Buy us the spirit of 26 May 1989, Arsene

Twenty-two years ago today, 11 players and a sub set off to Anfield to attempt the near-impossible.

After 37 games each, Liverpool and Arsenal both still had a chance to take the league title. But Liverpool stood top by three points and had a superior goal difference, home advantage and were playing, in accordance with the mantra they had created after the death of 96 of their supporters at Hillsborough a month before, 'for the dead'.

Arsenal faced other challenges too. So dominant were Liverpool throughout the 80s they had not lost by two goals at Anfield for over a decade. Arsenal’s requirement to take the title back to London for the first time in 18 years: ‘Win 2-0’.

All the hype before had claimed the title was destined for Anfield, and that Arsenal didn’t have a chance. Arsenal had, after all, thrown away a big lead in the title race and Liverpool had won 5-1 against West Ham in the days before. “Not a prayer” was the famous headline on the day of the game.

The Arsenal responded in accordance with their own history – with class and pride. George Graham pinned said headline on the wall of the dressing room and his team talk was done. The players took to the field with bouquets of flowers in memory of the Hillsborough dead. And none of them spoke of the team’s chances. Talking would be done on the pitch.

And so it was. And in the most dramatic fashion. Alan Smith headed the goal that gave Arsenal a chance on 53 minutes, and what followed is football folklore – the stuff dreams are made of and which kids kicking balls around the streets couldn’t think up.

With 89 minutes gone, Steve McMahon of Liverpool took word from the Kop that in 60 seconds the title would be theirs again. He didn’t know how resilient that Arsenal side was.

In the 92^nd minute – and in the days before injury time regularly exceeded 93 minutes – Michael Thomas broke through the midfield, lifted the ball over the advancing ‘keeper and wrote himself, the class of ’89, and the words “It’s up for grabs now” into football history.

So why am I telling you all this? Obviously, you all know it.

Well it’s because of this: I will always argue that today’s footballers, in a head to head with those of yesteryear, will triumph comfortably. It would be athletes vs members of the Tuesday Club; and the speed, power and strength of today’s thoroughbreds wuold simply shine through.

Yet despite their superior ability, I don’t believe today’s current Arsenal team would have come even close to winning 2-0 on the night of Friday 26 May 1989.

Because although today’s team have more ability, they do not have one ounce of the determination, willpower or affiliation with the fans that the class of ’89 had.

Sagna, Clilchy, Koscielny and Djourou cannot match the passion of Dixon, Winterburn, Adams, Bould and O’Leary. Fabgregas, Walcott, Nasri, Arsharvan, Rosicky and Denilson do not have the determionation to win that Richardson, Thomas and Rocastle had. Chammakh, Bendtner and even van Persie do not have the guile of Smith, Hayes and even Groves.

I know which set of players I would choose to take into a one-game battle for silverware.

When Arsene Wenger gets his chequebook out this summer, let’s hope he realizes that what we lack is not a match winner or a speedy, tricky little flair player. But some passion, determination and fight.

Then we have a prayer.

Sometimes, all that's left is to laugh...

There are so many jokes flying around in football at the moment.

There’s the one that goes: “Now King Kenny has returned to Liverpool, the odds on them winning the league next season have been slashed to 14/1. If you don’t understand how betting works, it means if you put £10 on, you’ll lose £10.”

Then there’s the one about the ballot for the Olympic tickets. “My credit card has now been debited. I didn’t get the events I wanted in the Olympic Stadium but there were 45,000 tickets available to watch West Ham.”

And then there’s the one about Ryan Giggs. What?

What’s worrying me though, is that beyond all this tomfoolery, the true laughing stocks of the Premier League this season have been us.

The media already take every opportunity they can get to have a dig at the Arsenal. This week’s double-page spread explaining we’re in disarray because Denilson – who has played about five games this year and is shit – wants to leave, was a classic example. Especially when you consider it was bang next to an inch-long story about Tevez, Man City’s actual best player, wanting to leave.

The following day’s story that Arsenal use GPS to track their footballers’ whereabouts, quoting Robin van Persie as saying “We don’t have private lives anymore”, was also classic ‘papers stirring it up’. Because the actual story was that Arsenal fit their players with GPS in training to monitor movement and patterns and, one day, a player had to pop home and forgot to take it off.

So we could really do without giving them extra ammunition to attack us with – namely being spineless, falling away at the end of the title race, never spending any money and all those other terribly predictable things this season has produced.

I didn’t used to care about this stuff. In fact, I quite liked that we were hated by the media. As long as we were winning, it just added to our ‘backs-to-the-wall’ battling mentality, and it made us stronger. I enjoyed sticking two fingers up at them.

But now it’s got a bit embarrassing and I’m tired of Keys and Gray and Collymore and The Sun and the Mail pointing out our frailties, our weaknesses and our softness.

Even Gary Lineker chipped in with a little dig at the end of Match of the Day last night, saying “Try spending some cash, Arsene”.

So when Wenger sits down later this week to consider whether he needs to add some steel and strength to this team, he might do well to observe that this team simply isn’t good enough to recover our reputation on its own next season – and that this club’s fans won’t enjoy being a laughing stock again next year.

It’s bad enough that this year we managed to come fourth in a two-horse race...

Difference of opinion...

When I started this blog at the beginning of the season, my stance on the major issues at the club were clear: Wenger was the right man for the job; I agreed with our cautious approach to spending; I accepted we were in a period where we had to sacrifice massive investment in the team – and possibly trophies – to secure the long-term future of the club at a time when we had a stadium to pay for; and I genuinely believed that when the media said most fans ‘just want silverware’ that they were wrong.

In ten months, things have changed a lot.

Bob Wilson came out today very much echoing the things I said in August. He reminded the fans that they are lucky to have been in the top four – and the Champions League – for the past 14 seasons, at a time of having little cash to spend. “You’d miss it if it was gone,” he said. “Just ask Spurs fans.”

He is right on that, of course. It only takes one season to lose your place in the top four and the demise can be rapid.

But maybe football fans don’t think that way, and maybe I don’t either anymore.

I didn’t particularly agree with the black-scarf demo at the weekend because I’m not sure they are right that the board is being greedy. It’s not like they are taking massive dividends out of the club, it’s just that they’re not spending the money the club has.

However, I did agree with the chorus of “6 per cent – you’re having a laugh” throughout the second half of the game, because I think the club has a cheek asking us for more money if that additional money is not to be spent strengthening the team.

However, what I think has changed my mind on investing in the team the most is not really a desire to buy the players to win trophies – although that would be nice – but a genuinely concerne that if we don’t spend, we may not be anywhere near the top four next year.

While the general consensus among the football fraternity is that, now the title has gone, we’re simply going through the motions in our last few game, the stats are a bit more damning.

Two wins in our last ten league games and just three in our last 12 games in all competitions (that’s equivalent to a quarter of a season), shows this team has gone stale. Too many players have lost form, desire and the ability to win regularly, home and away.

What’s more, I haven’t seen much in recent performances to suggest that next season this team will turn those things around and, if Man City invest as many suspect they will, Liverpool continue their resurgence and Spurs retain their big-name players, we could be in for a pretty big shock come August.

Five years ago today, on 17 May 2006, our team walked out on the biggest stage of all – the Champions League Final.

Fail to spend some of that 6 per cent on new players this summer, and we may not even be in it the year after next. And who knows where we go from there.

Putting things right...

As our season winds towards an end as predictable as trouble flaring up at a Glaswegian nightspot or a Jägermeister hangover, so a few other anomalies are also correcting themselves and helping re-establish the equilibrium.

Spurs – after a one-year foray into the Champions League – have returned to their rightful position outside the top four, and possibly Europe altogether. After we went out of this year’s competition and they were still in, the ‘Arsenal – watching Eastenders’ chants were annoying. Well, as it turned out, it was just the one episode for us. Dot went out to the launderette to wash Jim’s clothes, in case any of you missed it. In the 15 years they’ve been watching Eastenders as we toured Europe’s finest venues, they’ve seen every plotline from rape to murder to incest and divorce. So they didn’t really have much to shout about did they. Still, it’s good that things have been put back as they should be. All that remains now is for the Redknapp-induced bankruptcy and firesale of their best players to take place, leaving the fans to lament how they chased the ‘Champions League dream’ by putting players on huge wages and contracts that allow them to leave if they don’t have European Cup football the following year. If van der Vaart and Modric, at least, don’t have Champions League get-out clauses in their contracts I’ll don a ‘Neil Lennon is God’ t-shirt and take a stroll round Glasgow G51.

Elsewhere, Blackpool are back in their own rightful place - among the relegation fodder, which means we no longer have to listen to the idiot-talk of how they have been a breathe of fresh air to the Premier League and how they prove that you don’t need to be defensively strong to survive in this league. Well it turns out you do.

Stoke fans are another group to have returned to their rightful place – this time among football’s most distasteful fans - by abusing Aaaron Ramsey through last Sunday’s game because, presumably, he had the cheek to allow his leg to be broken by one of Stoke’s idiot thug players last year, nearly ending his career. As it’s unlikely there will be some bizarre cup final stampede that results in all of Stoke’s fans receiving broken limbs tomorrow, I’ll just have to settle for them getting battered on the pitch. Then that prick Pulis and his mouthy Chairman can crawl back to the Potteries and prepare for next season’s relegation battle. No-one will be watching anyway. The move to schedule the Cup Final for the same day as a round of Premier League games means, together with the fact that recent finalists include Portsmouth, Millwall and now Stoke, the Cup Final is about as prestigious as, well, the League Cup Final.

Finally, Niklas Bendtner has returned to his rightful place too - as the club clown (having wrenched it away from Manuel Almunia, presumably). Bendtner came out with this week with this classic line about where he would like to go when he leaves The Arsenal in the summer: “If it’s a free choice, I choose Barcelona. I’ve never had any idols in the football world but if I had a dream player to play with then it would be Xavi and Iniesta.”

Hmm… I suspect Nik may be heading for a touch of disappointment over the summer.

Tottenham... watching TV on Tuesdays and Wednesdays again

Fine lines and clutching at straws

I have to confess that Sunday’s win over Man U surprised me a lot. It wasn’t quite the surprise of waking up in a multi-million-pound Pakistani compound at 3am to find some US Seal standing at the end of my bed dispatching the contents of his AK47 into my temple. But I did expect us to lose, and lose with a whimper.

Afterwards it just added to the disappointment of our season – a season when we finally learnt how to beat Man U and Chelsea again but forgot how to close out games and get on a winning run in the easiest of finishes we’ve had to a season in years.

A win over Man U, stood in the sun outside the boozer with the day off work the next day, should have been accompanied by the celebrations of eeking towards the title. Instead it was just all a bit flat – and it feels like we lost the title ages ago now.

Imagine my surprise then, when I stumbled across what the league would look like now if every time the woodwork had been hit in all Premier League games this season, the ball had instead gone in [I’m not sure who the man is that calculates these things, but I imagine he gets out about us much as the Fritzl children c1990-2008].

Now I know football is all about ifs and buts, and that statistics can generally paint any picture you want. And I know that it’s no use bemoaning these things because they’re all part of the game etc etc.

But I also know that the width of a post or crossbar is pretty small. So the fact that we would have been an incredible 12 points clear – and Champions - had all teams’ woodwork strikes been goals, is pretty amazing.

Clutching at straws? Me? Whatever…