Dear Myles,
I have read your blog for a long time and, despite disagreeing with you on many topics, I continue to patronise your site on a daily basis.This is because I invariably find your opinions to be insightful and based on fact, especially when compared to a lot of other Arsenal blogs.
However, I have to say I am disappointed with the tone of a lot of your articles recently. There seems to be a focus on the negative and a trend towards denigration of the team and it’s achievements, or lack thereof.
Particularly I find this negativity focuses on Wenger, and you cite in many cases where he is losing the plot or making fundamental mistakes in his management of the team (note not the club because he does not manage the club).
I would posit that it is not Wenger who has mismanaged matters.
In fact I would say he has done a fantastic job guiding the club through a very trying time as it has embarked on a decade long period of modernization.
The reality is that the amount of commercially sourced debt that the club has taken on in order to perform this modernization has presented real problems for the football business. You mentioned last year about loan covenants which the club is subject to, and I think it is worth remembering that these put immense shackles on any business that assumes debt as a means to pursue growth. For anyone who is unfamiliar with loan covenants I think it is worth pointing out what they are: business rules aimed at safeguarding a lenders investment. They can stipulate many things ranging from minimum cash reserves to be maintained, levels of profitability, or key man provisions.
However, in most cases the penalties for non-compliance with these covenants can go as far as assumption of control of assets, potentially the club in our case. The reality is that the every day man on the street does not have access to the terms of Arsenal’s loans, as they are private agreements, but we should all recognize that at the minimum they mean that there is no room for fiscal irresponsibility in our club.
Wenger has managed to keep the team competitive while staying within these boundaries, and there should be no Arsenal fan that forgets this. If you look at the key decisions he has made over the last four years, almost all of them can be traced back to the economic situation of the Arsenal Group.
An example of this is the current formation. I’m sure there are many reasons for adopting a 433, but the players Wenger has to work with are key in it’s use. The reality is that we conceded too many goals last year and we need to shield the defense more. We don’t have the funds to buy an Essien, so we now need three players where some might use two in central midfield. As in all Wenger’s great teams, he has foregone out-and-out wingers for marauding full backs, and now has three technically gifted forwards in Arshavin, Van Persie and Eduardo, so in my eyes it seems a system well suited to the players he has. My question to you is that if you think this 433 doesn’t work, what formation should we play? I can’t see us being any more effective in a 442 given the players we currently have or could afford to buy.
I am not saying that more could not have been done to lessen the impact of these restrictions. The sluggishness the club has displayed when pursuing an overseas commercial strategy is unforgiveable (the Deloitte numbers back this up). Four years ago we had one of the hottest brands of the moment in world football, and some of the most marketable players, yet we failed to capitalize on it in time. To me this was free money that we missed out on, and for that the board should be held accountable. This is perhaps where Manchester United and Chelsea have been able to steal a march on us, as their revenue numbers show we lag them to the tune of 16M GBP per year in this area.
Your blog has become a somewhat prominent source of Arsenal news on the internet, and I feel that you have a duty to present balanced viewpoints wherever possible.
Many of us look to you to provide analysis of our club, not just comedic opinion or hyperbole, a valuable quality that many other sites cannot claim. I personally would like to see you think more about the overall situation we find ourselves in, rather than just focus on the perceived mistakes that are being made in the running of the club.
Keep up the good work.
Regards,
Patrick McKenna
Myles replies :
Regarding my negativity on Wenger, I’d say what Nick Hornby said about George Graham : you can go off people.
His thrilling successes are celebrated in The Professor, a 400-page paperback which is a hymn of praise for 390 of its pages. The final chapter covering 2007-2008 is titled Another Developmental Season. If I’d had to update it for August 2009, the new chapter would have been called Yet Another Developmental Season.
When 2008-2009 started on ANR, I still called the manager Arsene. Somewhere in the autumn or winter, that changed to Wenger. I don’t know exactly when that changed, but I know why it changed. I stopped believing in his culture, stopped believing that his methods would ever win another trophy for Arsenal. I didn’t think that Walcott, Djourou, Eboue, Song, Adebayor or Van Persie were good enough. When I saw Torres go past Toure twice in the first ten minutes at Anfield, I thought : he’s over the hill. AW wanted to unload Ade for 15 months before he did so.
When the young Patrick Vieira signed for Arsenal he joined a team of battle-hardened warriors who had won things and he thought: I want to be like Lee Dixon, Tony Adams, Nigel Winterburn. Now it’s the exact opposite of that. New players join a team which has won nothing and they think : it’s OK to be a bit flaky.
Silvestre said Arsenal was too French but when Sir Alex thought he was no use to Manchester United any more, Silvestre signed for Arsenal because Wenger could not afford anyone better.
I love letters like yours. You are absolutely right to say he has to play Arsh, NB and RVP in a three because that’s the only way he can get all three of them into his team.
I was thinking that earlier today. And you’re 100% correct to say that he has three players doing the work of two in central midfield because he can’t afford an Essien. In 2002 he rang Harry van Raaj every day but the PSV president did not budge from his price of £15 million for Mark van Bommel, the rugged halfback Arsenal needed. He could not pay £15 million so he signed Gilberto Silva for £4.5 million. Gilberto was a good partner for Vieira but not for Fabregas, so he replaced Gilberto with Flamini and it worked superbly for six months. That was an inspired and radical move that I explained at the time on ANR.
This 4-3-3 is too new to judge. Let’s see what happens in the first 10 games.
My preferred formation would be 4-4-1-1 with Nasri left, Wilshere right, Arshavin behind the main striker.
Yes, Arsenal’s global brand has been neglected and commercial income is £20 million a year less than it should be because of Keith Edelman’s front-loaded deals. I’ve heard that Edelman is now advising Red & White. If that’s true, then everyone Danny Fiszman has kicked out is now working against him: Dein, Edelman and Lady Nina.
I’m bemused when you suggest that, “Your blog has become a somewhat prominent source of Arsenal news on the internet, and I feel that you have a duty to present balanced viewpoints wherever possible.”
First of all, I don’t feel balanced every day. I’m lucky if I can manage a balanced viewpoint once every two weeks.
What I write is more opinion than news.
I don’t see myself as a news provider. But if I hear something that ANR readers will want to know, I stick it up here. It might be wide of the mark.
I’m often misunderstood, although I’ve explained myself many times, or tried to. I’m a football fan, not a Gooner. And I’m an author who was a journalist.
I’ve written for The Times, Time Out, Radio Times, Rolling Stone, The Scotsman, FourFourTwo, 90 Minutes and many other papers and magazines. But I have never had one day of training in reporting, editing, shorthand, typing, law for journalists, or any other aspect of the profession. Nobody ever told me what journalism was about, or even asked me what I thought journalism was about.
If they had asked me, I’d have said : “It’s about tweaking the tails of the Establishment, isn’t it?
I’m very naive. I didn’t realise that I was opinionated because I thought everybody was opinionated. I’d been a journalist for 15 years before I realised that most journalists had nothing to say. I thought that people went into newspapers to get things off their chests. Bizarre as it may sound, that is the truth. That is why I did it.
I have a columnist’s mentality, not a reporter’s mentality. I don’t pretend to be a nice guy and don’t think life is a popularity contest.
At times, here and there, I’ve had some problems fitting in. At Manchester University I said to one tutor, “I don’t belong here” and he said, “Rubbish, you’re bright enough.”
Another tutor, who had to mark some of my shabby essays, understood me more clearly. One day he took me to lunch in the staff canteen and said two things. He said, “You’ve got the kind of mind that mixes things up. And you’ve got no idea about how much detail you’re supposed to know.”
Before that, when I was eighteen, my dad said, “With a little humility, you’ll go a long way.” I haven’t gone a long way. But I’ve written some books and believe my next book will be better than my last one.
Understand this and you’ll understand Myles Palmer : none my heroes is a footballer or a journalist.
My heroes are all novelists : Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Maupassant, Nabokov, Heller, DeLillo, Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, Jay McInerney. David Nichols, who I discovered at Book Slam recently. Writing pop reviews and interviews for The Times or The Scotsman isn’t success to me. Anybody can do that. If I went to an airport bookstore, Len Deighton’s novels had their own section. That, to me, is success.
So I am a failure in my own eyes and always will be. But I’m quite a happy failure because I’ve been lucky in my private life, blessed with a lovely wife and terrific kids and sparky friends. All I care about is my next book and my family.
To me, football is just something we talk about. It is the most important unimportant thing in the world. You should know my mantra by now : It’s only football !
I’m 65 today and my brother called from Devon to wish me Happy Birthday. My other brother, also younger, called later from Colorado. We talk a lot and I’m glad we’re still enjoying ourselves and still happily married to our first wives.
On ANR, I write over 250 pieces a year but I don’t have to do it. I was going to write a Celtic preview tonight but I decided to put up your letter instead.
I do ANR if I feel like it. If I don’t feel like doing ANR, I don’t do it. It’s not a job, only a hobby. I can’t be everything that people want me to be, or write what various Gooners want me to write.
I can’t be as balanced as Patrick McKennna, for instance.
But I can publish your letter for other people to read.