Thursday, February 16th, 2012 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade
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By Tony Attwood
The longest relationship I have had in my life is with Arsenal. I found myself emotionally bound to the club from childhood, with both my parents coming from families that supported the club from the moment it moved to north London. I had no choice. I was an “Attwood”, I was Arsenal.
Now with both my parents having passed away a few years back, and with myself being no longer in contact with any of my chums from primary school, my love affair with Arsenal is by far and away the longest emotional relationship in my life.
Which means that when things go wrong, as they did last night in Milan, I feel the pain. There’s no logic there, no analysis. Just pain, sadness, unhappiness.
It is the same when we win: I just have the emotions. I couldn’t fully share in the 7-1 victory over Blackburn as I was in Australia at the time, but I’ve been there at great moments – the victory over Everton to win the league with Tony Adams scoring, a 6-1 away thrashing of Middlesbrough, the final game of the unbeaten season to secure the impossible dream….
Why did I laugh and scream with delight on these occasions? And in the case of the final whistle of the victory over Leicester at the end of the unbeaten season, why did I cry and cry so much that the guy next to me, who I didn’t know, felt moved to comfort me and ask if I needed help? Because of my emotions. Because of my lifetime love affair with this football club.
The ups, the downs – I never know how to cope with them properly – especially the downs. My mate Roger, with whom I shared so many journeys and so many matches before his untimely death, used to get into the car after a humiliating defeat, shake his head and say, “never mind”. And that was that. What else could be said?
But the media play a different game – especially when it is a European game. It is an irrelevant game, but at the same time, a game that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.
They start always with the commentators saying that they are hoping for a victory for the English team. But that is not a hope based on the emotions that we all feel as real Arsenal supporters – it is a fake emotion, an emotion based on nationalism and the voyeurism of the onlooker who can’t be part of the real show.
We are supporting Arsenal in Europe because we love Arsenal, not because Arsenal is a club whose ground is in England. Goodness knows what Walter and his pals in Belgium would think of it all if he heard this faux commentary. The commentators don’t actually call the opposition “Johnny Foreigners” any more as Lord Sugar did when he was running chairman and was talking about Arsenal signing Bergkamp, but the implication is there.
Then, when it all goes wrong, they start looking at the detail, like sad pornographers, unable to understand the meaning of our love for the club, and so instead looking for details, close ups etc, all with the vague hope of getting turned on.
Whether they do get a turn on or not I don’t know – but surely they must know they exist in a terrible no-man’s-land devoid of the company of all real passionate supporters. You know, and I know, that last night all real Arsenal supporters were desperate for us to do well, and desperately sad when we didn’t. You know, and I know, that all Tottenham, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea supporters were desperate for us to do badly. The first four because they weren’t invited to the show, and the last one because it takes the pressure of their failures.
I don’t blame those supporters – I am the same in reverse. I want those teams to fail, and I want my team to win, just as when my children were in competitions during their school days, I wanted them to be first, at the expense of everyone else.
So the media move from a very very poor imitation of a lover at the start of the show, wanting Arsenal to do well, and turn into something more akin to the dirty old man looking in through the window at the couple having a bit of slap and tickle on the sofa. They analyse the position, they look at the moves, they criticise the technique of the couple in the house, and they do all this AS IF THEIR OPINION MATTERED.
This is where they go so wrong. Their opinion does not matter. It doesn’t matter a toss. I have my grief at last night’s defeat, and I don’t need a bunch of people who don’t know the meaning of being a true supporter to tell me anything about it, any more than a teenager needs a Personal Social and Health Education teacher to tell him how to get over it when the girl he fancies has been seen holding hands with the guy who works in the pie factory.
These emotions are things that you work out yourself, with your own loved ones and your dearest friends. And it is this that the media has always failed to understand. It is emotional guys, there is no logic.
True, the football media did once have a raison d’etre, in the days before mass TV coverage of football, for in those days they could tell us what happened – and it was the only way we got to know the story. Often they were hilarious with it too, writing in a style that is now long since gone. Later they had a role in telling us who might be moving from club A to club B.
Now those reasons for existence have gone. The games are on TV, and the rumours of transfers are all false.
Their new approach – trying to be logical about something that for most of us is utterly emotional – leaves them cast out on a desert island that most sane people can’t reach and don’t want to reach.
I am, for some reason, reminded of Plato’s Republic. Don’t worry if this means nothing to you – its a Greek thing. But anyway, in the book Plato describes his perfect society, and within that society he bans poets. He does so, as I recall, because the poets always fail to put across the emotions of life, because they use words which are fixed in real meanings. When they go beyond colours and shapes, they fail. Musicians on the other hand, working in the abstract world of pure emotion, can open the gateway to feelings, and they can be in the Republic. Plato lets in the musicians – just as I open the door to the true supporters wrapped forever in their all-encompassing love for their club.
So it is with football. It is an emotional world, not a logical world, and the insistence on the media to treat it in a non-emotional fails every time, just as pornography fails to convey anything vaguely approaching the meaning of love and relationships.
I am devastated, I am sad, I am heartbroken, I am lost. And I don’t need some snivelling journalist on TV or in the paper to tell me that the cause was something to do with the fact that we have lost our three best midfield players this season, or anything else. I know all that, and I don’t care.
Just leave me to my misery.