Thursday, August 26th, 2010 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger in all he does

By Bogus Cheese, our man with an argument

Mes cheery cheries.  Bonjour, hello and what’s new?

A happy Limburger to you all.

Our dearest old chums of chance, the Anti-Arsenal Arsenal are up to it again!  You’d have thought they might climb back down a bit having taking such a hammering over the question of the tickets sur le season upon my soul, but no.  Passendale cheese?  Not a bit!

On our site, on our very own site, yes right here, on our beautiful dedicated and overwhelmingly overwhelming Untoldio, comes one of their number claiming, saying and proclamating such tales as you would not believe.  In fact you wouldn’t believe them.  And in case you do not believe and choke on your bavaria blu I’ll quote the very same words, the very words, and no sanitisation or Stilton (Protected Designation of Origin)

“So details concerning Wenger’s contract extension have emerged and it appears that he is no longer on £5million a year, they have given him a 20% salary increase up to £6million a year. Can you believe this?”

and another…

“If we have a fantastic youth system how is it that not one player in 15 years has come through that system.”

(Which youth system is that?  The one that developed Theo, or the one that took Cesc at 16 from no-man’s-land, or the one that gave us A Cole, or the one that developed Wilshere and JET and Lansbury and Frimpong, or the one that has developed Coquelin, or the one that found Anelka, or the one that found Gibbs, or the one that brought in Bendtner as a 16 year old…)

Oh my little serpentine, my little Ribblesdale Blue Goat, its the old trickety trick!  Quote a non-attributed source, treat it as fact, and they argue on from there.  Make up a statement that is horribly and hopelessly so far south of the truth that it won’t even stand up in a cheddar mine, and then treat it as real.

Oh come on!

Then the second bit of Kefalotyri and back with the supposed salary – they say, “How in Gods name does anyone manage to secure that sort of salary increase when they have failed…” assuming that a) the original story is true, and then b) there is a failure and that c) the world is as simple as a piece of Camembert de Normandie.

Instantly we are into corruption, and all the rest of the old Gruyère.  I mean to say!   Appellation bloody d’Origine Contrôlée sunshine or what???

This is the gibberish of the premier order.  This is tripe.  This is nonsense.  This is Munster-Géromé (no offence).

First, I insist, no I demand, no I utterly utterly mean you jolly well have to.  If you want to cite something that is not accepted as common knowledge (like for example the fact that an object dropped from a height towards the earth will accelerate at a rate of 32 feet per second per second) then you really do have to say where the data came from.

In the first case (the salary) no origins are posted by the scurrilous poster, but the story has cropped up on goal.com and a few similar sites, mostly using the same language and terms as each other, suggesting a fair degree of cutting and pasting.  In the second, well, there are no facts at all.

It is a standard anti-Arsenal trick – plant the story, get it copied and then get your dandelion minionettes to repeat it as if true.  There is no truth because there is no verification.  It is the Anti-Arsenal bundle of Oak Smoked Wensleydale and Stinking Bishop.

They plant the story and then try to get us to argue about it, thus attempting to get their original premise accepted as fact while we argue about the rights and wrongs.

Lord Haw-Haw or what???

Second, if you are going to suggest Wenger has failed, you have to do so within a certain context. Now you can say, “If for a moment we ignore the fact that in the last five years football has changed with the arrival of Chelsea and Man City’s endless finances, and if we ignore the fact that Arsenal have selected a route to long term profitable survival rather than the risk of continuous debt, and if we ignore that for the past seven years Arsenal has been building a youth team which started with the recruitment of a bunch of 11 year olds, then it might be argued that Arsenal have failed in not winning a trophy for five years.

“However to argue this we must also look at the historical context of 23 major trophies (league and FA Cup) in shall we say the last 100 years.  (100 is a good number since it is exactly 100 years since Henry Norris created the modern Arsenal).   So that gives us 1 trophy every 4 to 5 years – which means Wenger is not far off in the present run when there has been the biggest upheaval in football since 1939 – but even this ignores the fact that every year it is a top four finish, which makes the last six years the second longest run of being in the top four in the history of the club.

(The longest run of being in the top four is held by, oh, what’s his name – that French guy.)

(Put another way, even in the 1930s we couldn’t stay in the top four for more than five years running, and that was before Mr Hitler became general manager of Europe).

Now I know that one can construct a debate without all this complexity in it, but really to do so takes us back to the level of the Daily Star, and I am not really certain that Untold is working at this level.

If we are then we really should run the headline

Arsene Wenger and Elvis Presley lived together in a London double decker bus on the dark side of the Moon until rescued by David Dein and Captain Pugwash

I mean Icelandic Höfðingi or what?

No, my petty squiggles, my tiny footnotes to the history of propaganda,my little Marat, mon petit Robespierre,  you can’t do it like this.   If you want to corrupt the truth you can do it, but you have to do it with style, with panache, and with whatnot, and not with just whatwhat, if you catch my drift.

Might I suggest the writings of the Tony Attwood character in “Making the Arsenal” where he has Jacko Jones writing his King of London parody and the Swiss Navy is just one of ten different foreign groups to invade the country at once.  You can do it like that, but not just by making up childish little tales, cutting out 99.99 percent of the facts and then running a rant.

(You can of course rant a run, but that is a different matter).

My dear chums, “we’ve already said… goodbye – and since you’ve gotta go you’d better go now”, as the disc jockey played at my club last night for reasons that will not become apparent at this time.   And really if you don’t know that quote, you should pack up your Macedonian Kashkaval and head for the hills because this is serious.

Propaganda is an art and a science, and you, my petit Edam, my minor Gouda, my smelly Limburger you are none of these, my anti-Arsenal Arsenal propagandists, for you cannot write a believable story, you cannot entertain, you cannot amuse, you cannot convince with your dribbling little dribble, and your Jarlsberg and your Nøkkelost

What do you take me for?

Ah, one of those.

Well I’m not.   Circassians Tvorok Rossiyski and goodnight.  (And you probably don’t even know what cheese is).  Give us an argument with gusto and phlegm, not some basic piece of wholemeal constructed out of anchovies and scribbled down in three point seven seconds flat.

Yours sincerely

Bogus.

PS – Tony do I get double fee for mentioning your book in that rather authentic manner?

OK – but don’t tell anyone – ed

Oooops.  Sorry.