June isn’t a football month.
Neither is July, really.
The summer is a good time for football junkies to take a break, do other things, talk about other sports.
I try to re-discover my appetite for the game.
During July, every year, I hope to re-discover my appetite.
Over a 40-year period, my appetite in July has varied a lot from year to year and it still does.
For millions of people, it may be a constant but I’ve never been that way. I depends on what else I’m doing and on how much I enjoyed last season.
I can remember one day in the summer of 1969, when I was a Times reader rather than a Guardian reader, looking through pages of cricket, tennis and athletics for some football news. And there was no football story. No football news at all. People did not expect football news then, but I craved it. So I kept looking through the golf and the racing for something, some fragment, and eventually I found a result from the Far East, a pre-season tour game.
It was in tiny, tiny print : Hong Kong X1 0 Manchester United 1.
And I wondered who scored. It didn’t matter, but I still wondered who scored. I never found out.
Nowadays we have Breaking News 24/7 on the net/radio/Sky Sports.
We are bombarded by it, battered by it, blitzed, swamped and inundated.
Quite often, summer gives Ian and Myles a chance to figure out where ANR should be going.
When this website was redesigned it kept crashing, so we switched to an American server, and that company has since been bought by another company. Ian does all the admin, which is seriously time-consuming, especially on top of his very challenging management job. The old ANR was still online at another URL.
Incorporating our vast archives here was very difficult, technologically.
Ian Grant originally started Arsenal News Review as part of Arseweb, another website, and then it became a stand-alone spin-off site.
That was before I met Ian in the press box at Highbury. We were sitting next to each other at a game against Blackburn. Ian was a busy environmental journalist/Gooner who wrote an Arsenal column in the local paper [Ham & High and Highbury & Islington Express] and I worked for The Scotsman.
Last night Ian and a techie friend put the ANR Archive on this site.
I scanned down and clicked on the story that has the oddest headline : Merry Christmas to Almunia – and all ANR readers