Long before the credit crunch, before Arshavin and Sagna, before anybody had ever heard of Setanta or Sky+, I had a vision of what the next few years would be like for Arsenal.
I always said that the club could afford to build a new stadium, could borrow £260 million, and could pay it back over 18 or 20 years. To do so was bold, imaginative and unique, something no other club in the world could have done, something that could only been done in London but something that could only have been done in London by Arsenal FC. Only Arsenal could have done it. I made that point on ANR. Several times , in case anybody had missed it.
I figured that the new stadium would mean that Arsenal had a cheap team for four or five years. Money would be tight for that period. The stadium & regeneration project the club took on was complicated and colossal.
But I knew David Dein and Arsene Wenger had ambition beyond that. They saw the stadium not as a destination, but as a vehicle that could launch Arsenal on a flight path that turned them into the biggest football club in the world.
If moving 600 yards up the road was an essential first step on what some deemed Mission Impossible, the versatile workaholic Arsene Wenger was willing to take the strain.
He was willing to take the strain, take the flak, take the some bad results, and suffer a damaging period where his team was nowhere near as good as it had been in 1998 or 2002 or 2004. In his grand plan, there was an element of masochism, I felt.
And that was when I dreamed up an ANR piece called The Titanium Man. I never put it on the website because I never got round to writing it, except in my head.
That ANR piece went something like this :
Arsene Wenger is a visionary leader with incredible stamina, a guy who is prepared to say : “OK, it will be a youngish cheap team for a while, so here’s what I’m gonna do : I’m a giant who can stand on the centre-spot at Highbury and slowly lean over backwards so that my hands and head are on the centre-spot at Ashburton Grove, and all of you, all you 150,000 Arsenal supporters, all you staff, all you directors ( especially those who inherited their season-tickets) can walk up my legs and over my body and climb down my upside-down arms into the promised land of a spectacular 21st century sports arena. Don’t worry, I can take the strain because I’m a giant and also a scientist, I’ve made all the calculations and I’m made of a titanium alloy that’s very strong and virtually indestructible, so everything will be fine.”