|
LAST UPDATE 5.5..02 A CUP FINAL DIARY 7.4.02 NOW WE'RE BACK FOR GOOD 20.3.02 WE'RE BACK AND BOY ARE WE PISSED OFF 3.3.02. A FEW COMMENTS ON A WONDERFUL WEEK 20.2.02 TALKING BALLS AN @FC ANNOUNCEMENT THE NEW ARSENAL CREST - EINSTEIN OR FRANKENSTEIN? TALKING BALLS 29.1.02 'YOU REALLY ARE TAKING THE PISS WITH THESE REPORTS' TALKING BALLS 30.12.01 'WHY NO REPORTS?' I Current Match I Current Season I Match Archives I Mail us I Links I Home I Welcome to our new site. If you look very closely you will see that absolutely nothing is new. Apart from the new tarty bits and decoration, everything else is just the same old regurgitated opinions, grudges and stupidity. It's nice to know that in a fast changing world you can still rely on idiocy and entrenched footballing prejudice. Have fun.
This time we’re back for good. The problems that have kept @FC so spotty this season have now been resolved without having to resort to divorce or illegal substances. From now on the reports will be up to date and next season might even see the new, new look (as opposed to the old, new look). We like the new Arsenal crest so much that even now we are amalgamating various designs culled from cheese labels, yoghurt pots and sixties Wolverhampton Wanderers logos to bring the best in cutting edge visual environments. Evolution, not revolution as David Dein may say. Or arse crack, not pants as we prefer. Anyway, we’re back. For good.
We’re back with a long-term grumble I think everybody knew that Arsenal had reached their European ceiling after the Deportivo game. We were suddenly playing in an arena where we were dog paddling out of our depth. Couple this with the rocket science permutations of the Juventus game and you had a no-win situation- stuck with a game where your fate was being decided by someone else. Whist Moscow rescued our sorry arses last year, this year we disappeared with nary a whimper. A pathetic, lacklustre performance against the Juve boys’ team did nothing except confirm that all those games where we surrendered possession and won were nothing except statistical flukes. If you don’t get the ball, you don’t win. So simple, even Ron Atkinson could work that one out. It made us feel ashamed to watch that lot in the red and white tart around in Turin. No names, but if Kanu ever pulls on an Arsenal shirt again there’s going to be a ritual burning of season tickets in this part of North London. And Luzhny…well, no names. Tony Adams can’t come back soon enough. A lot is going to depend on Saturday’s game against Newcastle. Not the result, but how the team respond. If we see a smidgen of the ridiculous strolling, ambling Turin farce then I can ensure Mr Dein that several long-term gooners will be turning up at Underhill next season rather than Highbury. The battle now is for the spirit of Arsenal. And it’s not about results. Guts, commitment, application, blood, sweat and tears. All these things are missing from Wenger’s half time talks and I for one am getting fucking sick of it.
Fulham, Bayer and Newcastle. The Wonder Week that proved us wrong. Incredible. As soon as we vent our spleens in the direction of Stepanovs, Wiltord, Lauren, Luzhny and Grimandi, Wenger sticks them all in one team and they all play like gods. Really, what is the point in moaning if you’re constantly proved wrong? I suppose this is the closest we’ll come to issuing a public apology. This last week has been wonderful. (Our one saving grace is that we predicated all the results. The only blip being we had the German game down as 3-1. On the minus side the Gooner X-File Nostradamus Unit reckons a win against Derby on Tuesday and a narrow defeat in the cup against Newcastle. Further ahead, one of the wired-up Highbury egg-shape bonce telepaths reckons he can see Spurs getting a massive mauling at the hands of Henry and co. Mmmm. We’ll see.) So, in celebration of a marvellous week of football we’ll forego the usual drunken moaning (and repetitive match reports - see below) and give you a cut out and keep list of ten terrific things from the past week. 1. Igor Stepanovs The key to Igor is realising that he is in fact Andy Linighan in a fright mask. Just like Andy he started off as sure footed as Norman Wisdom with Parkinson’s and then confounded everyone by managing to stand up for more than thirty seconds and kick the ball with some kind of forward momentum. He still handles the ball at least once a game, but on current form he’s at least as good as Upson. Even the crowd, when they chant ‘Igor, Igor’ are starting to do it without a trace of irony.
Looked great against Fulham and his slow turning circle seemed to mesmerise the Germans. He finally seems to have worked out that the men in red and white are the same blokes he shares a bath with after the game.
We’ve said unkind things about Lee in the past (‘speed of a bungalow’, ‘couldn’t put a cross on a pool’s coupon,’ ‘the positional sense of Mr Bean’, etc, etc) What a great week he’s had. A split second back tackle in our own area against Newcastle would have had me on my feet if I had been sitting down. Awesome.
Still a God; Babylonian or Minoan, by the hairstyle, we reckon. Great reflex saves in all three games, the only blot being guilty of a bit of cloud watching during Fulham’s goal. And if he had had got in the way of that German strike he’d have been taking his head home in a Tesco’s bag.
Only played in the Newcastle game, but his one-two and run into the Geordie area and subsequent shot were very un-oleg, but were thrilling to watch. Forgive us o crippled oxen and root vegetable eater, we have wronged you.
Two goals that make a mockery of the written word. The Bayer goal (turn, chip, lean, loft, drop, goal) and The Newcastle goal (swivel, lift, flick, run, dodge, shimmy, poke, goal) had us rubbing our eyes and commentators scraping the bottom of the adjective barrel for superlatives. Stop reading this now and get hold of a clip or a video or something. Two of the finest moments of any Arsenal supporters life. Show them to your sad mate the Spurs fan immediately.
Okay, this one is a bit hard to believe, but he did really well in a difficult position.
This one is easier to believe. We thought originally that he was just having a lazy season before he pisses off to the land of the paella and the strong red wine that maketh the ground wobble. But in the last month his new languid style has actually been revealed to us as masking someone that has moved onto a higher plane - a bit like Gandalf the Grey dying in Lord of the rings and coming back all spiritual with his clothes washed. (Sorry if we’ve spoilt the next Hobbit film for you - Sauron turns out to be Frodo’s dad too. Great wand fight over the Cracks of Doom, though.) Will he stay or go? Who knows. Just worship him while he’s here.
Chant of the week, at the Bayer game, directed to all those glum watching Tottenham supporters. ‘We saw you cry on the telly.’ Mind you Fulham dug out the female linesperson who failed to signal offside for Henry (first Arsenal goal - Lauren- and it was on) with ‘You should be home doing dinner.’ Sexist, but it made me laugh.
The hairstyle the size of a topiary is back. (Small privet for Thierry at the moment. Watch it bloom.) Great. Just make sure you don’t sit behind him at the cinema. What a week. And we haven't even mentioned creepy Stephen Byer's green lighting the new ground. Perfect. Shame about that fucking crest, though.
Late nights, the mid-life crisis scenario and memories of Ian Wright. You probably think the clever title is another shabby attempt by the lazy sods at @FC to excuse the latest non-appearance of the match reports. And you’d be right. For a variety of reasons (and only one of them of the bone idle variety) the match reports from now on will be a bit more sporadic. So, no change there, then. We’ve always liked lists, they give the appearance of being methodical, if a little anal and they’re really useful for things like shopping and cataloguing people who have stitched us up in the past. So here’s six reasons why @FC is going to be a bit spotty with the old reports in the future. 1. We are lazy. There’s no getting away from it. Get home from the game, usually blitzed by a combination of London Transport battle fatigue, dangerous takeaway snacks and swimming in Guinness, the last thing you want to do is write bollocks. Talk it maybe. Usually we settle for making an unfeasibly large sandwich out of the slop in the back of the fridge, crack another beer and watch one of the Steven Siegal movies that Channel 5 have been showing since the Pleistocene era. Also ‘Life’ (as my missus calls it) is increasingly taking over from ‘LIFE’ (copyright Arsenal FC) as I know it 2. We’re undermanned. Couple of years ago everybody thought the Internet was wonderful. Everybody wanted a go. Now it’s left to the last few nerds to tap away into the wee small hours. 3. We’re repeating ourselves. Re-reading a lot of the old reports we see the same old shit again and again. (We see the same old shit on the pitch too, but that’s another matter.) We know the nature of football is cyclic but we have no wish to end up like Alan Hansen. 4. We’re repeating ourselves. No, the quality of reporting has definitely gone down. We’ve all noticed it. We’ve spent a lot of time moaning this season – and every time we moan we get heaps of mail telling us to put a sock in it. And to tell you the truth we’re fed up with all the grizzling too. For once and for all let’s get it off our chests. Lutzny is a dog. Stepanovs a disgrace. Will someone explain to me what Van Bronckhorst actually does? Lauren? Right back? The bloke that’s always out of position. Him. And as for Wiltord, I just don’t get the joke. That feels better. The problem is that we just don’t believe in this team. It’ll be different in 18 months we know, but we still haven’t really got over Ian Wright leaving, or Alan Smith, or Liam Brady or Charlie George…pathetic really but we like living in the past- it’s cheaper, the NHS works and you can still buy Spangles. 5. Sometimes we find ourselves with nothing to say. Look at the Everton game, a couple of weeks ago. Played shit and Wiltord fluked a volley. Pretty short report eh? Gillingham? Two Parlour bottles, two Gillingham goals. When was the last time we killed someone off? You just end up feeling pissed off and uncommunicative. 6. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. (Apologies to Groucho). Unfortunately (and here’s the rub) other writing commitments are impinging on @FC time. There’s an unfinished novel knocking about somewhere (not to mention the unfinished decorating and the unfinished relationship with the significant other.) In the old days it was easy; load up on amphetamines, type like the wind for three days, collapse, sleep for two more and then try to decipher the gibberish that you had been banging away at. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY. You know what I mean. Something has to give and unfortunately it has to be those match reports where we don’t give a shit ie. The Worthington Cup. This isn’t meant to be an announcement of the pipe and slippers variety, just a warning that in the future if Arsenal are playing Knobend United in the Polo Mint Cup then chances are unless something extraordinary, nasty, funny or ridiculous happens then you won’t be reading about it here. Next report will be the Fulham game. We’ve got a lot to say about them…
Mr Dein - You’ve been had. The new Arsenal crest. A vital glimpse of the future or something that looks like it should be on a lump of cheese? The debate begins here.
(Doubtless there's all sorts of copyright stuff that should go here. Don't use this logo without checking with Mr Dein or his dog that designed it.)
This was a bolt from the blue. We had no idea that the Arsenal were contemplating changing the old crest. The first we saw of it was on the front of the programme. Now I know that most football fans are complete Luddites when it comes to any sort of change, but I have never seen such a unanimous outpouring of bile and vitriol, such an instantaneous surge of dislike as when people appraised the new crest. So, why the change? The reasoning is specious at best. The old crest is impossible to copyright. This is arrant bollocks. The old crest can be modified and that can be registered. Spurs did it a few years ago by making a few design modifications. You don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. What Arsenal is saying is that they can’t be arsed to enforce copyright on the old logo because it has become too problematic, therefore a new one makes more sense. Now before any of you start mouthing off, let me tell you that I’m writing as a professional Art Director, somebody who deals with copyright law every day and I’m a trained designer (even though most ‘designers’ deserve to have the shit squeezed out of them by an industrial slurry recovery machine and then spoon fed back to them- which when you think of it is a pretty good idea of how they come up with ideas in the first place.) Which leads us to… The quality of the design. Now this is subjective. However, having a done a bit of teaching at Art Colleges (not much, I have no wish to join the ranks of the barely living) if a first year graphics student had come to me with this design I would have kicked their spotty arse all the way back to primary school. This logo is monstrous. Ten minutes with Photoshop on a Apple Mac and Stephen Hawking could have done better. It’s crass, it’s clumsy, it’s thoughtless and it’s been done at best by numbers and at worse by a committee. And on a technical note, Mr Dein, that gold colour is always going to appear shit brown unless you run a special fifth colour (gold). And five colour printing is knobbing expensive. ‘Tradition with Vision’ I’ve sat in enough presentations from design consultancies to smell the whiff of a bull’s backend. I bet their presentation document said, ‘this is not a revolution…it’s evolution.’ And indeed, the Arsenal have used this verbatim on the flyer they gave to us before the Southampton match. I also bet they used words like ‘paradigm’ and ‘upscale’. Listen, most designers are fucking jackals - they have technique, but no idea. And David Dein falls for it. Not really researched that well. Or not at all. Before the Saints game a few kids holding big banners paraded the new crest around the ground. Have you ever heard 35,000 people boo a logo? Extraordinary. I don’t think the design firm took this one to focus group, do you? In conclusion, it’s badly designed and worthless as a piece of communication. Well, apart from the word ‘arsenal’. (You should read the guff in the programme about why the gun faces east- priceless.) And it looks like it just fell off a pot of yoghurt or the packaging on a nice piece of Canadian extra sharp cheddar. Mr Dein you’ve just bought yourself the emperor’s new clothes. And they don’t fit.
No-show of reports. More crap excuses. If December was the month of flu, colds and laziness, then January is the month of dead computers, bloodletting at the office and DIY projects that end in loads of water coming out of a hole that it's not supposed to. Missed the Leeds game. Missed the Leicester game and then the computer did its impersonation of a house brick for the Liverpool game. Once upon a time, we saw all the matches, had a drink, argued about it, had another drink, ate food that no man has ever seen in daylight, fell asleep on the bus/tube and woke up covered in bright red chilli sauce somewhere near the North Circular, got a mincab home driven by a serial killer and then fetched up on a doorstep just before the milk floats started. And then we put together the match reports. But not now. As we approach the outer environs of middle age our whole lives are turning into fucking episodes of 'Terry and June'. 'Shit,' as our American cousins say, 'happens.' Sorry about all the delays. Next month we're expecting a rain of blood, a Martian invasion force and Jesus to return fronting a vanguard of angels. Or maybe the computer will commit hari-kiri again.
What the lazy sods at @FC haven’t been doing lately. A diary. After saying that we were turning over a new leaf and getting back on schedule with the match reports and stuff suddenly December hits us like one of the plagues of Egypt. This is what happened. The West Ham Game. 1-1. Couldn’t get a ticket. Nobody I knew was going. Got depressed watching the highlights on the telly. Woke up early the next morning full of vim, determined to write a match report based on hearsay, rumour and lying (no change there, anyway.) Got spirited away to someone’s house and filled full of the aforementioned spirits. Came to during Monday afternoon. The Newcastle Game. 1-3. Didn’t go. Had to work. Well, had to go the firm’s Christmas Bunfight. About a quarter to ten the DJ (a Spurs supporter) gleefully slipped me the score. Then all the other lowlife (Spurs, Chelsea and even Palace boys all started up a chant, ‘3-1 to the barcode boys.’) Bastards. Got home. Phone never stops ringing from the Gooner network. Gunners stitched big time by Graham Poll (aka, ‘the Thing from Tring.’) Got depressed. Went to bed. Woke up with a rotting ferret in my mouth and a head full of bass notes. Go to work. Field half a dozen calls from moaning Gooners. Tell them to fuck off. Head throbbing at the same frequency as the florescent lights. Want to die, but want Graham Poll to die more. Later. Get all depressed about Bowyer and Woodgate getting off. Hope that anybody wins the League rather than Leeds. The Liverpool Game. 1-2. Somebody filled my head with a duvet and my lungs with elastic green snot. Feel more wobbly than I do when I’m drinking. Couldn’t walk more than ten feet in a straight line before the ball in the hole in the middle of my head rolled to one side and I fell over in a paroxysm of projectile coughing. I’m convinced it’s germ warfare, but my missus informs me it’s ‘a bit of a cold.’ Forbidden to leave house. Watch the game on Teletext. Excruciating. Fab result though. The Chelsea Game. 2-1. It’s Boxing Day. Even though I’m only now bringing up pea soup coloured bile every ten minutes I am deemed fit enough to be bundled into a small car and hurtled at unfeasible speeds towards whole squadrons of festive relatives. I am stuffed full of turkey leftovers and plied with tissues, linctuses and tiny bottles of Stella Artois. But I am nowhere near Highbury or even a pub that is either open or heard of Robert Maxwell’s wondrous dish. Watch the game on Teletext again. Another nail-biter. More turkey arrives in the form of rissoles/soup/curry/a healthy shake. I get more depressed. Tell everyone that if I don’t get to the Middlesbrough game that they are divorced/cut off without a penny/eviscerated or just ‘dead’. Wrap up the leftover bits of turkey in a big foil ball and throw them out of a window. Feel a bit better.
Osama Bin Gooner. Not a wind up. Some of you might have seen the papers and the report that the world's most wanted man, Osama Bin Laden was a regular at Highbury in the early nineties where he used to sit over the Clock End with his son. A mate of mine reckons he remembers him. 'Tall bloke, beard like old wire wool. Kept singing, 'no-one like me, but I don't care.' And 'stand-up if you hate Zionist imperialism.' Stand by for the stealth bombing of Avenall Road.
Cup Final Diary 4.5.02 Arsenal 2 Chelsea 0 4.25 am. Crawled out of bed, eyes gummed shut, head full of cotton wool, vaguely aware that three hours earlier we’d been drinking tiny green bottles of varnish, labelled ‘Biere de Gare’ (beer that comes from the railway station - something like that) and that the huge chicken curry that had seemed so appetising only scant hours before, was still refusing to budge from the gut, holding its position in the narrow oesophageal passes like the Greeks at Thermopolae. Mate number one (Dave) is downstairs drinking tea and watching Polly Toynbee talk about the monarchy. She talks for about ten minutes and doesn’t mention the word ‘Arsenal’ once. Turn the telly off with mutterings of ‘ignorant slag’ and leave. Security guard returning from a night shift gives us the thumbs up. A good omen. 5.15 am. Called around to a mate to pick the tickets and him up. Me and Dave are dressed ‘football travelling light’ style. Team shirt, trousers with capacious pockets for things like cash, tickets, passes and a pair of stout boots. Also obligatory is the Marks & Sparks and Sainsbury’s carrier bags full of sandwiches, crap snacks and those cheapo carton drinks that are the colour of industrial effluent. We’re underdressed, it’s freezing, but we don’t care. Mate number two (Chris) lets the side down by appearing to be wearing every garment he owns. T-shirts, red Arsenal polo shirt, cardigan, great big waxed coat and most worrying of all, an Arsenal bum bag. It later transpires that for some mysterious reason the bag is actually full of batteries. Don’t ask. We didn’t. He is also carrying a plastic bag full of God knows what that is the same size as a builders’ skip. 6.00 am. Get onto a coach near the stadium. Sleepy people in full kit, toting the entire sandwich output of northern Europe, file onto the bus. Several of them have made laughable attempts to put red streaks in their hair and a few brave souls have even had a go at face painting. We look like a coach full of burns victims. Everybody is quiet. Nobody really thinks we have much of a chance. But at least it’s a day out. 6.50 am. Coach leaves. A convoy snakes through north London and hits the motorway to the west. People dive into their bags and start eating like Homer Simpson. Why everybody (me included) is eating Scotch eggs is beyond me. This must be the great unsung primordial football food. When I was young it was all Wagon Wheels and Bovril 6.51 am - 10.30 am. A coach journey. England recedes. Wales, a small country conjoined to England, arrives. We spot sheep, unnatural looking hills that were probably once inside the earth and not on it and millions of cars all heading in the same direction. Some have blue and white streamers, others, red and white. Still half pissed from the night before, we cotton on that something must be happening 10.31 am. We’re in Cardiff. The driver of the coach tells us to remember where we parked (we don’t) and we head off in search of drink and incredibly, more food. 10.59 am. Mate two (Chris) wants to look around the castle. We look at him as if we were seeing somebody who had just shat into the open mouth of Queen Elizabeth, the queen. The suggestion of a castle tour is not a complete success. A few gooners are playing football in the moat of the castle. Fat, uncoordinated blokes, in dodgy replica strips, whacking a half inflated ball around- it’s almost like watching Spurs. We wander into Cardiff. A nice city that has renovated itself rather well. The old buildings have been lovingly restored, the new ones neither monstrous or carbuncular; it’s a nice town and it inspires you to think in a more elevated, cultural way. 11.00 am. Exhausted by aesthetics. Find a pub. 11.30 am - 1.30 pm. Welsh Guinness is a lot like English Guinness; black at the bottom, white at the top, but with the added bonus of being considerably cheaper. Watch the FA Cup BBC telly warm-up. Old Spurs players, old Liverpool players and old West Ham players. And for this we pay a licence fee. Decide that John Motson is too old to be wearing hair gel and that fucking car coat of his makes him look like a kiddy fiddler. Decide to get more food. 1.31pm - 2.00 pm Other people go on pub crawls, but we decided to go on a swift Cornish pastie crawl. In quick succession we do a beef steak special (cold to handle, filling the consistency of diarrhoea but with the temperature of molton rock). Still 6/10 for that one. Five minutes later we find a shop that has a sign saying ‘Award Winning Pasties.’ How can you resist that? Cheese, Leek (lip service to the Taffs there) and Ham. Pastry that tastes of ingredients, not packing material and an inside that blows your mind not your anal ring. 10/10. Another great omen. 2.01 pm - 3.00 pm. There seems to be millions of Chelsea supporters and slightly less of us. They’re like a rash, they’re everywhere. Get to the ground to soak up a bit of atmos and sit down before Cornish pasty starts to ooze out of my split sides. If you’ve not been to the Millennium Stadium. Go. It is a magnificent place. Everyone of those twats who is fucking up the redevelopment of Wembley should be forced to come down to Cardiff bay and see how it could be done. And when Tone leads out the lads on the hour, it is a moment that is up there with all the fine things in life: music, art, love, beer and whopping big pasties the size of a plough blade. 3. 01 pm - Three forty fivish. No surprises here. One of the reasons why there’s no Bolton report for last Monday was that we were so nervous, that we drank so fast, that we got so bladdered, that the whole week was one of playing catch up and trying to make up for the bad behavioural mistakes of the night. To anyone who saw me abuse the chocolate machine at Finchley Central, I apologise. Still, stocking the thing with fucking chocolate once in a while might be an idea. Chelsea obviously had a game plan. They closed everything down faster than I’ve seen most teams do this season. Arsenal’s best chance was a Lauren header that just shaved the bar. Chelsea got wide, but went nowhere. But it was nerve wracking. I was shouting and jumping up and down, pretending to encourage the lads, but really desperately trying to dislodge the poultice of masticated pastry, cheese, ham and leek that was sitting on my chest like a sleeping cat. And the game dead-ended itself in midfield. Henry looked unfit, Bergkamp was Desailly’s puppy and only Wiltord, my favourite £15 million quid signing of all time (THIS WAS A DEMONSTRATION OF SARCASM - for all my American friends reading) only Wiltord out of the front runners looked like class. At the back, Adams, Cole, Lauren and Campbell were consistently heroic. Half time. 4ish - 5ish. And the second half started exactly the same. Chelsea pressed ferociously. You were thinking that if it went to extra time that they would be knackered. Adams and co at the back were slightly stretched, the boys at the front nullified and the middle? Parlour, Ljungberg and Vieira were all over the pitch fire fighting. Twenty minutes to go. For anyone interested the pastie was beginning to shift. Openings were appearing. Wiltord, just inside the Chelsea half, slipped a ball to Ray Parlour. Ray ran, avoided the blue shirts, saw three Arsenal players draw off the Blues, he looked up, ran on bit and whacked one. Our seats were looking right along the Chelsea goal line. Ray’s shot dipped, arrived at the net. For a second I didn’t have a clue where it had ended up and then I saw net in front of ball. My God it must have been thirty yards. What a screamer. If you’ve ever looked through the little plastic window of a Dyson vacuum cleaner when it’s turned on you’ll have some idea what it was like in the stands when that goal went in. Screaming, loss of bodily fluids, pocket change scattered like confetti and fat blokes dancing exactly like how fat blokes dance. A true wonder. And we were happy. A second later we were miserable again, knowing that like last year, we were more than capable of cocking it up. For ten minutes or so, we thought about everything except the Arsenal; why is there only one Monopolies Commission? Why did those Wolves fans have that banner at the play-offs that said ‘You’ve let us down again?’ Did they make the fucking thing during the game? You tell me. And then there’s Edu, looking all sort of upright in his own way. He flicks a ball to Ljungberg, who is still inside the Arsenal half. Freddie runs. Tackles come in and he takes little notice. Advance he does (Sorry, that sentence was a bit Yoda - but you get the gist.) John Terry sidles in and pokes out a leg. Freddy starts to go down. But then gets up. Terry is the past. Years behind. Freddy advances. Just outside the Chelsea area he looks up, curves his foot to the ball, lifts it and shapes it. It bends and you know it is always going to be six inches beyond any goalkeeper in the world. It tucks inside the top right corner of the net and half of Cardiff detonates. Mate two (Chris) later put down his bruised useless throat to that second. Oh well, talking is overrated; monkey’s do OK without all the verbal. And though Chelsea looked spirited, there was only one name on the cup (apart from Axa - which I believe is some kind of sage and onion stuffing.) At the final whistle the red flares went up and the Arsenal team looked ten years younger- happy, smiling, leaping and care-free; just like us. Adams and Vieira received the cup together and the sun shone with that deep yellow that is peculiar to cup final day. ‘Sol’s a Gooner’, ‘We love you Freddie’. ‘Oo ar Ray Parlour’, ‘Vieira wooooooo,’ ‘Oleg Lutzny is God’ (maybe not the last one) all the great songs got an airing. We danced badly and clapped out of time and is was, in the words of Freddie, who was blipped out on a live broadcast; ‘Fucking great.’ 5.45 pm - 1.30 am. Couldn’t find the coach. Mate one (Dave) remembered it was ‘parked next to a building’. That’s sound if you’re in the Gobi Desert or Mars, but not much cop if you’re in the middle of a city. Found it. Right next to a ‘building’. Amazing. Coach goes. Beyond tired we do the only thing possible to do when you’re completely cream crackered; start eating again. Wales disappears under the wheels of the coach. The driver of the coach gets the hump with a Chelsea coach that overtakes us. He chases it and finally gets the better of it by overtaking it on the hard shoulder. Another Arsenal victory. We listen to a Welsh radio station. Try to sleep but keep seeing Ray and Freddie whacking them in. Eat more. Fall asleep. Wake up and someone is talking Turkish. Haringey Radio or something. Arrive back at Drayton Park. Go to pub. Go to sofa. Watch Match of the Day. Drink. Incredibly, eat even more. This time it’s quiche. Nice, but no pastie. Drink more small green beers. Begin to hallucinate. Tony Adams is running around the Cardiff stadium celebrating. He’s holding a giant pastie. Go to bed. Man of the Match: Two lifted the cup so let’s have two men of the match. Step forward Freddie and Ray. Arsenal gods.
Really, what's the point of writing COPYRIGHT on anything on the net? Most people who do that have nicked the stuff in the first place. If anyone steals anything from this site we demand that you pay us in BEER, SNACKS or DVD'S. Money is useless; wives, girlfriends, the Inland Revenue and cab drivers only pinch it off you. Give us something that we can use.
I Current Season I Match Archives I Mail us I Links I Home I
|
