ANR gets loads of emails.
We post a few when we can, and we reply privately on occasion.
We got over 200 emails after my financial piece and I’ve been called lazy, clueless, arrogant, imbecilic and carping.
However, some readers liked what I wrote and agreed with it. One guy said it was an interesting and useful analysis. Quite a few people are upset by what the Arsenal directors are doing and not doing. And, as always when readers disagree with me in vast numbers, I notice that they disagree with each other as well.
It’s a shame that I’m misunderstood. It’s a shame that people do not, even now, realise where I’m coming from. I’ve made it abundantly clear, over a number of years, exactly who I am, and where I’m coming from.
Taking the 200-plus emails as a whole, I think there is a dimension of anxiety among Arsenal fans which has nothing to do with what Myles Palmer writes or doesn’t write. That is just my intuition at this moment, in the last week of July, 2008.
Also, I don\’t think I\’m that lazy. When I first went online in 1998, just after Arsenal won the double, some of the Arsenal boys were playing in the upcoming World Cup, and Ian Grant suggested we do a subsidiary website about the tournament, as we were buzzing after Arsene\’s heroes took the title from Manchester United with the most dynamic and thrilling football we’d ever seen.
The day I went online was the same day that the World Cup managers had to submit their 22-man squads for France 98 to FIFA, so we called the offshoot-site FB22.
Since then I’ve written 200-250 pieces a year and many of them were over 1,000 words and some were over 2,000 words or even 3,000. I don’t count the pieces or the words, I just write when I can, and when I have something to say, and write it as it comes, and try to give an honest opinion, and when I get it wrong I roll with the punches. There’s room in cyberspace for everyone, and if I worried about people slagging me off, I’d never sit down at this keyboard.
In January 2000, I wrote Seven warriors, three technicians, one of my own favourites.
I did a piece titled Ten reasons why Arsenal should have bought Robbie Keane
In February 2002, after the Bayer Leverkusen game, I wrote Arsenal are the speed-kings of 21st century football.
In December 2002, I did Arsenal half-term report- and hot gossip
In March 2003 I wrote Vieira was 500 times more disappointed than you.
In November 2003 I wrote Three assists by Thierry in Arsene’s 400th game.
In December 2004 I wrote Fabregas, Flamini, Almunia star in 2-2 draw with Chelski.
In November 2006, ANR was crashing a lot and it had failed again the day I went to Colorado to see my brother Neil but I filed a few pieces while I was on holiday over there.
In football, I judge a player by his last 10 games and I judge myself by my last 10 pieces. I’m not at my sharpest right now as I’ve been on holiday since May 12. I needed a break, so I\’m having one and our 15 days in Split, Bol, Sibernik, Krka, Primosten and Trogir was part of that.
I\’m gonna get back to work when the football season starts on August 16. I\’m really looking forward to getting back to work and I\’m looking forward to the new season as well. I always associate the new season with autumn, not summer, with going back to school, going back to uni, walking out early on a Saturday afternoon to see Stevenage Athletic Under-18s, or Manchester University, often on a cool sunny day, or on a breezy day, or sometimes on a damp day.
And for 20 years going back to the press box after the summer break was like my first day back at school.
As I\’ve indicated, I\’m not a big pre-season man. I think pre-season is for managers. I\’ve always said that rehearsals are for groups, and pre-season is for managers.
So I don\’t have much experience of watching pre-season games. I do remember a few Makita tournaments, a couple at Wembley, and one at Highbury, where I met Hugh Southon, a tabloid genius who could talk to a player for ten minutes and get four stories, often without the player realising he had given Hughie any stories. Hughie had the phone numbers of hundreds of players and he persuaded me to start writing for 90 Minutes, a weekly magazine edited by Paul Hawksbee, so I did that for a while and became quite pally with Chris Waddle, Ray Wilkins, Darren Anderton and Mark Draper.
Hughie said, “As long as we\’ve got these numbers, we\’ll always earn a living.” It was Hughie who had the numbers. He gave me 30 phone numbers for every one I gave him.
There was one July when I must have been unusually enthusiastic because I went to see Leyton Orient v Arsenal. I was standing outside the ground talking to John Cross, Lambros Lambrou and Nigel Bidmead. A little while before that I had sent George Graham a fax asking : When can we do your book?
As the four of us were talking, George appeared and walked briskly towards us. He grinned and nodded but didn\’t stop.
“Did you get my fax?” I asked.
“I’m too young, ” he replied, laughing.
After the game, which Arsenal won 4-2, I asked George about one of the goals Arsenal had conceded.
In hindsight, it was not worth mentioning. A ball had been crossed from the right and it had gone over Lee Dixon’s head and an Orient player had knocked it in. Arsenal never conceded that sort of goal, so I was a little bit shocked, which was why I mentioned it. But George just laughed it off.
He said, “I’d rather it happened now than in a real game. It gives us something to work on.”
And I knew that George would definitely work on that. I knew for sure that I would not see that goal conceded again. That was why I liked him. He was cocky and he made me laugh and he had the answers to all my questions for eight and a half years. Mostly, he knew which questions were coming.
George once played Lee Dixon in midfield against Nottingham Forest, after his scouts had given him rave reports about a seventeen year-old Irish boy who had just come into the Forest team : Roy Keane. That didn\’t work and Arsenal didn\’t win and the senior players were upset with George for switching them around.
Quite a while later he played Lee in midfield again and the game didn\’t go well, so I asked him about it.
“Why did you play Lee Dixon in midfield? You promised never to do that again.”
“Did ah?” he growled.
George really didn\’t like that question. But I think he’s forgiven me by now.
OK, that’s all I’ve got time for this Wednesday morning, as a friend is coming for lunch, and I\’m playing catch-up today because I got up at 8.30 a.m. rather than 7. Last night I went to the Jazz Cafe with my mate Chris to see a hot, tight 10-piece Latin band from Texas called Grupo Fantasma.
Chris had previously seen them at the O2 Centre, when they were Prince\’s backing band