Monday, December 24th, 2012 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager
So what we see is a demand for the club to use “its own graduates, Russian players and foreign players with a similar mentality,” which is although not a racist statement in itself, a very dangerous one given that “mentality” is not defined, but turns up in a document which also says that they don’t want players who represent “sexual minorities”.
As I said at the start, Arsenal got a mention within this manifesto. “Now we fear that the club is turning from this road and following the paths of Manchester City, Arsenal, Anzhi and others who buy packs of players from around the world who do not represent the city or region they represent. For us it’s important that Zenit preserves its identity. …We want to prevent the transformation of Zenit from unique auteur cinema into a Hollywood blockbuster.”
The original Arsenal teams were made up of men associated either with the locality, and the ordnance factories – but those men were not all men of Kent, nor even men from Kent and/or London. The team regularly played with between three and five Scots in the lineup, and the man who did more than anything else to stabilise the club, and who was the first chairman of Woolwich Arsenal as a league team was born and bred in Co Durham.
So why then did people so criticise Arsenal for putting out teams with no, or few, Englishmen in the team when the club had been represented by non-Englishmen from the start? Why is an English spine to a team better? Is it about Englishmen being inherently better? (If you are of a certain age you might recall hearing about the fact that the English national team should always play with a big strong centre forward because foreign goalkeepers couldn’t cope with them). And why is it acceptable to talk about the positive nature of an English spine to a team, while the Zenit manifesto worries most of us.
I suspect that the fact that for a while we had no British players regularly in the first team and now we have several is just coincidence. There is no Arsenal policy of discriminating in favour of English or English and Welsh players. But if the newspapers and TV pundits that endlessly ranted against Arsenal during the period of our having no Englishmen in the regular first team were to be believed, Arsenal should have had a nationalist (if not a racist) policy. Though quite why we should have done was never explained (unless somehow it would have helped England not miss so many penalties).
When we get into a tangle like this, things become difficult. Compare the criticism of Arsenal for having no Englishmen in its first team on occasions, with this comment from the Zenit fans:
“We, as the most northern club of major European cities, never mentally were associated with Africa or to South America or Australia and Oceania. We have absolutely nothing against the people of these and any other continents, but we want primarily at Zenit to have players who are close to us in spirit and mentality.”
The issue is one of the local identity of the club. I support Arsenal because I was brought up near to the ground, and my father and both my grandfathers supported Arsenal. That was the source of the local identity, not the players. My early memories of Arsenal involve seeing Northern Ireland full backs, and a Welsh goal keeper. Later a Scottish centre forward. Of course I knew where these players came from, but it didn’t worry me. Arsenal was my local club and I couldn’t care less where the players were from.
Now that local identity has gone. I retain my season ticket while living in the East Midlands. The trains from this region are packed with Arsenal fans on match days. Does it matter that Arsenal was never fully identified with England, and is now not even identified with London? Does it matter that we have fans all over the world?
For me, the answer is no. I still call myself a Londoner, because of my origins in the city, and the fact that I worked in London for many years. But I don’t worry about the origins of players nor other supporters. That’s why the Zenit manifesto is so troubling but also so illuminating.
For me, it doesn’t matter where the players come from nor where the manager comes from, nor where the supporters come from. I like the fact that we have become an international club and for me all the talk about the Arsenal’s new “British spine” is irrelevant. I really don’t care where a player was born or brought up. If he’s Arsenal, then I support him.
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