From Mike Geraghty: Redundancy
Dear Myles,
I hope you are keeping well.
On matters Arsenal ,I would like to draw you back to mid-summer last year, or maybe even the year before, where you spoke about redundancy.
If my memory serves me correctly you quoted your father in this article, something along the lines of, “When everybody has the same opinion as me, then I am redundant”.
I can’t help but reflect on that now, as more and more people are buying into what you have been advocating these last 5-6 years.
Project youth is a failure, it’s official.
The squad was not decimated by injuries this year at any stage, nothing more than normal rates of attrition for any club. There are no excuses to hide behind any more. Wenger has lost his way. He held the purse strings. He didn’t want to “kill Diaby” or “kill Denilson”. His choices.
Lately it makes me to chuckle to think that 99% of your readers (myself included) that write in invariably begin with something like, “Even though I disagree with your views 80% of the time….”.
Now I remember when I first started reading ANR, your blog was downright sacrilegious.
Surely you were mad and needed shouting down… then over the years I came to see that you had a point, but were a bit over the top, so although I enjoyed your reading your views, I disagreed with them (80% of the time, roughly).
I find myself chuckling because now, after all of that, I have to look back and say: you were right. The project is and has been a failure. Wenger is untouchable in his job and the board don’t care because he’s a gravy train…. I was about to go on there is no point. It’s all been said before.
You are redundant now, Myles… unless you want to become a Wengerite next year!
So what now?
___________________
Myles replies :
That’s partly why I’m taking three weeks off, Mike.
I’m in USA for my nephew Derek’s graduation and a road trip with my brother Neil.
What our Dad said was, “When two people are continuously in agreement, one is redundant.”
Funnily enough, Neil and I were talking last week about things PJP used to say.
Patrick Joseph Palmer was Irish and had three sons and once said, “You three are a fine pair if ever there was one.”
When we were mixing concrete for the paths of our large back garden at 152, Fairview Road, Stevenage, I remarked that Rome wasn’t built in a day.
“I wasn’t foreman on that job,” said Dad.
Neil remembers Dad saying, “It’s always close when you’re up against it.”
One of his mottos was, “He who aims at nothing has a very good chance of hitting it.”
What now?
Finish my Seventies rock memoir, of course.
I’ve been writing it for seven years.
Clearly, seven years is too long to spend describing six years of backstage fun with a few rock stars.