Up For Grabs Now

Sooner or later, all good businesses get bought. Arsenal, as we all love, is one of the best businesses around. It was bound to happen. We held out for longer than most. Our sensible financing, our division of shares between a few already-wealthy and interested people, our genuine long-term planning – all of these are reasons that Arsenal took longer than Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, Spurs and any number of other clubs to fall into the hands of a billionaire owner.  Arsenal are a profitable and glamorous business.

Once you accept the inevitable, you see that Stan Kroenke is just about as good an option as there is. He has not borrowed to purchase the club, not plundered the equity of the Emirates to reinvest elsewhere in his empire. He has sat on the board for four years, gradually winning over those – such as Peter Hill-Wood – who were initially hostile. He is a fan of Arsene Wenger, like all of us, but like all of us also craves trophies. Like some of us (this blogger included), though, he is not willing to mortgage the future and ethos of the club for some short term silver. He is not Alisher Usmanov, an industrialist of dubious provenance seemingly on a quest to be just like Roman Abramovich.

He is not an industrialist looking for a glamorous plaything. He is a professional sports franchise investor, with as much experience as anyone in the world at making them work. He knows football – our sort of football, not just the American format.

I think these last points are the most crucial. British football, in the past twenty years , has been hurtling towards the American model of sport as entertainment. The purists will hate me for saying so – and I think football does have an egalitarianism and tradition which lift it – but it’s true. Fans do not pay £2,000 a season just for love of the club. They pay to watch world-class entertainment. They pay to watch 22 of the finest athletes on Earth (with due exception for Titus Bramble and Ashley Cole) do battle.  Champions League TV rights go for millions not because your granddad took you to your first game and you grew up near the ground. They go because great football is great football, and is entertaining wherever you’re from.

America has understood this for years. The NFL is the most successful sports tournament on the planet: the Champions League is second. Stan Kroenke understands where football has come from, and where it is going. Arsenal FC is perfectly positioned to carry on being a great club for the imaginable future. If someone has to have their hand on the tiller, I’m glad it’s him.

It’s also worth noting how well our board has done to get us here. The main sources of his new shares, Danny Fiszman and Nina Bracewell-Smith, were both motivated to sell (he by cancer, she by personal animosities), but have still had the wherewithal to negotiate with Kroenke, play a long game and present a united front behind him. Peter Hill-Wood has realised the game is up and planned a smooth compromise. The board has behaved like rational adults, with the long-term interests of Arsenal at heart and in mind. In the context of the modern game, this is nothing short of miraculous. Thanks, gang. UFGN salutes you.

Welcome aboard, Mr Kroenke. You can start by buying some defenders and, y’know, a goalie.

So what shall we say of you now, Corporal Cole,

that have with your .22 air rifle shot and wounded

so direful a foe as Tom Cowan, unarmed intern, 21?

And from just 5 feet away, I wonder

that you did not bayonet him instead,

boldly through the guts

since you had muzzle and nightscope why stop there

if to butcher interns is your petty pleasure.

What shall we call you now, Cashley?

Or should we text and hope (Sonia) Wildly

For a bare-cheeked picture message signed in your sweaty hand:

“There. I look so ugly x.”

Judging by the comments on the previous post, it seems that the general feeling is that we need some songs for players who don’t already have them.

My humble suggestion is for Bacary Sagna, to the tune of the chorus of The Clash’s ‘Rock the Casbah’

Gooo-ooo-ners like it,
Bac-ary Sagna, Bac-ary Sagna

No posts for ever and then two in a day. I ask you. Is it because of a rash of Arsenal news, or is it because this blog is half-maintained by a procrastination-obsessed freelance journalist? You decide.

I’m upset with the current Samir Nasri song. It is unsatisfying. In response, I have knocked heads with my friend Tom, who pointed out that a much better version can be sung to the tune of the chorus of Tinie Tempah’s popular hit, ‘Frisky’, which you can listen to here.

The new version goes like this:

“Oooh, na na na na
Na na na na na
Oooh, na na na na
Na na na NASRI”

Essentially you replace the word ‘Frisky’ with the word ‘Nasri’. What’s more, Mr Tempah is, I believe, a Gooner, so should be amenable to the adaptation.

Feel free to sing in the pub, stadium, any way you can help to disseminate this.

Anyone got any other good new song suggestions for any of the players?

Another draw, more hysteria. As the Leyton Orient goal went in my head went down, but then it came up pretty quickly again. Frustrating to have to play another game, but what romance for Leyton Orient. It’s hard to see us losing at the Emirates and a plucky little club gets a great day out.

I know some will complain that it’s yet another fixture in an already crowded calendar, but given that it was more or less a completely different team, I don’t see it as a great problem. Some of the first team might have to play some of the match to see us through to Old Trafford, but – hey – they’re all professional athletes. They’ll survive. I doubt we’ll hear too many complaints as we pick up each part of our quadruple. Perhaps perverse to say so, but I thought in some ways it was quite reassuring to see that Almunia and the second-string are just that, and that the first team all deserve their places.

A note on Barcelona. I don’t have much to say that hasn’t been written better elsewhere, but two things: first, turns out Koscielny is an excellent defender. Who knew? More like that, please. If he comes good, alongside an ever-improving Djourou, then suddenly we don’t look nearly as vulnerable.

Secondly, the Emirates towards the end last Wednesday was as loud as I’ve heard any stadium. Well done all of us. Perhaps its true that a stadium needs to accumulate successes, like a wok picks up the seasoning of past feasts, in order to become a home.

Quadruple accumulator still on.

I figured I’d blow the cobwebs off this old lady and take the time to respond to some of the pessimism surrounding the 4-4 draw away at Newcastle. I’m not going to defend the team’s performance in the second half. Arsenal should not be in the business of conceding four goals in a match, let alone one half, against anyone. However, I also think some perspective is called for. We had a bad half. A cataclysmic half. Every team has these from time to time – passages where the whole lot just fall to pieces, and your team seems to turn from Champions League contenders into kindergarten retards. It’s never fun to watch, as Saturday reminded us.

But but but. We still drew. Our worst passage of play of the season and we still drew. We conceded four but we’d already scored four, at a canter. If we had been 1-0 behind and equalised at the last minute, nobody would really be grumbling about a draw away at Newcastle – particularly not after they beat us at home. In fact, how many of us would have swapped a draw for a Manchester United defeat? Arsene spoke after the game about the potential psychological impact of the second half, but it won’t be nearly as powerful as the impact on Ferguson’s jolly band of smelly, er, professional footballers. Every team in the league will have a go at them now, and some of them will be successful. United will drop more points. Every team in the league was already having a go at us, and so far we’ve more or less batted them off.

We’re hot favourites for the Carling Cup, we’re still in the FA Cup and, as far as I’m concerned, we’re favourites for the Premier League too. We’ve arguably the best attack in club football, and though our defence is not what it could be, we still look much more up for a ruck than we have during the past few seasons. That said, if nothing else Saturday proved once and for all that Diaby will never be Alex Song. (And who, four years ago, would have imagined that sentence ever being credible?). But there is more to be happy than sad about.

Now all we’ve got to do is breeze over those Catalan chancers next week, and my Quadruple accumulator will be looking rosy once more. Chins up, Grabbos

Sometimes as a football fan you get bad days. These include days where you lose 1-0 at home to Newcastle thanks to horrible land monster Andy Carroll and his head of bone. These include days where you lose to at home to West Brom, a side of limited technical proficiency who play you off the park like in the days when you didn’t know the ‘closing down’ button on Pro Evo.

In a smaller way, they include days like Saturday, when you watch Manchester United spend most of their match two nil down to Villa only to come back right at the end and scrape a jammy-bastard draw. The jammy bastards.

They do not, however, include days like yesterday. Yesterday was a great day. Firstly beating Everton away 2-1. Everton away is a tricky fixture. Manager David Moyes is a reasonably canny and somewhat tricky Scotchman. Cesc-lite Mikel Arteta and Antipodean Rebound Monkey Tim Cahill are fine footballers. So it was with extreme pleasure and a hefty dose of relief that we watched Bacary Sagna wallop the ball past Timmy Fuckyou. 1-0.

It was even finer to see Cesc and Chamakh combine dreamily for the second. The captain has been a little out of sorts of late, prompting crap fans to suggest that he’s chilling in advance of Barca. He’s never seemed like that sort of player to me (in the same way that he’s never seemed like a deliberate fouler, despite his bad tackle on Wednesday), and it was very nice to see him get on the scoresheet with a corking technical finish. Proving that we should always have two goals before we feel comfortable, Cahill monkeyed in a late rebound to make for some tense closing minutes.

That was a lovely start to Sunday.  Then Chelsea were dumped on their arses by Sunderland. They were 2-0 down, and it didn’t look like anything could get better, and then Ashley Cole made a comedy mistake. Har, har, har (count them). If we beat the scum we go top. Lovely Sunday has set up a wonderful Saturday.

One of the NY Red Bulls 'Ultras' just after half-time. Omar Cummings scored Colorado's only goal moments later.

For the forty or more years in which the game has been waiting to take off in the States, the assumption has been that ’soccer’ in America has to catch up with us. But what you get from Major League Soccer isn’t a throwback at all, but a nauseating premonition of where the game is heading in more established football nations.

It’s a clean-cut nightmare of flat-pack stadia, wipe-clean concrete, and fat fans queuing for exorbitant fast food. Sadly, the top-level game in England looks more and more like it every year.

The actual game goes on as something to look at between buying another giant foam hand and grabbing a second hot-dog. There are club shops everywhere. These are called ‘Bullshops’, and everything is red and white and Adidas. A lot of the merchandise uses images of ferocious-looking bulls, but it’s a cartoon aggression that can only remind the buyer that they’re spending their dollars in support of a football club that is really nothing more than a sickly energy drink.

If you ever reach your seat, you’ll hear the murmur of polite conversation from the crowd, and the occasional shout from players on the pitch. People all around you are on blackberries and i-phones. Most of them are continually refreshing their Facebook page.

All the support comes from one end of the stadium, where the Red Bull ‘ultras’ make a din. Angry men with megaphones and baseball caps conduct the chanting from specially ensconced plastic platforms, which have a safety rail in case the angry men should get too excited and totter off. When the Red Bulls open up a 2-0 lead, the ultras sing out: ‘Can we play you every week?’ But the conducting’s too good, the phrasing too precise, and it sounds more like a push-button gloat from a video-game than genuine derision.

And in all this, Thierry Henry. He took his goal well, but appeared to lose interest as the game went on. He’s always been a bit of a shrugger, but now his team-mates – apart from Mexican captain Rafa Marquez – really are nowhere near his class.

Squillaci wo-oh. Squillaci, wo-oh
In such sweet rhymes our defenders sometimes go

Willy Gallas fucked off at long long last
Thinking we’d forget his cuntishnesses past

On Sa’day we looked alright at the back
But Blackpool were a pile of tangeriney cack

Who knows what further citrus gags await
Though zesty I fear they might start to grate

Squillaci is a silly-sounding name
But though funny, that line’s no real shame

He has so far plied his happy trade
In Seville, source of wondrous Marmalade

Their famous Barber I presume is known to him
He lacks a single hair ‘pon his Gallic chin

He must Pollyfilla our defensive cracks
Against Drogba make no ill-conceivéd hacks

Welcome, new Gooner Saint Sébastien
We beg no tantrums against Birmingham

Try a bit and you’ll try more than him before
And Harry Redknapp’s mother is a whore.

Dear Hotspur, T
This must be
The apogee
Of your attempts to avenge Sol Campbell.

It ranks with the triumphant parading
Of Rohan Ricketts.

Oh, Rohan Ricketts!

Why do you now trade your sorry ply at
Moldovan Intertoto Cup outsiders FC Dacia Chişinău?
Was it because you went to Tottenham?

If Gallas wants some Ricketts, he can have them:
Dennis, God, the real red 10,
Knows ‘Cappy’ (sometime ‘Crappy’)
Has had every other injury besides.

Besides which, he wasn’t nice to Kolo,

And now he’ll limp beside Trauma King and Surgery Woodgate.

He wasn’t a good defender
And when he used to score
With his famous penis
(Deft from corners sometimes)
It somehow felt just slightly not as good
As every other time that Arsenal score.