From Keith Murdoch : Why?
Hello Myles,
I’ve been an intermittent visitor to this page for years now.
Back in the early days when good positive things were being reported. By you personally.
What’s happened? Now you rarely write anything.
You just post correspondence and comment on it.If the said correspondence is negative, then you reply positively to it and vice versa.
I know news in general is always being criticised for its doom and gloom (or vice versa) but this is football. It’s supposed to be a pastime, somewhere to go on a Saturday, meet friends etc. Sure, moan and groan at a bad result.
But isn’t it about getting behind the team?
I know you disapprove of AW but then again there aren’t that many people at the moment who do….but is it all about him? Can you not report, personally, as you used to on some of the good aspects of the club? For example a player for the future or how well the ladies set-up is doing? Absolutely anything other than this constant slating of the club and manager.Or am I mistaken? Is this page is no longer about Arsenal and its merits as a club but just a vendetta against it? And as the fans sing on occasions, “Are you Tottenham in disguise?”
Sorry for this post….I don’t expect you will post it anyway….
Just want to know where it went wrong for you.
From Myles to Keith :
1) I\’m not an Arsenal fan, just an author & journalist who writes about Arsenal, about other clubs, other matches, and sometimes about popular culture.
2) ANR is an independent website, not a PR conduit for the club. It’s about discussion and opinion, not about ‘getting behind the team.’
Yes, ANR has changed a lot in form and content over the last 14 years. That\’s life. Things change, people change, reactions change, expectations change, cycles begin and end.
Nothing I do on ANR is planned, it just happens in the moment and I write a lot of stuff that I dont use. Sometimes this blog gets stuck in a riff, sometimes it goes off at a tangent, mostly because I\’m an unaverage & disorganised bloke who makes it up as he goes along, someone who follows accidental events to see where they take him.
This website has taken me into a dialogue with thousands of people.
I don\’t like the team these days but I enjoy the dialogue, although I admit that this dialogue is very time-consuming and could stop at any time, could finish in a heartbeat.
3) ANR reflects current concerns about the future of the club. Not just about Wenger, but the policies followed by Stan Kroenke and the elderly board.
4) There’s no vendetta.
When Wenger was rocking the Premier League with stylish power football and re-inventing the Arsenal brand, we all loved it.
And I loved it so much that I wrote a before-Wenger- and-after book about Arsenal, explaining how he rebuilt his teams and won trophies. When he was good, he was fantastic and unique and innovative.
The Professor mainly covers the years 1996 to 2008.
The Patrick Vieira years, I call them.
Wenger has won nothing without Bergkamp and Vieira.
My role here now is simply to tell you what I think, and if I ever reach a point where I can\’t do that, or don\’t want to do that, I’ll stop. And I could stop at any time.
But if I have some news, I\’ll share it.
I\’ll say: Arsenal have signed Sol Campbell. Or I\’ll say: Song and Van Persie have left the club. If I have some news that I\’m allowed to share, I\’ll always share it. I won’t flog it to some ghastly tabloid.
While I\’ve been writing a trilogy of memoirs (covering periods when my life was much more colourful than it is now) I\’ve come to believe that I was always quite good at realising when one phase of my life was over and another had started.
Furthermore, I was one of the first to point out that the Emperor had no clothes, at a time when virtually everyone still considered Wenger a messiah.
Some ANR readers, who have since become my friends, were more trenchant critics of Wenger than I ever was. They care more than me.. They’ve been Arsenal fans all their lives.
5) ANR has also published readers’ pieces supporting Wenger – including the lengthy post by Graham last week.
When the team declined, ANR swerved round a corner and became a forum. That wasn’t planned or even talked about by me or my website partner Ian Grant
6) A lot of Arsenal fans are genuinely worried about the club’s direction. If you share that concern, it doesn\’t make you a Spurs supporter in disguise.
7) Where did it all go wrong for me?
When Wenger seized overall control of the playing budget,wages and transfers. I immediately knew that the team would go downhill.
When he lost the plot and just let his ego,his theories and his fears take over.
When I figured out what Wenger is really like behind that mask.
When I realised that he doesn\’t teach defence and wouldn\’t know where to start.
When I realised he was lost in his laptop and couldn\’t think on his feet.
When he didn\’t mention the name Andrei Arshavin for three weeks after Ivan Gazidis signed him.
When he dropped Arshavin to play Diaby at Wembley.
When he told us Fabianski is a world class goalkeeper.
When he dithers on transfers because he’s scared of getting it wrong. And then still gets it wrong.
He waited 18 months to get Chamakh on a free and then paid him so much that he can’t sell him.
And so on.
I won’t continue the list.