From: Jayjay Brokocha
Date: Mon, Sep 7, 2009
Subject: Reader advice
Myles,
I’ve been reading your blog for years, and have always respected your views.
You often publish emails that agree with your viewpoint, and some that don’t. You also talk about us readers as being your inspiration for writing so many blogs a year.
But I do feel your being overly negative, it’s saddens me that I skim through your articles now rather than taking time to read, access and analyse.
I will remain one of your biggest readers, I just don’t feel you’re doing enough to keep some of your old time readers, like me and my close friends, who come to you for a reasoned, fair and constructive articles.
Regards,
Jay
p.s. ANR is saved as an icon on my iPhone on my very first page, along with text message icons, iPod icons and all other important icons for the average 25-year old. I don’t want to have to move you to my second page, Myles. Please listen to my advice, you’re not the same Myles as we used to know and love.
Thanks, Jay.
Your message is very direct and candid.
So I’ll respond candidly.
I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you and your best buddies.
If I’m not the same Myles, it’s because it’s not the same Arsenal. I still enjoy friends, family, jazz, novels and holidays as much as I ever did. Our time in Croatia last summer was the best holiday we’ve ever had, or at least since Barbados.
I think I enjoy football as much as I have ever done, although in a different way. When I enjoyed a powerful, exciting Arsenal team, it showed. When I saw a patchy, mediocre Arsenal team, I enjoyed it less, and that showed as well.
Nineteen days ago, I started this season badly. I was fine until I got inside the stadium for the Portsmouth game on Saturday, August 22.
Portsmouth were weak opponents but not as fragile as Everton had proved to be the previous week, when Joleon Lescott was still at the club and that nasty situation made the Everton team unrecognisable.
During the Portsmouth game I sat there thinking : What would it take to get this place rocking? When can I see a rocking, thrilling, memorable big-match victory that really excites the crowd?
Obviously, the first game of a season is not always fun. It’s often tentative, a nervous beginning, a re-convening of the faithful, a dress rehearsal of a show that might start next week. And the English football season always kicks off during the six-week break of the English school holidays. So half the country is on holiday in August, as I was for 14 years in the Algarve, missing the Charity Shield and the first Arsenal home game every year because I was away with Jan and our school-age kids.
Therefore I didn’t have huge expectations on August 22. But I sat there wondering, “What would it take to get this place rocking? Will it have to be new owners, a new manager, a new team?”
My life, like the lives of millions of other people, has been quite random. It’s been chapter after chapter of accidents, as I wandered from advertising into journalism, and then rock journalism, and then into co-managing bands and making a few records, and then into football journalism, and then I sat next to Ian Grant in the Highbury press box when Arsenal were playing Blackburn.
I can’t remember the date in 1997 or the result but we got talking. Ian knew a lot about computers and had been online for years. At that time I didn’t know what a website was or what an email was.
Then I went online with Demon in June 1998, when Arsenal had just won the Double.We were enjoying it and Ian suggested we do a website on the World Cup as a spin-off from ANR.
That was the day the 32 managers had to give FIFA their 22-man squads, so we called the spin-off website Fb22 , a silly name. When things happen very quickly, silly stuff comes out but some good stuff comes out too.
I had not realised how many matches the new format World Cup would entail. But since I love World Cups, and would be watching it and talking about it anyway, I just took what I was saying to friends and typed it out and put it on the internet.
Somehow, 11 years have flashed past. We stopped going to the Algarve, my hair turned grey, the kids went to uni and got jobs, and all the players I had met have left the club: Vieira, Bergkamp, Dixon, Winterburn, Adams, Parlour. I’d done phoners with Wrighty and Bouldy and some others. I’d met Overmars and Petit the summer they joined.
By 1994 the only Invincible I had met was Gilberto, so I was further away from the team.
I still loved football, though. In the late Nineties I sometimes wondered why I did ANR and I gradually realised it was 33% sharing, 33% therapy and 33% practice.
When I first went online, before the net was commercialised, the thing that struck me was the spirit of co-operation and sharing. That spirit reminded me of American students I had met. I don’t know why but that’s how it grabbed me. I tend towards snap judgements, towards trusting my first impressions. I suppose I’m an intuitive type who trusts his responses and gut reactions too much, someone who fails to analyse and calculate and be rational.
Pre-ANR, I shared my views on football with 12 friends. Then I made those views available to a wider audience, to see if they were interested.
By therapy I mean: getting things off my chest. If you do that, you feel better, I find.
As someone who had written within the format of Radio Times, within the format of Time Out, The Times, The Scotsman and other publications, I wanted to keep my style more open-ended, to be able to go where the sentence takes me and where the paragraph takes me.
As an author, I did not want to write like a tired old newspaper hack and I thought ANR would help to keep my writing a bit more fresh and original. Where I could, I tried to refresh the cliched language of football reporting.
That’s what I mean by “practice”.
So that was how I saw ANR : as 33% and 33% and 33%.
What was the other 1% ?
I think it was noblesse oblige. I wanted to give something back. I’ve been lucky in having a lot more good years than bad years, having lived a privileged life, coming from a loving family, having created a loving family, having a million laughs, and rising above the bad days and the disappointments, which were many.
If I believed in God, I’d thank God every day for how lucky I have been, especially when I had those car crashes as a student. In my own small way, after an entertaining life as a football fan, I’d found a way of giving something back.
That was why I wrote ANR back in the days you recall so fondly.
Of course, it’s much easier to see things in hindsight.
I don’t know why I do ANR now. I really don’t know why I do it. If I knew, I’d tell you.
I have no answers, only questions.
When will I start enjoying Arsenal again? When will I start believing in the team again? What will I do if Arshavin and Fabregas leave next summer? Will this team go to Manchester on Saturday and beat City 3-0 and win the league and build indestructible happiness ?