wanted to know what was happening in the world of Arsenal – I invariably knew that stuff from the plethora of other websites that were out there. But I wanted to get the funny, humorous take that Arseblog was so good at. It wasn’t that it was irreverent, or quirky, it just appealed to my sense of humour, and obviously it helped enormously that I invariably agreed with the opinions expressed, which were generally very reasonable and not reactionary. They were passionately pro-Arsenal and its values, loyal to the club and its staff. These were qualities I liked to think I had myself.

The other thing about it was the comments; to start with, it was a relatively small community of people from around the world with whom I was able to instantly identify through the Arsenal connection: people from London, from Utah, from Canada, from Scotland, from Ireland, from Australia, from Wales. These people were Arsenal fans, but as well as that, they were also relatively tech-savvy early adopters of the web – another common interest. The comments weren’t just about the football either; there was a mix of conversation covering a range of topics, and it was the first online community in which I really felt at home. It undoubtedly appealed to the university version of me that had been so taken with the entire concept. It didn’t matter where I was, or that I didn’t go to games very often, and since it was online, it wouldn’t matter if I moved on again.

My own involvement with Arseblog came when I offered to help out with the technical side. As I recall, there was some problem with images not being displayed, and at the time I was a web developer, so offered my assistance. After that there were other little technical issues here and there that I helped out with, and then one day the comments system on the blog broke for the umpteenth time, so I wrote a new one – the Arseblog Arses. From there I was privileged enough to be asked to write the blog on occasions of holiday and such like. I can tell you now, given that it has to be written every day, it is extremely hard work. I’ve had the slightly more dubious pleasure of writing for Arseblog in the close season, when there’s literally nothing to talk about, and yet it still happens – and people still demand it – day after day, year after year. It’s really quite the achievement to have been doing it almost every single day, for ten years, and still be attracting new readers.

The other significant component to Arseblog was the forum, which quickly grew and became where I spent far more of my time than I care to think about (and certainly wouldn’t admit to any of my former employers!). The forum was far from just football related – there were posts on all sorts of subjects, with friendly and knowledgeable people from around the world willing to give you an opinion or talk with you at any time of the day or night. It was very addictive, and very community spirited. An excellent example of this was when I wanted to spend my stag weekend in London for an Arsenal game. The weekend we’d chosen was Highbury versus Blackburn, which was hardly the most glamorous of games, but after a request made on the forum, I got nine tickets for me and my friends for that game, via Arseblog. Nine! These were people that had never met me in real life, and certainly hadn’t met my friends. I remember meeting one of these extraordinarily generous people in the city to get his season ticket and not quite believing he was happy for me to post it back to him after the game. I tell you what, that was some responsibility – that ticket went back Royal Mail Special Delivery with extra insurance, and no mistake. That story really sums up the Arseblog community for me. Ten years later and I’m proud to say I’m still very much involved.

That hasn’t been the end though. Twitter and Facebook have come along, both of which have given more fans more direct access to players than ever before. Twitter in particular was something I didn’t see the point of until relatively recently, but I do appreciate the access it gives fans to players, at least theoretically, and to their credit, most footballers have embraced it too, sometimes with unintentionally hilarious consequences. But it’s the web that changed everything when it comes to being a football fan. There are countless blogs, news sources, feeds, forums, chat rooms, and websites dedicated to clubs and players. It really makes no difference where in the world you live – you can be a supporter of whichever team you like. You can be an exile, an expat, and still watch your team. There are kids in China and Africa who have never seen Arsenal play live, and may never do so, that are some of the most passionate supporters out there; and I’m quite sure that like me, some of them are choosing to be Arsenal fans because their friends are Man United or Chelsea fans.

The clubs and players themselves haven’t been slow to exploit the commercial potential this has brought – there’s no doubt the web has contributed massively to the growth of the ‘superclub’, and players themselves are now global superstars. One or two players have even transcended their sport, David Beckham being the prime example, and while part of this is no doubt down to the general expansion of global media and the ambitions of companies like Sky and the Premier League, I think most of it is directly attributable to the web since it’s made the world that much smaller and more accessible.

And as Arsenal fans I think we’ve been very lucky indeed that the age of the web-based fan has come along at a time in our history when we’ve been relatively successful and are playing attractive football. There’s no doubt it has benefited the club enormously.

Here’s to continued evolution.

***

Tom Clark is an Arsenal fan exiled in Edinburgh, Scotland. Occasional contributor to Arseblog, and creator of the arses, he looks after the technical side of the site.

7 – HERBERT CHAPMAN - Philippe Auclair

Herbert Chapman; eternally plump, eternally anxious, no doubt, to undo a button of his well-filled and perfectly tailored waistcoat; eternally waiting to raise his homburg to a passing lady, does not correspond to the image we have of a football god. Luis-Cesar Menotti is a stronger candidate, long-haired like a doomed dueller, blessed with the kind of beauty men don’t understand until it is too late to join the tango, something you would never have said of the Yorkshire man. Both smoked, but Herbert’s cigarettes look stubbier than Cesar’s on photographs somehow. Herbert didn’t do sexy. But Herbert was a genius, not just the greatest manager Arsenal Football Club has ever had (which seems indisputable to me) but perhaps the greatest of them all; if greatness is ascertained not just in terms of a long intimacy with success, but also of a never-satisfied desire to move forward, innovate and experiment, whilst laying the foundations of traditions which long outlasted one’s tenure at the helm of a club, or clubs, or national team.

Every Arsenal fan knows, or should know, that had it not been for Henry Norris turning to the man who’d just won two consecutive league titles with Huddersfield Town, their club might have gone back to the old second division from which they’d been very lucky (Tottenham fans might use a different adjective) to leave a decade earlier. None of the glories they witnessed in the 1930’s, when the Arsenal had a legitimate claim to be recognised as the world’s greatest team; in the early 1950’s, when Tom Whittaker revived a club that had suffered more then most during WWII; in the late 1960s with McLintock’s commando, or any time since, might be savoured now. Before Chapman made heroes of the Gunners, he saved them.

Look at the photographs again. Herbert has the appearance and the demeanour of a typical Englishman of his era; that of a prosperous merchant, perhaps, whose plate was only empty when he’d dealt with it with a robust fork. But within that wide, jovial and unremarkable frame, a brilliant, inventive, unorthodox, revolutionary mind was at work. I often wonder if there has ever been an English manager like him, and I sometimes despair that there will ever be another one (I very much doubt it). Chapman was a cosmopolitan, to start with. What would we not give to hear the conversations that he had with his great friends, the Austrian Hugo Meisl and the Italian Vittorio Pozzo? Imagine this, as I have, often: the man who offered W-M to England, then the world, the godfather of the Wunderteam and the architect of the Metodo, huddled around coffee cups and shots of brandy, somewhere in Vienna, Budapest, Trieste or London. These men were giants, their age a golden one, when modern football still had to be invented, which they did; for they were modernists, not plain modernisers.

Although an Englishman, Chapman was no little-Englander. Black players? Foreign players? So bloody what? When he was in charge of Northampton Town before WWI, he signed Walter Tull, the grandson of a Barbadian slave. The same Tull who’d played a handful of games for Spurs before he was hounded out of their first team by racist fans. (Somewhere in North London, there should be a statue of handsome Walter, the first coloured officer in the history of the British Army, who was killed in action in March 1918, three-and-a-half years after he volunteered to join the King’s infantry; but that is a different story, one which should be taught in schools, and isn’t).

Johnny Foreigners? He attempted to bring the great Austrian ‘keeper Rodolphe Hiden to Highbury in 1930, only to have an unholy alliance of the Ministry of Labour, the PFA and the Football League squeal in unison and prevent the transfer from happening. Chapman then recommended Hiden to the only British manager who, in my opinion, deserves to be quoted in the same breath as Herbert, Jimmy Hogan. Hogan, who more or less brought modern football to the continent, coaching in the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Germany and France (only to be branded a ‘traitor’ by the FA) took Hiden to Racing in Paris, where he won one league title and three French Cups before Hitler’s Wehrmacht passed the Maginot line. Chapman responded by taking on a Dutch ’keeper instead, the amateur Gerrit Keizer, who’d played a bit at one of Arsenal’s feeder clubs, Margate FC, and regularly featured in Arsenal’s first team in the 1930-31 season before his daring and idiosyncratic (euphemisms for ‘crazy’ and  ‘erratic’) style cost him his place in the starting eleven

Chapman never shared the belief most of his contemporaries had in the innate superiority of the English game, and envied those continental colleagues of his who could take their teams into the Mitropa Cup. This competition, championed by Hugo Meisl, played a vital role in the spectacular progression of clubs like Austria Wien, Ferencvaros, and Sparta Prague in the late 1920s and the 1930s. Had he not brought his Northampton side to Nürnberg as early as 1909? Hadn’t he mooted the idea of a genuine European Cup more than two decades before L’Équipe launched it in 1955? The Arsenal were considered to be the world’s premier side, however, despite being denied a chance to prove it. The Gunners had to be content with regular trips to Paris to play against French football’s aristocrats, Racing; trips which were instigated by Chapman of course, and became one of the great sporting occasions in my country in the pre-war years. Wishing to spare his players a strenuous train and ferry journey, Herbert thought nothing of flying to the French capital at considerable expense – the first team to do so, one of so many ‘firsts’ linked to his name – to ensure that James, Hulme, Bastin et al were in peak condition to confront their opponents. It made perfect sense; but then, so many of Chapman’s innovations, all of them in fact, were based on common sense. What set him apart was that he could distinguish prejudice, which should be fought, from tradition, which must be honoured, and that which was deemed ‘revolutionary’ by others was only logical (he’d have used the word ‘scientific’) to him.

Take his adoption of the WM system, which would become the default tactical formation throughout most of the world until Brazil introduced their 4-2-4 at the 1958 World Cup. The change of the offside law in 1925 led to a glut of goals in the English League, and Arsenal’s conventional 2-3-5 struggled to adapt to the new regulations. Part of Chapman’s genius was his astonishing attention to detail, which led him to innovations like the adoption of white sleeves and hooped socks, so that his players could identify team-mates from close or from afar without losing sight of the ball; but this arch-modernist was no control freak. In fact, he’d go as far as encouraging his players to put forward tactical ideas at the weekly team meetings he’d introduced at Highbury; another first, it goes without saying. According to Brian Glanville, it was at one of these meetings that the great Charlie Buchan, a £2,000 snip buy from Sunderland, suggested that one of the three half-backs should drop between the two fullbacks to create a line of three defenders. The idea was not entirely new, and some recent research by Jonathan Wilson suggests that Southampton had played at least once in this formation in the 1923-24 season. But what might have been an experiment for others became a system for the Gunners once Chapman put Buchan’s idea into practice, providing the organisational foundation on which Arsenal’s ensuing success was built.

The way English football reacted to this tactical shift was two-fold – or, rather, borderline schizophrenic. Within a couple of years, almost every single professional club in the country had adopted Chapman’s WM; but that didn’t prevent opposing fans and supposedly neutral newspapers from accusing Herbert’s serial FA Cup and League winners of practising an over-defensive football – and this, when Arsenal scored 127 goals to become champions in 1930-31. There is an explanation for this reluctance to give the Gunners their due: the watching public hadn’t learnt to ‘watch’ yet. They still felt nostalgia for the short, triangular passing game favoured by legendary teams of the past such as Corinthians, which the systematic use of the offside trap and the alteration of the laws had rendered obsolete a long time ago. By contrast, Arsenal, who had perfected the art of swift transition from defence to attack better than any other side of their era, favoured the ‘long, well-placed kick’ (Chapman’s words – note: not the ‘long ball’) and the quick switching of flanks, in order to bring their opponents out of position with deadly effect. Chapman’s players were also notably quicker, fitter and stronger than their rivals, thanks to their manager’s unprecedented attention to diet and physical conditioning. Unfortunately, very little footage has survived of the conquering side of the 1930s, but what remains shows a team which, in terms of style, organisation and rhythm, is much closer to the implacable Liverpool of the early 1980’s than to Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona or, indeed, Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal. This is not to say that Chapman discouraged his players from ‘expressing’ themselves on the pitch. The Scottish inside-forward Alex James, for example, had full licence to exploit his stupendous ability to pick passes that no other player could have imagined, yet alone executed – a Dennis Bergkamp in baggy shorts, if you will, with Cliff Bastin in the role of Freddie Ljungberg. Chapman was ahead of his time and, because of this, dominated it.