I have a confession to make. I’m an Arsenal fan. I make this confession because I’ve been in denial about this fact since 2005 (which coincidently was the last year Arsenal won a trophy). And yet I find that news about the club is the first thing I look for on the Internet.
I’ve started supporting the team in 1971 when Charlie George scored a magnificent goal to win us the FA Cup and to close out the league and cup double for that year. My memory of it suggests a forty yard screamer into the top corner, but Youtube shows me that it was more of a tap in. That’s the problem with memory. It makes everything in the past bigger and more impressive than it actually was, which by default makes us believe that the present is a little bit shit!
I do support other teams, such as Carlton in the AFL (who at least I get to watch regularly), Dundalk in the League of Ireland (at least when they are winning) and Louth in Gaelic Football. Louth are probably the only team that would prompt me to get on a plane and fly to the other side of the world at short notice, if they managed to make it to a final. I can make this statement however, comfortable in the knowledge that everything that has happened since 1957 makes this a remote possibility.
I have wavered in Arsenal support over the years, mainly coinciding with fallow periods at the club but also with significant changes in my life. I moved to Luxembourg in 1993 and found myself in Amsterdam on the weekend of the FA Cup Final. I was in a pub and somebody mentioned that Arsenal were playing in the match and it was on a TV screen down the back. I was more interested in the thrill of living in mainland Europe by then and Arsenal seemed part of my old and boring life in London.
I moved back to Ireland in 1996 at the beginning of the satellite TV revolution in Football. It coincided with Arsene Wenger becoming Arsenal manager and the start of their Golden era. It was impossible to live in Ireland and watch football without picking a team to follow in much the same way as anyone in Melbourne with even a vague interest in sport must pick an AFL team or banish themselves to internal conversational exile.
I kind of lost interest again when I moved to Melbourne, because the games are on at strange times of the night and the team were rubbish. But technology has dragged me back into the tent. For a start, I tend to listen to podcasts now rather than music on my way to and from work.
And the smartphone I bought at Christmas has lots of football related Aps that can be read everywhere. This is particularly useful in the toilet as it avoids having to hide a newspaper in your pocket.
For the past three months I’ve been following the soap opera of Arsenal’s summer transfer policy. This has taken up hours of time on podcasts and consumed gallons on digital ink on the web, despite the fact that Arsenal have not actually signed anyone.
The Internet has been a god send to the English Premier League. There is a hardly a news related site in the world that won’t have some reference to it. If you contrast that to one of my other sporting loves, Gaelic Football, you’ll see a startling difference. Soccer is statistics based and at the click of a few buttons you could find out who finished bottom of the West Cork under 12 league in 1993.
Gaelic Football treats its audience in the same way we were treated by our Irish teachers in secondary school. They assumed that after 8 years of primary school, you were fluent in the language and they could spend their time teaching us how to interpret 15th Century poetry written by some blind harpist.
I’ve read match reports in the Irish Times for example headed “Tribesmen too strong for Saffrons” and not find the names of the teams anywhere in the article, any reference to the competition they were playing in, whether it was football or hurling or even whether it was men or women involved.
Gaelic games have a long way to go when it comes to harnessing the web. I just looked up my local clubs website, which in fairness seems mainly geared towards renting their all-weather pitch out as much as possible. Their “latest news” talks about an upcoming match on 26th September 2012.
I do wonder if I’m being sucked into the English football hype. It’s so easy. They repeat all the games here at reasonable hours and there are plenty of people at work to discuss the sport with, including many Australians who have spent a year in London and now think they are experts.
So I’ll sit back and enjoy the new season. We lost our first game and still haven’t signed anyone but there is always hope. If I was Arsenal manager, I’d make the team sit down and watch the 1979 FA Cup Final, which is probably my favourite game of all time. Arsenal were leading 2-0 with only 5 minutes left to play when the hateful Man United scored two quick goals to equalise. Momentum plays a key role in Football and United had all that. But equally important is mental attitude.
After Man United’s second goal, Arsenal legend Liam Brady picked up the ball for the kick-off. The expression on his face said “I’m not having this” and he drove at the United defence before laying the ball off for a quick cross and a Sunderland tap in at the far post.
That’s how you win football matches. So come on Arsenal. Win something so that my time spent reading about you in the toilet won’t have been a waste of time.
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