Arsenal's sudden return to form really could mean it is still all to play for
Next Post Coming Soon...
By Tony Attwood
If you are a regular reader you’ll know we have had a host of technical foul-ups of late. I won’t bore you with the details but to try and resolve this I’ve had to delete lots of old articles from this site, and in doing so I found one that rather amused me. So I thought I’d copy a bit of it and publish it again. On the grounds that if I’d forgotten it (and I wrote it) you might have forgotten it too.
It all started when the Guardian ran an article which quoted an Arsenal chant in the days of public transport not working properly in which they quoted some of us singing “Three nil and you can’t get home” Here’s how part of the Untold Arsenal piece went, and I think it is as relevant today as it was when first published….
——-
Of course it is written within the constitution of the Guardian that they can’t praise either the Gunners or the Gooners without slapping them down at the same time, especially where a long word that you might not have heard before is involved, so we have the obligatory “The Emirates is not known for its rambunctious atmosphere…”
[Rambunctious: difficult to control or handle; wildly boisterous:turbulently active and noisy – difficult to do that with the stewards around]
Of course the stadium can be noisy – it all depends where you sit and what the game is. Sit in the club level and shout and it feels like you’ve made a faux pas at a funeral, while in much of the rest of the ground it’s noisy – although that fact leads to a debate on sophisticated acoustics and architecture by some journalists. B
Anyway, it got me thinking, not just of the recent “He wants his own song” my favourite of all time was the 1991 night at Highbury when Arsenal playing Man U, having had two points deducted for a handbags at 30 paces non-rambunctiousevent at Old Trafford.
It was, I think, the first and last punishment of its sort dished out by the league ever, and was of course singled out to be given to Arsenal who unacceptably looked like winning the league for the second time in three years, having rubbed Liverpool’s noses in it just 18 months earlier. You could hear the League’s cotton mill and mine owners growling about upstart cockneys without them having a clue what a cockney was (or what the inside of a cotton mill or a mine looked like).
Anyway, Liverpool were playing late afternoon (for TV) and needed to win to keep their chances of the title alive. They didn’t and as a result of that failure, Arsenal’s evening game didn’t matter. Arsenal were champions again and we celebrated in the pub before going onto the ground for the evening game.
And as we poured into Highbury, we could hear but one song, going around the whole stadium at an incredible volume (which must have confused the journalists of the day what with journalistic law saying “Highbury” could not be written in a newspaper without an inclusion of the word “library” alongside it). To the tune of “she’ll be coming round the mountain” we sang, “You can stick your fucking two points up your arse.” Over and over and over again.
Even more amusingly, ITV who were televising the game, turned down the crowd noise as befits a library, and the delicate nature of evening viewers of ITV, and the commentator said, “and you can hear the crowd already singing, ‘We are the champions’.” As if.
Beyond that old favourite, when we beat Tottenham through a Fabregas goal in which he nicked the ball from Tottenham as they kicked off after a goal a minute before half time, we got, to the tune of the old Tottenham “when the spurs go marching in” song, the new lyrics “Oh when the wheels, come off the bus, oh when the wheels come off the bus, I want to be in that number…”
Thinking of Tottenham (as one must when thinking of funny things) I loved the time when they were thinking of moving the club to Stratford. Of course as we know, they couldn’t find the bus so never went, but after something like 98 years of their anger at Arsenal having the temerity of moving its ground by seven miles, we could sing “North London is ours, fuck off to Stratford, North London is ours”.
Or when the wonderful St Totteringham (or Totteridge) day comes around, to be able to sing, in the low solumn manner as befits such an occasion, “It’s happened again, it’s happened again, Tottenham Hotspur, it’s happened again.”
Ah such very simple pleasures and such lovely memories of the old days… Computer corruptions do bring forth one of two nice things.
Recent Posts
Arsenal's sudden return to form really could mean it is still all to play for
Next Post Coming Soon...