By Myles Palmer
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After Arsenal became champions again, Virgin asked me to write another chapter for The Professor, which they have republished this week with a new jacket.
Luckily, the exploits of Lehmann, Toure and Reyes gave me something new to write about.
The bank loans for Ashburton Grove made the season memorable.
And the unbeaten record made it historic.
It’s not easy to describe a football season briefly, compressing it into a story with strong themes, without leaving out something significant.
THE PROFESSOR – Arsene Wenger at Arsenal now has a new Preface, a Prologue, and 11 chapters.
Chapter 3 is Booze and Ignorance.
Chapter 7 is 1999-2000 : The Season of Henry
Chapter 8 is 2000-2001 : The Season of Rotation
Chapter 9 is 2001-2002 : The Season of the Squad
Chapter 10 is 2002-2003 : The Season of 15 Draws
Chapter 11 is 2003-2004 : The Season of 38 Games Unbeaten
People always ask :Are you an Arsenal supporter?
And I reply : No, I’m a writer, not a Gooner.
A writer is someone who is always looking for something worth writing about.
Writing 360 pages, and rewriting every page five times, takes a billion hours alone in a small room, so if you ever hesitate, if you ever think for one minute that the subject is not worth this much grief, you will never
finish it, let alone do a good job.
Readers new to ANR must ask : who is this guy? What gives him the right to say these things?
WELL, I BECAME interested in football when I was 15 and I did local match reports about my mates, who played for Stevenage Athletic’s youth teams.
At 18, I wanted to write a book about football.
Went to university in Manchester because my hero Denis Law was playing for Man United.
But on the first day at uni I joined the fortnightly student newspaper as football reporter and on the second day I met the team at Fallowfield, the sports ground.
Spent three years travelling with them every Saturday and Wednesday, writing about our games.
So my plan to watch The King did not work out. I only saw a few matches.
Benfica was good !
But I interviewed Denis for the student paper.
Denis asked if he could have Pat Crerand sit in on the interview “for moral support.”
Afterwards, Pat gave us a lift back to the university union. Me and the photographer.
That day changed my life. Until then I had thought that stars were a different species from the rest of us.
Meeting these two footballers made me realise that stars are just blokes.
After that,I was never in awe of famous people, and got on well with those I met and interviewed
The president of Manchester University Football Club was Len Langford, a former Man City goalkeeper who had played with Matt Busby.
One Wednesday when we did not have a fixture, Len arranged for Manchester United’s youth team to come down and play us.
Matt arrived in a beige Rover driven by Jimmy Murphy, his assistant.
Both wore light brown Crombie overcoats.
Matt was benign, a bit like the Pope.
Our photographer stook a picture of me with Busby and Murphy, but I never saw it, as I only bothered with photos we used in the paper.
United’s youth team were whippets, under-18s, and one of them was Brian Kidd.
I spent the game comparing Kidd with Johnny Brooks, my mate, who was two years older and had captained England schools at cricket and trained with West Ham. Ron Greenwood advised him to go to university.
Johnny was a big lad, like a left-footed Bergkamp. I thought he was better than Kidd. But I was biased.
He later trained with United, after I left, but did not enjoy being treated like a piece of meat
EVEN AS A STUDENT, I was more interested in managers than players.
During Rag Week in 1966, not wanting to shake a charity tin, I went to London and met Alf Ramsey and Chelsea boss Tommy Docherty.
I watched the charismatic Malcolm Allison training Manchester City on the pitch at Maine Road, which is a 10 minute walk from the university.
In the dressing room I talked to Big Mal as he got changed, while Mike Summerbee and the other players rioted nearby, accusing Irishman Johnny Crossan of pissing in the bath.
IN 1970 I was working for Radio Times and we wanted to start the season with some features on skilful players like Eddie Gray and Ralph Coates.
My mate Kurush, an Iranian student at the Royal College of Art, insisted on driving me to Burnley in his Mini-Cooper S.
The car packed up at Stoke and I got out and phoned the club to say we would be late.
By the time we arrived the players had all gone home. Manager Jimmy Adamson had his secretary call Ralph, who drove back to the club to talk to me.
While we waited I had an illuminating chat with Adamson, who had turned down the England job before it was offered to Alf Ramsey.
In 1985 I became The Scotsman’s Charlie Nicholas correspondent.
In those days, Everton and Liverpool won everything.
I told Ian Wood, my sports editor, that London clubs were doomed to failure, that football was a northern thing.
“I don’t expect to see a London team win the league title in my lifetime.”
“Why ever not?” said Ian, astonished.
“Well, because it means more on Merseyside, it’s not so important down here, it cant be, there are so many other things going on. Liverpool is a poor city. Football is all they’ve got. Ronnie Whelan is young and fit and wearing a nice suit and driving a new car and living in a big house. He has the best job in the world in a city where many people don’t have a job at all. Every ball, every tackle, every goal, is important up there. Much more important than it is at Spurs or Arsenal. We can’t compete with that intensity”
Then in August 1986 Arsenal played their first game of the season against Man United and beat them 1-0 and Arsenal’s new manager walked into the press room and hit me like a bolt of lightning.
I had never met George Graham before that day. I loved him because he was menacing.
He was also succinct, like Howard Kendall. He did not waste words.
George said, “I wanna see Charlie in the box – and I mean the six-yard box.”
He also said, “We’re gonna set standards here – and the players know it.”
He was in and out in two minutes.
I was gobsmacked.
I was stunned.
I thought to myself, “Jesus Christ, this guy is gonna make the players earn their money !”
I knew instantly that EVERYTHING would be different now.
This guy was a Glaswegian martinet who was crisp, super-shrewd, tough as nails, knew exactly what he wanted.
I did not know what would happen, but I went to every home game after that, to find out.
At press conferences I became George’s feed-man, his stooge, his friendly quizmaster, always asking the first question, and often the second question.
I did that for eight years.
We had a rapport.
OCCASIONALLY, if he had changed his team, or Arsenal had played badly, I would wind him up.
Once I said, “You promised you’d never play Lee Dixon in midfield again.”
“Did I ?” he growled.
George becomes very abrasive when challenged.
But he knew that I liked him and understood what he was trying to do.
We did one on-one-interviews in his office.
Later, I asked, “When are we doing your book?”
He smiled and said, “I’m too young!”
The week after George was sacked I was due to do another interview with him, but sat down with Stewart Houston instead.
Stewart had five Sampdoria videos on his desk.
SO WHEN ARSENE arrived in 1996, I knew exactly what the
Frenchman was inheriting. The club, the directors, the personalities of the squad, the recent history, the expectations of the fans.
It took a long time for someone to ask me to write a football book, but The Professor was fun to do, even if it did damage my health and sanity.
I decided to make it a before-and-after book, in case somebody read the book in future years and did not know what the club was like pre-Wenger.
In 1996 Arsenal was a good club that shared a training ground, had an ageing team, some boozers, some gamblers, and no good youngsters coming through.
ARSENE turned it into a serious modern club with a deluxe training ground, undersoil heating on two pitches, dieticians, hydrotherapy pools, masseurs, plyometrics, and so on.
NOTE : The Professor is not a biography.
It’s a book about one man’s impact on the club, the team, the style, the brand, the franchise.
And it’s a book about football and footballers, and the competitions that Arsenal try to win.
Most of the book was written at the time of the events described, so the 360 pages took eight years to write.
Its quite dense, compacted, but easy to read.
There’s a lot of detail, sometimes too much. Arsenal 2 Bayern Munich 2 gets five and a half pages.When Arsenal led 1-0, it was exciting. When they led 2-0, it was very exciting. Could they beat the big boys?
Thats about it, really.
The Professor is a book that is new to anybody who has not read it.
First published in 2001, it has stood the test of time and I’ve been able to add new chapters and new insights.
It’s my best book. Even if I write 10 more books, it might still be my best book.
Virgin had a new print-run of 6,000 copies.
August 10th 2004.
PS Some thing I forgot to say.
If I had never written this book, and I was given a choice of 20 Premiership managers as the subject for a book, I would say : Arsene Wenger.