AN ARSENAL FAN from Belfast slags me off on the Amazon website.
In reviewing The Professor, the guy says : “He seems to be a trendy author who took a fancy to Wenger’s Arsenal.”
That is a RIDICULOUS comment.
I was a reporter in the Arsenal press box for years when Terry Neill was the manager. We watched dire Arsenal teams, sometimes on freezing February nights, with only the jokes of Jeff Powell to keep us from nodding off.
Don Howe came into the old press lounge after one game and shocked us by saying he’d handed his resignation to the chairman.
I cursed myself for not having switched on my cassette recorder, so that, after Don left the room, every reporter could write down exactly what Don had said.
It is rubbish to say I took a fancy to Wenger’s Arsenal.
BUT THIS IS TRUE : I took a fancy to George Graham the first time I met him in August 1986.
We got on well, I interviewed him one-on-one in his office three times and was lined up to interview him a fourth time when he was sacked, so I asked Stewart Houston if he would be interviewed instead and he said OK and I talked to him in George’s office with five Sampdoria videos on the desk.Arsenal were about to play Sampdoria.
I also interviewed Bruce Rioch.
One Sunday morning in 1996 I got an unusual phone call.The new manager was flying in today from Tokyo and reporters were invited to meet him, so I went along to see what he was like.
Immediately, I realised Arsene Wenger was radically different to any of the dozens of managers I had previously met.
That was obvious to everyone who was there that day, I think.I hope.
So that Sunday afternoon, after having lunch with Pat Rice, and chatting briefly to David Dein and Danny Fiszman, I went home and typed out all my thoughts about the new manager and his situation, as well as transcribing everything that Arsene said that day.
I did that because I wanted to nail it down for future reference. The passage of time deceives us and our views of people change and we are never entirely sure how and when our views changed.
Some days are more important than others, some days are signposts, and I try to be responsive to those signposts. Some events force you to make notes, and meeting Arsene Wenger was one of them, just as meeting George Graham had been.
I wrote my thoughts down privately, for myself, not to use in an article.
I just wanted to record that day for future reference, in case it became significant later on. I had no idea that I would one day be asked to write a book about Arsene Wenger.
In 2000, when Virgin hired me to write The Professor, I punched up those computer-saved pages from 1996 and read them again.
Eventually, with most of the book written, I decided to use those notes almost verbatim as an introductory chapter which I call PREFACE : MISSION STATEMENT.
Also, my interest in football is not “trendy.”
I became interested in the game when I was 15 and started writing match reports on youth football when I was 16 and then when I was at Manchester University I met Matt Busby, Alf Ramsey, Malcolm Alison and Tommy Docherty.
I was more interested in managers than players, although I have interviewed and met hundreds of footballers during many years of writing for Inside Football, the Scottish Sunday Post, Time Out, Radio Times, The Scotsman, 90 Minutes, FourFourTwo and the Scottish Sunday Herald.
WHAT HAVE I DONE to deserve this from Mr Malicious of Belfast :
“Anyone who has read Palmer’s columns will know the intense regard that he has for himself and his own opinions and this book seems to be a padded series of his columns. Palmer tries to set himself up as an all-seeing, all-knowing football genius.”
Sorry mate, but ANR is not The Professor.
If you don’t like ANR, don’t read it. If you want to complain about ANR, write to us at ANR.
If you think Myles Palmer is too opinionated, don’t read Myles Palmer.
I can’t help being opinionated. Being opinionated is like having blue eyes or big feet.
ANR is what I say to my friends about football. Without the libels.
It’s what I say to 12 or 15 friends, typed out so that it can be read by thousands of people. If you have a problem with the tone, it’s because that’s the way we talk.
ANR is often quick, topical, off-the-top of my head, full of typos and bad grammar and cliches, as speech often is.
My stuff on ANR is not a book – it’s informal, chatty, like an email.
The Professor has structure, balance, facts, descriptions, quotes, narrative, strict themes, loads of things that ANR lacks.You can’t compare the two.
The Professor took thousands of hours to write because every page was written and rewritten and edited a dozen times.
The book is not “padded”. It’s 380 pages cut down from 800 pages, brutally compressed into a few themes and some set-piece events which cover four or five pages each.
There is a lot of detail as well as generalisations.
You say : “This book tells you a lot about the author.”
And I say : This book tells you a lot about Arsenal FC, something about Arsene Wenger’s career before 1996, a lot about what Wenger inherited, a lot about what he did with the ageing team he found at Highbury, a lot about the players he bought and sold, and a lot about the hundreds of games his teams have played since 1996.
It tells you a bit about the author in that (1) it records the questions I asked Mr Wenger on your behalf and (2) it contains my detailed descriptions of key events, including several AGMS, which cannot be read about in any other book and (3) it describes how, while with three French journalists, I bumped into George Graham on Hampstead High Street just after Patrick Vieira had given the four of us a lift back from the training ground at London Colney, near St Albans.
IS THAT CLEAR? I’m not a trendy author, my book is not padded, and ANR is not The Professor.
ANR is nothing like The Professor, except for a few pages.
ANR is free.
The Professor costs £6.99 on Amazon.
If you can write a better football book than me, if you are better qualified, don’t bottle it up.
Don’t be anal. Don’t keep it to yourself. Write it, share it, get it off your chest, send it to Virgin.
For more on The Professor ( including reviews, table of contents and an excerpt), please click on Home below.