Friday, January 21st, 2011 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade
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Victory Through Harmony
Snooping Around 18, 19 & 20
By Sammy The Snake
Sammy The Snake runs a company. Well, you got me! Sammy The Snake pretends to run a company while he day-dreams about Arsenal. I have a huge football pitch in my head, and I’m constantly replaying the goals from the last game, or wondering how the next goal will be scored against whoever we’re playing in the next 27 hours or so (Fabianski distributes to Sagna, ball pushed towards Cesc, two steps forward, quick turn to lose his marker, ball sliced towards RVP, and goal!)…
Anyway, Sammy The Snake has a football analogy lecture that he keeps drilling in to his troops: “Business is just like football, it doesn’t matter if you have the best striker in the world if the rest of the team is not on par. It’s no use to have a team of stars if the coach has no clue. To achieve success, you need to have all the components of the team in the same wavelength. It’s not good enough if you have the best team and the owners keep making wrong decisions. Even the team doctors, and even the water boys, must be of the highest standard…” You can see where I’m going with this, so I’ll stop.
I’ve recently been thinking the opposite of this rule may be equally true: “You must really suck at everything if you’re at the bottom of the league”. Teams at the depth must have rubbish players, air-head coaches, mismanaged owners, and the list goes on. So it must be interesting to see if the blogs for such teams suck as hard!
Parking at 18th place on the league, and earning only 1 point per game, we find our next opponents, Wigan, to whom we gifted a point (by sacrificing two of ours) when we last met not too long ago. First on the search results, I see OleOle, which covers all teams and is not a Wigan-specific blog. On their Wigan page, and hold your breath for this, there’s nothing! They have Wigan’s basic information (established 1932, manager, chairman, league position, last/next game) and nothing more. You can see “no news found” as the only meaningful words on this site.
Wigan FC Official Web Site has a blog compartment, with one article “Wigan 0-5 ManU” written by BBC Sports on 22 August 2009. No kidding! On the right, you can see the headlines, the second of which is “Wigan 2-2 Arsenal” which refers to our game of 3 weeks ago! This is truly the land of the dead.
Not one to give up, not easily anyway, I keep searching and finally get Wiganer.net, which seems to be their only proper blog. And it is a proper blog, with intellectual articles like “Fulham Reaction: Negative Latics pay the price”. They have a message board with lots of interesting reading materials (but linked to footymad.net). Different topics (Like “If I were a rich man”) make it an interesting reading, and the picture of the cutie in bikini makes the page easy on the eyes (you may wish to visit http://boards.footymad.net/forum.php?tno=558 for closer inspection). The general mood here is one of despair that new players aren’t coming in, and even if they were, one or two players can’t make that much difference when the other players aren’t creating chances. This seems a bit cynical, but it’s probably true.
Our next target is the local rugby team called Wolverhampton Wankers, also known as “Mussolini’s favorite”. They’re sleeping so peacefully on the 19th, and they deserve their position every bit. This great team has one single blog to call its own, and that’s Wolves-Mad (I hear you, you gotta be mad to follow this junk!). But wait a minute, this is part of FootyMad again, which means this isn’t an independent blog at all.
Let’s have a look anyway… Wolves showing off their 500,000 pounds newcomer from Barnsley (Spending all that cash!)… “Wolves make survival a priority” (No Sh!t!)… And a bit of shouting about their 5-0 thrashing of Doncaster (the strongest team in pre-historic Europe). The message board isn’t much livelier, except that I like one thread beautifully titled “MICK OUT”.
At last, and of course surely least, we have West Ham: the greatest pornography football team this side of Jupiter. They like it so much in 20th place that they can’t get themselves to fire their coach, or is it that no one wants to replace Avram (who gives a new meaning to the term “walking dead”).
Hammered blog is a different kind of creature with short “tweet-like” articles on a daily basis. In one longer blog, they’re still arguing how Tevez was legally playing for West Ham (good old days, eh!). Other topics include daily roundups, transfer rumours, and such stuff. I like the style of writing, the wits of the writer and the ideas put forward, especially in a rant called “Sky Sports Understand – Very Little”:
“…Sky … “senior source” … Grant Would be replaced … Sky don’t say if this same “senior source” saying something completely different to what was said yesterday… Here’s my lack of understanding of the situation:
1. … Journalist trying to sell copy… or
2. … club are leaking this stuff to media… to force Grant to resign… or
3. … club have failed to convince any of their managerial targets to take over… or
4. … disagreement on the board… to replace Grant or not…”
Quite an honest approach, I’d say. Up next, Hammers In The Heart blog, which goes to show the Porno team have a bigger web presence than the other W teams. Again, this is an “outside-the-box” kind of blog, somewhat refreshing. They expose the fact that the West Ham leak is none other than Avram’s agent, a Barry Silkman, who happens to be doing all the wheeling & dealing at the club as well. To top it off, he’s pre-releasing their news on a betting channel! Well, well, well… What else is new?
They seem to be overly preoccupied with their managers plight, claiming “We love you Avram we do?” I’m not best pleased with them saying “And he’s finally shut-up those Gooners singing “Sacked in the morning!”. Yeh, right! Happy stay at “20th Place Inn”!
Isn’t it interesting how all the bottom teams are alphabetically last too? They all start with W! Is the opposite true? The team starting with A should be on top, right?! Another topic for another time.
Come on Gunners, tear Wigan apart on Saturday. 3-0 to the Arsenal!
Sammy The Snake
The new George Allison season on the Arsenal History site.