From John Feeney : Arsenal tourist in Cumbria
Hello Myles,
Been a while since I have written .I suppose I haven\’t really had a great deal to say.
It is a shame that so many of your readers are giving up their season tickets.
I now live in Carlisle so I only really to get to the North West and North East away games and 2 games a season at The Emirates. It is always fun to go to these matches and sit either with partisan locals or diehard gooners depending on ticket availability. What is sad to see since my self-imposed exile is the ever-growing number of empty seats at these matches.
Chatting to staff and fans at clubs like Wigan, Newcastle, Sunderland or Everton and a similar pattern emerges. Hardcore fans will always go no matter who the visitors are but Arsenal just isn\’t box office any more. Floating fans will come out to see Chelsea, City or United.
Be it right or wrong, everyone hates United.
Chelsea are the rich southern kids everyone likes to beat. Arsenal and Tottenham just won\’t draw discerning folk away from Jeff Stelling and Paul Merson and that garbage on a Saturday (I don\’t know if you are familiar with Beavis and Butthead but if you want evidence for your observations on attention spans, look no further than your local boozer and the sight of grown men watching past it sportsmen watching TV )
We can sing “you only come to watch the Arsenal†from the rooftops of every stand in Europe but sadly, outside France, this simply isn\’t true anymore. If I was a week-to-week punter rather that an Arsenal Emirates Tourist, I too would be livid.
But I am not. It is the legacy of the club that concerns me more. We can cry about the Americanisation of Arsenal but it does make money.
What concerns me is that here in Carlisle you will see countless Chelsea, United and now City shirts on children. It is extremely rare to see an Arsenal one.
We may well be big in Malaysia, but for how long? Chelsea, City and all our big competitors are also flooding these markets.
When I was at school in the Early 80\’s there was pretty much only Arsenal, Tottenham ,Liverpool and United fans.Followers of teams from outside North London were either “glory hunters†or of Irish descent. When my son started school here in Carlisle in 2004/2005, there were plenty of these “pot chasers†to use a local term, who wore Arsenal shirts.
My son is now twelve and there are none. Literally, in a school year of 240 kids, no one apart from my son supports Arsenal.
We are not box office anymore. We are Rod Stewart.
Yes, we get attention because we are famous and were once great, but no one really cares about our new records anymore.
Keep up the good work, Myles. Looking forward to reading more from you soon.
Myles:
You’ll be lucky, I think I’ll just publish your letters till Wenger goes in May.
Rod was once great and he was very special to me.
We both loved Denis Law and Sam Cooke and he made his solo albums at Morgan Studios, Willesden, near where we now live.
Rod came into my life in 1971 and I saw him as a canny London-Scot, a shrewd operator who made me laugh. Reason To Believe sounded amazingly good coming out of the big studio monitors and that frisky, bouncy song, a dirge when sung by its composer Tim Hardin, became the A-side of the first single from Every Picture Tells A Story. Originally, the B-side was Maggie May.
We gave him the cover of Time Out three months before Maggie hit No.1 and changed his life forever. We took the cover photo in the garden of his house in Southgate.
Rod was pretty hip and treated me just the same after my honest review of the Faces at the Reading Festival. The vibe from their management office was never quite the same after a line in that review in The Times. I’d written : Even The Faces would not dare play as badly as this indoors.
Then, as now, I was compelled to write what I thought about any performance.
In 1986, George Graham came into my life and to me George was what Rod had been in 1971-1973 : somebody whose magnetism I recognised immediately, somebody to follow, somebody to write about, somebody who knew exactly what he was doing, a guy I could have fun with.
That might seem a very,very strange thing for a journalist to say.
But I’m probably the only bloke in the world who knew both of them well enough to make that comparison.
Rod and George were two exceptionally shrewd men who made exactly the right moves for five years and set themselves up for life.
PS. We have updated our Reviews Section.