Bring Back Dein « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager
by Ian Trevett
I am a full-paid up member of the AKBs – otherwise known as the Arsene Knows Best brigade – which is why I always come back to this site. But I also belong to the trickier to pronounce AKBBKEMWDIA grouping, although to be fair, I have just invented this. I don’t think a career in marketing beckons after coming up with such a garbled acronym.
In case you were wondering it means: Arsene Knows Best But Knows Even More When Dein Is Around.
He made some big mistakes. I hated the idea of playing Wembley. I hated the idea of Usmanov owning the club. I am pleased that the rest of the board stood up to him on these occasions. But the fact remains that Arsenal has had considerably less clout on the British and World football scene since he departed.
On football matters, he is well connected, ambitious and powerful. No-one on the board has represented the club in the same way since. His deal-making was legendary and decisive, and gave us a big advantage.
I know that Hill-Wood and the old buffers on the board have the best interests of the club at heart but they are hardly dynamic and forward-looking. Lady Nina has called for fresh blood and I totally agree.
If you want to understand the influence of Dein, you just have to look at the post war record of the board. Chapman and Allison were football revolutionaries and years ahead of their time. Nothing was too sacred to change. Standing still was never an option, they always had a new idea and during the 1930s we were, without question, the most powerful team on the globe.
After the war, the team carried on nobly, winning a couple of titles, but after 1953, the club declined into a mind-numbingly mundane institution, and the team won just one league championship in 26 years (puts today’s barren spell in a bit of perspective). Part of the reason for the decline was that the board slavishly followed the innovations made by Chapman. One manager, Billy Wright, used to curse the bust of Chapman that looked down disdainfully in the Marble Halls.
The board totally missed the point. Chapman’s legacy should have been a club that constantly changed and experimented, always looking to the future. That was what he was all about. Instead they ‘honoured’ him by replicating what he had done in the 1930s. In his name they created a backward-looking club.
It only changed when Dein arrived in the early 1980s. Hill-Wood had such a lack of vision that he scoffed that Dein’s investment was dead money.
Dein had a vision for the club and every day he looked in the mirror wondering how he could create a winning team. To be honest, I never trusted Dein at the time, and I saw him as the enemy when they demolished the North Bank and introduced the Bond scheme. I wrote for the fanzines and even got a serious looking warning letter on one occasion. Mind you, the editor of The Gooner had added a headline of ‘Dein’s Dirty Deals’ which may have been a bit provocative!
But in time, I realised that this was a man dedicated to turning Arsenal into a force to be reckoned with. I met him a few times when he instigated some fans forums to help create a better atmosphere in the ground (a forerunner or Red Action), and he donated ‘anonymously’ a huge flag that appeared all over Europe until someone swiped it.
But his biggest contribution of all was appointing Wenger. He wanted Wenger after Graham departed, but he was over-ruled by the rest of the board who wanted a Graham Mark II (another Scot in a blazer). He got his way in the end and at last we had a manager who truly lived up to the legacy of Chapman.
I’d bring back Dein now. He’s not perfect, but he would shake the place up. His partnership with Wenger worked even better than Bould and Adams or Petit and Vieira. Bring them back together now.
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