From Adrian Caddy:
You’re right, it’s a sunny morning, why spoil it writing about Arsenal?
Everyone knows what you’d write anyway.
I know I’ve got a choice, I could just not bother to click on ANR. But I do, because it’s bookmarked in my Arsenal favourites and so habitually I find myself reading your posts.
They’re very well written and always pointed. But they’re also bloody repetitive.
It’s insanely annoying reading one after another and yet another reader posting the same old questions and observations and making the same old comments to Myles so that said Myles can rehash the same old answers, again and again and again.
It’s annoying for me because I’m a Gooner who just wants his team to win football matches and cups.
It’s annoying because it’s frustrating to have ones obvious faults pointed out continuously.
It’s annoying because it’s so avoidable yet seemingly inescapable.
We’re stuck. Simple.
As long as AW is in charge we’re stuck.
And when he goes, who knows?
But what on earth makes you do it Myles? How does repeating yourself fill up your days?
Not sure I can get my head around that. Do you feel vindicated?
It came as little surprise to learn that you’d been a Spurs fan for many years.
It always struck me as a little strange that you’d been able to write about the rise and fall of Arsenal during the Wenger era with such dispassion and objectivity.
Of course you had admitted before that you were not an Arsenal fan but it always seemed slightly perverse that you found the energy and dedication to continue posting on ANR.
You became a lightning rod for all the most despairing Gooners. An agony uncle for the lost and angst-ridden.
Now after 18 years playing second fiddle to Arsenal, Spurs fans are beginning to believe that they could finish above them in the league, perhaps even win the thing.
When it happens, you should start writing about Spurs full time. It would bring out some joy in your writing.
Enjoy the sunshine.
Myles says:
Habitually? Fine!
What are we but the sum of our habits, Adrian?
Our habits are mostly what we prefer, what we choose to do.
King Wenger habitually sits on his Sky-supported throne.
He will be there forever and the whole thing is very sad, a great shame that it’s panned out this way, a pity that the ArseDisney now play in a soulless stadium and that Wenger’s job is to make more money for an Amerikan billionaire 6,000 miles away.
IT’S COME TO THIS.
A talented, arrogant, titanium-tough Frenchman has turned a treasured British institution into a vehicle for his flawed ideas and cannily acquired huge power over a 20-year period.
I vividly remember meeting AW that Sunday morning at Highbury, when he flew in overnight from Tokyo, talking to David Dein as Danny Fiszman listened to what we were saying, lunching on steak & kidney pie with Pat Rice, hearing Pat defend Spurs boss Gerry Francis against unfair press criticism.
I’ve done a lot of things long forgotten but I recall that Sunday clearly.
I don’t give every day equal value and, in hindsight, I can see that I’ve lived much of my life through events, through gigs and football matches and encounters with famous people.
And I’ve been very lucky to be able do that and have two kids who turned out well, and a lovely wife who has never once said: “I think you’re going to too many gigs” or “I think you’re going to too many matches.”
Looking back, I see that I’m more intuitive than rational, someone who tried to cruise through life in a state of alert relaxation, so that he could recognise the important moments.
When something significant happens, I always write it down.
I’ve been a scribbling journal-keeper since I was about 16, so after that day – 22nd September 1996 – I went home on the tube, knowing this had been a turning point, and wrote down my impressions, my feelings at that moment, and typed up the press conference, not knowing that Virgin would later ask me to write a book Jonathan Taylor wanted to call The Professor, or that what I wrote that day would become Mission Statement, the prologue of the book.
I do ANR for our readers in London, Nairobi, San Diego, wherever.
On the internet you receive far more feedback than I ever got as a newspaper journalist or a magazine writer.
( Last year I wrote an unpublished comic piece about meeting one of my readers on the way home from a gig. A very unusual situation developed when young guy sat next to me and started to read a football magazine in which I had done an interview with a player who was a mate and gave me a ticket a couple of times when his club played in London.)
You dare to talk on ANR about Spurs winning the thing?
That’s Pochettino’s job! What joy in mid-April to still have a chance.
What bliss to have a 44-year-old manager who looks younger than his age, rather than a 65-year-old who looks 75 during matches.
Poch says that if Tottenham win the title they should build a statue of every player.
Stoke v Spurs is at 8pm.
I’m really up for it because I still get off on football.