By Myles Palmer
The paperback of The Professor is out today.
Published by Virgin,£9.99.
And I’m a guest on Simon Mayo at 1.p.m. on Friday.
The show is on Radio Five Live and the BBC are sending a car to pick me up.
I reckon The Professor is better as a paperback .
For a start, it has a more appropriate title.
It’s now called The Professor – Arsene Wenger at Arsenal.
And it has an exciting new chapter about last season.
So the book has something it needed : an ending.
When the hardback ended in May, 2001, Arsenal had just lost an FA Cup Final they deserved to win, Vieira wanted to join Real Madrid, and the manager only had one year left on his contract.
A year later Vieira was still there, Robert Pires had become the best player in England, Sol Campbell had arrived, and Wenger had signed till 2005.
And Freddie Ljungberg had scored seven goals in seven games to power Arsenal to the title, which they won AT OLD TRAFFORD.
And they got to the FA Cup Final again.
Played Chelsea, beat them 2-0 to win the Double.
So that gave the story an emphatic, happy ending.
On the cover there is a quote from a review in Time Out. It says the book is “lively, quirky and clever.”
I will admit to “quirky”.
ANR readers are aware of my quirks, moods and opinions. I can’t help being opinionated.
Basically, it’s a book for Arsenal fans.
If you already know a lot about what Arsenal was like under George Graham, a lot about Ian Wright, Dennis Bergkamp and Tony Adams, a lot about the institution that is Arsenal FC, a lot about what has happened at the club since 1996, then you will probably like The Professor.
It will add to what you know, but it will also contradict some of what you know, or what you think you know. So you might find that annoying.
But that’s me. I think the main thing I have to offer is originality. I write football the way I see it, not the way everybody else sees it.
The structure of the book is simple.
It has a foreword by Rob Hughes, a preface, an introductory chapter.
After that it describes what Wenger did in France and Japan.
Then it summarises the state of English football and the booze culture of the early Nineties. Some notorious incidents involving Merson, Hartson,Parlour, Adams.
Then it describes how Wenger inherited an ageing team and what he did,season by season.
The story finishes, on the last page, talking about NOW, September 2002, looking forward to a Champions League season in which the final will be played at….. Old Trafford.
There is a lot of analysis of the big European games : Kiev, Fiorentina, Galatasaray, Barcelona, Valencia, Juventus, Leverkusen, Deportivo.
It took six years to write The Professor. And I’m proud of it because I managed to say 90% of what I wanted to say.
The first chapter was written in 1996, long before I knew I would write a book about the new manager. And I left that chapter pretty much as it was.
Most of the book is like that: written at the time of the events described.
And that, I think, is what gives The Professor an edge over many other football books, where events are carefully reconstructed years later.
Hindsight always simplifies, smoothes things out, squeezes the juice out of events, leaves out the details, the feelings of the moment.
Some people might think that five pages about Arsenal v Bayern Munich is too much.
But anybody with an atom of suss can tell that I didn’t just see that match. I didn’t just report that match. I LIVED that match.
And I have to say this : Updating a book feels weird. I had never done that before.
My other books I just wrote and forgot.
For me it is a huge effort to write a book and a huge relief to finish a book.
But publication isn’t as dramatic as people might think. I get a copy, my wife gives me a kiss and says,”Well done!” and I’m already somewhere else. I go into a subject and through a subject and out the back of it – and never look back.
After I wrote New Wave Explosion, about the Sex Pistols-Police-Blondie era of pop music, I didn’t go to a gig for six months and didn’t listen to any new albums. I’d got it all off my chest. I lost my appetite.
So I found that going back to rewrite the same book was a strain. Deja vu.
OK, I write stuff on ANR every week but ANR is often written very quickly, often late at night, and most of it is intuitive, impressionistic, off the top of my head.
So it has mistakes, typos, rash predictions. Sometimes I write something good here, sticking down my thoughts clearly like a good thumbprint.
Other times I don’t because I’m tired, not thinking clearly.
But a book is different. A book has to be carefully written.
I had rewritten every page of The Professor about ten times, trying to make it flow, trying to make it vivid, trying to make romp along in a readable way.
Luckily for me, 2001-2002 was an eventful season with a great ending.
The first hour of the Simon Mayo show usually has two or three sports journalists as guests.
I gather that the other scribes have been sent copies of The Professor in advance of Friday’s show.
I don’t know who they are. They may be friends, or acquaintances, or two guys I’ve never met.
Whatever, it should be fun.
September 5th 2002.