UNTOLD ARSENAL » Blog Archive » “Arsenal fans quite happy to wait for success”

You can’t really imagine the Daily Mirror running that headline.  It is what editors would call a non-story, and so it gets non-coverage.

Instead the Mirror is today running a piece saying that Wenger should be sacked if Arsenal come in sixth in the league.

Of course there are people who agree with this, but what cheered me this past weekend was the number of emails of support I saw on the Red Action news group and elsewhere in which the stance of the fanzine Highbury High was the centre of attention.   In case you missed the article about it on this blog, and the magazine itself, Highbury High carried the banner headline proclaiming Highbury High as a moan free zone.

In taking this stance the magazine is up against the might of Wapping Swamp, or where ever it is they make newspapers these days.

So it is that “Wenger to Real Madrid” (the weekend’s story in some papers) is much more likely to get a print run than “Wenger to Stay”.   Indeed Wenger to Stay can only be run if first the paper has run the news that he is going to Real Mad.

Actually, and diverting myself for a moment, it is always interesting to read the way the language changes when papers do reverse their stance and suddenly reveal the opposite of their previous statement to be the truth.

“Wenger will go to Real Madrid” screams to Daily Dollop.  Then when it becomes clear that the Lord Wenger will do not such thing, the Dollop will state that “although he had been tipped in some newspapers to leave Arsenal this summer, the Dollop can exclusively reveal that Arsene Wenger will be staying at the Emirates for at least another week…”

That way the papers get a double hit.  They get a headline story that makes some people buy the stuff.  And then they get a hit by suggesting that it wasn’t them that ran the story in the first place, and you can’t trust these scurrilous newspaper editors.

Of course it doesn’t always work – no one has acknowledged that anyone said that Wenger was going to sign Peter Crouch when it was imagined by the press that Adebayor was going trip trotting along the road to Milan Reserves with Flamini. It still remains one of my favourite headlines.

Anyway, 1-0 to Highbury High in my opinion.  The Moan Free Zone – I love it, and I’m so glad that there is an effort going on to show the world that some of us are very happy with the current management.  (I just wish half the ladies team weren’t buggering off to teams in the States, but still, we can’t have everything.)

(c) Me.  Today.