Monday, April 9th, 2012 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

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By Tony Attwood

I have no idea who invented the phrase “Highbury Library” but it was one of those half-rhymes that newspaper journalists and TV pundits love to repeat.  A simplistic vision that if repeated often enough avoids having to think of anything new to say.

No one ever went out and measured the noise levels at grounds, and from my experience over a lifetime of watching football, Highbury and the Emirates were no different from other places in the Football League.  Noisy in parts, noisy at times, quiet when facing a miserable defeat.

Of course some grounds are noisier than others, sometimes because of the architecture, sometimes because the football is so utterly awful that it is up to the fans to do something to make up for it.  (One thinks perhaps of Stoke here).

But there are people out there who still maintain Arsenal’s ground is quiet.  It is gibberish of course.   For it can be – and for the last few months has been – the noisiest ground in England.

There’s a relentless deafening volume that can be maintained for far longer than in most grounds.   And there is the humour.  “He plays when he wants, he plays when he wants, Carlos Tevez, he plays when he wants,” doesn’t quite have one falling off the seat at home, but it was so funny in the stadium, given that the melody used about Robin is what we hear most often.

The Nasri song was presumably cut for TV audiences for being grossly obscene but also rather droll I felt.  And had a lot of people who might not normally say such a thing, joining in.

Yes it was fun.   We dominated the noise through the 90 minutes, (Man $$$ hardly made a sound), we dominated the game on the pitch, struck the posts, missed several open goals, cleared one of our shots off their line, and showed we could win even without luck.

Song, we must not forget, is fortunate not to be in hospital, such is the nature of the way Manchester City allow and indeed presumably encouraged their players to play, but it is part of the myth of football that this club built on many years of nothingness, playing in a stadium that us British tax payers paid for, creating a club with a disregard for the rules of Uefa and questioned for being improper within the Council of Europe, is all somehow ok.   “Shit club no history” sang the crowd. Quite right.

David Platt at the end asked the Man C “players” (I use the word lightly in some cases) to go to their travelling support.  Carlos Tevez did not, nor did quite a few others.  That is what you get from this type of manufactured football club.

Having had 64% of the possession, 5 shots on target to their zero, and 13 shots all told to their 5 Arsène Wenger said that when the “horse smells the stable” it accelerates.  It was a clever twist on calling Man U, Manure, just one of an infinite number of literary and linguistic observations that Mr Wenger has made over the years  that makes him so worth listening to.

Back in the game, Nasri was awful, making us all so glad that we had taken the money and banked it, ready for this summer’s spending.  When his history is finally written (and I would love to be the guy to do it) Mr Wenger’s ability to turn decent players into men playing way over their ability, and then flog them knowing that there is no one else in football who knows what to do to keep that player at the highest level, while pretending he doesn’t want to lose them, is so obvious, so well known, and yet clubs fall for it every time.   Remember Hleb?  Adebayor meandering from club to club?   Poor Gaël Clichy just not really there.   Even great players get the treatment – Thierry Henry costing Barca something in excess of £1m per game until they found his time had gone.  Vieira, sadly finding that he had moved from a club of morality to a club that fixed so many games even the Italian league finally had to relegate them.

Yes of course Arsenal wanted to keep Nasri and Cesc last summer to avoid the disruption that we got when they left, and worse of all when Jack was injured.  That is what Chelsea and Man City can do to any club – offer insane money for players – in the case of Nasri for ordinary players made great by our manager.

If ever we needed proof that Arsenal make players and rebuild players, just look at Tomas Rosicky, just look at Arteta.  Oh and Song, the man whom the AAA always told us was not fit to wear the shirt.  And our goalkeeper, who was clearly not up to it which was why the AAA were baying for us to spend £10m, £20m anything on a keeper.  And a new centre forward because Van Persie could never see us through a season.

On the way home my companions in the car chose “606″ on BBC Radio 5, and we listened to some turnip saying that Arsenal should not be celebrating because we are so far behind Man U.  He said the same line about how many points we are behind the leaders nine times in three minutes before they cut him off.

So the AAA are still out there with their simple little statements amplified by a willing media who having had to let go of the Highbury Library are now casting around for something else to call us with forgetting that our team was torn apart by morally bankrupt but financially powerful predators as the season started.  No conversation about football in England can be complete without the reminder that there are two clubs in the league who can spend anything on anyone (and still can’t be sure to beat us).  Nor will it be complete without mentioning that there is something extremely curious with the way refereeing is going, and that in the midst of all this, we are still there, still winning.

606 did quite a bit on refs, and they, like much of the media look like a rabble in retreat.  The old ploy of ignoring the referee issue totally has been battered down by the endless insistence that there is a problem published on the blogs like this one.  Then the media tried the line that refs are incompetent (a line they still run).  Then they tried “it all balances out in the end” on the basis of penalties given (as if we were back in the pre-TV days when Liverpool fixed games using that method to win the league over and over again).

Now they vacillate between each idea – nothing wrong, incompetence, all balances out – but you can just hear underneath the voices that they have read what we publish day after day.  You can just tell that the media is holding on desperately to the notion all is ok.

Radio 5 even allowed on a guy who sought to explain why refs are biased in favour of certain clubs.  He was a bit muddled, and the argument didn’t really stand up, but it was heard, and not for the first time.

Walter, and all our ref reviewers – keep it up, the myths are being blown away.  The message is getting there.

A day at the Ems is a lovely, noisy, joyous day to behold.

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What a great game of football!   How the atmosphere came across on the TV

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