The Match Noone Cares About. Arsenal v Fulham; Match Preview

Seems like unfortunate news..
next season John Dykes probably would not be presenting EPL related shows here in SE Asia –

Below is from his blog on espnstar.com
( http://www.espnstar.com/opinion/columnists/column/item56239/)

“I will not be writing a season preview for you, at least not here, this August, By then, I will have relocated to England to work on the Premier League’s new global TV channel. So, let’s sign off with a long-range forecast if you like. It’s going to be a great season. Trust me. I’m almost always right about these things.”

For those of you who watch some other telecast, he is much better than the SKY people, is pretty balanced, and that hyped up fellow Richard Keys would pale in comparision to even his shadow.

Kudos to Fulham, what a great run. Nice to see a composed understated guy like Roy Hodgson do so well. Someone needs to tell those A.Madrid fans not to get so excited, it’s not like they came 3rd in the EPL ;-)

Damn – Forlan 116′

Diaby makes it to the France squad. Hmm… shows how much the French have declined.

Steve McClaren, fresh from winning the Dutch league, has been appointed coach of Wolfsburg.

I hear what you’re saying Stag, and I agree the club wants agreeable supporters, however genuine apathy would quickly undermine the business model.

You need a certain level of obsessive interest to sell the 60,000 premium priced seats at The Emirates, maintain a waiting list, sell significant quantities of merchandise and more generally generate the contagion that develops the Arsenal sporting brand globally. Apathetic support won’t achieve that to the level Arsenal FC need.

In reality ‘The Club’ is actually a blend of actors involving the board and Wenger and of course the unknown quantity Gazidis. I think we can assume too easily that each party thinks the same. In my opinion that’s unlikely to be the case and in any event what drives them at a given time will ebb and flow.

The current board is fractured and therefore is likely to settle for a default position of seeking stability with a risk-averse approach to change. So yes, a level of supporter-apathy in the short-term is probably ok for them as long as it doesn’t result in dwindling match-day attendance.

Wenger on the other hand is driven by his desire to prove his strategy correct, determined that this approach of youth and a pure style(?) will succeed so that he can show 2 fingers to his detractors. His other motivation is to win the CL. That’s why he’s cool with 3rd or 4th. He knows 3rd or 4th provides the additional revenue the clubs ownership prizes and buys him time. It allows him to have another attempt at the CL and another year for his project to mature. So he personally is not in a great hurry, he believes that with every passing year as long as he keeps the majority of the squad together he is closer to this side achieving success. Supporter-apathy suits Wenger down-to-the-ground. He wants as much time as possbile with the least pressure placed on his callow squad. This is why he dumbs down everything including any sense of tangible expectation, it suits his purposes absolutely.

Gazidis is the outlier. We know little about him. He seems to be convincing yet we don’t know enough to know if there is passion and drive behind the front. Time will tell. If he has substance he’ll be concerned that Arsenal FC does not get hijacked by Wenger’s own agenda. Gazidis will know that Arsenal FC can only ride for so long on past glories and that they need to restock the glory cabinet. He’ll know that the club’s various revenue streams and expanding global appeal relies on success now not from 5+ years ago. If he’s clever he will be a key foil in ensuring that Wenger’s own agenda fits Arsenal FC’s or that the board starts to pressure him and looks at alternatives.

The concept of loyalty is an interesting one in sport. Supporters are by nature loyal – they are the givers the lifeblood of the club and normally stick with ‘their’ club all their lives. Conversely managers and players are normally not loyal in the real sense of the word and/yet derive an enormous financial benefit from the club and leave when it suits their individual circumstance.

For this reason I find the lecturing of supporters on their behaviour by fellow supporters or by the manager to be decidely misdirected. It is the manager and players that owe a duty in every sense to ‘earn’ their excessive reward. The supporters do what they do – they follow the club’s progress.

For this reason I feel little ‘automatic’ sentimentality towards the players. Sure I developed a huge admiration for the early squads under Wenger, yet that was in part a relic of the GG era (and the loyal hard-working players GG coached that AW inherited) and then it was a response to AW’s early teams application to the task and their success.

This current squad however have done nothing other than achieve the bare minimum of CL qualification. They do not present as consistently hard-working nor exceptionaly talented. Several of the talented players who can impose themselves on games are physically fragile which reduces their contribution. So, all-in-all they do little to generate a sense of admiration from a supporter, they rely on the default level of “support me because I play for Arsenal”. For me that default level only lasts for so long and then results in a diminished sense of interest…. apathy. Simply, they don’t deserve enduring support. If they can’t perform to the level Arsenal FC is at they should be replaced – both manager and players.

Andez, like you I’ve followed football for years and the Arsenal crowd, like most English crowds, are very tolerant of their players. Some foreign crowds can be merciless – so we need to keep a bit of perspective.

From reading your posts I understand you’re a guy who feels very strongly about loyalty toward the club its manager and its players. That’s great and I’d never propose that you should change your outlook. However I’d draw the line at setting that up as a standard by which all supporters should be judged. Because quite simply there is no rational justification for doing so. Arsenal FC players are lavishly rewarded and under Wenger they are shielded to a rare degree from the normal expectations to perform that every professional at a top club is exposed to.

This isn’t pre-school with little children that need gentle treatment this is the sharp end of professional sport, players receiving millions of pounds per year (funded by the supporters) no matter what their performance, and I would argue that crowd reaction is one of the few valid internal mechanisms by which these players get to sense if they are up to standard. Fabianski is poor – he shouldn’t be in the team. On an individual level that’s a tough message for the player to receive, yet that’s professional sport at the sharp end. Eboue got that message and managed to turn himself around. I wonder if he would have adapted if the crowd didn’t voice their displeasure?

Wenger has placed this group of players under enormous pressure by refusing to reinforce the squad both nummerically and with quality (experience/robustness). His call. But he can’t then turn it around and ask for never-ending patience. No, for me, crowd reaction is a very necessary part of the accountability framework that exists in professional sport.

Gotta take the hat off for Steve McClaren. From as far as I can recall, the Dutch league had always dominated by 3 clubs. Except on rare occasion like AZ bought their way to the title a couple years back (and ended up broke in the process), it was always a PSV, Ajax, Feyenoord 3 horses race.

FC Twente had no history whatsoever, and by no mean can be counted as a big club. What big Mac achieved with them was remarkable.

Another point is – lot of England national team managers at the past, after having a go as the national team coach, their careers went all down hill since. Taylor, King Kev, Hoddle. Fair to say their managerial careers were killed by their England job.

The fact that big Mac bounced back (virtually following the same path as Bobby Robson, sacked after 1990 WC and won the title with PSV two years later) you gotta take the hat off for him.

Speaking of Boateng, I like Kevin as well. Just for S’s and G’s, who from the relegated teams wouldn’t you mind seeing Arsene sign? Besides Boateng, I’ve been toying with the idea of David James but haven’t been bold enough to say it until now. So, there it is.

Chelsea deserved to win and my pre-season bet of £100 on the Blues will surely allow me to drown my Arsenal woes with some extravagantly expensive 30 year old Cognac.

I saw the game at our local Atlanta pub and the Arsenal turnout was dismal. On the weekends we have a room reserved for us compliments of the owner, him being an arsenal fan, and we normally draw at least 70 fans. Yesterday could only muster about 15 Gunners, very few of whom were wearing the kit. This could well be a sign of things to come if Arsene continues to lead us down the straight and narrow path of obsolescence.

I know they will many who say that those folks are fair weather fans at best, but it’s those fair weather fans who will make or break us financially in the future.

I hope Henri Lansbury will be included in the first team squad for next season.

He only came on for a few minutes. But decent touches, kept it simple, never lost the ball.

We need some bite in the middle of the park. Lansbury will offer us an alternative in CM. Best of all, his style doesn’t seem like yet another “nice guy”. More like an old fashion English bulldog. No more nice guys. We need some steel and spirit. To hell with the fair play award. I’ll be very upset if we ever win that fair play award again.

As for the Gallas extortion … well, I dont blame him.

If I were in his shoes I would do the same thing. He made a blunder leaving Chelsea for Arsenal. By now, he could have forced his way as a full-time starter there and gotten hold of a few more medals. Instead he has been wasting away at the “winning is bad” club for four years winning jack-sh&t.

Plus, if he stays at Arsenal for the next two years he is not going to win any thing … thereby wrapping up his career relatively unfulfilled. The extra 20k is meant to lessen the pain.

20k extra for two years is 2 million. We cant buy a new CB for 2 million except its a real bargain and even then we have to pay sign-on fees in addition to the wages and transfer fees. So it would still be about 5 times cheaper to keep him. And he knows Wenger knows that. And he knows profit is all the club thinks of.

Besides, if you are playing for a “winning is bad” team and that team decides to pay garbage, going-nowhere players like Denilson, Diaby and Walcott 60k each … why would you not ask for your own increase?

Stag, not sure how long the ‘event’ approach will last without the vital ingredient. Mega-sport is about aspiring to win. Take that out and it’s reduced to an evening at the opera. Sport, like opera, is in the entertainment business but a particular genre. It’s the competitive side of sport that appeals to the watching audience, dilute that and the magic goes. So, when you stop aspiring to win you change the product – it won’t work as a sustainable approach imo.

On the business side of things, selling out the stadium is critical and a key performance indicator. I’ve noticed that whilst we sell out almost all games there is usually a small portion that don’t show. That supports the theory that The Emirates audience are a different group to most other English clubs. Whilst the numbers 60,000 sellout and 40,000 waiting list sound compelling I’d be surprised if there are still 40,000 eager to buy season tickets. I think the swing impact given our more fickle ticket-buying support base is quite large. Hence, if the general mood at The Emirates grew grim I think the 40,000 (or whatever the current number is) would quickly evaporate. Remember, it costs nothing to put and keep your name on the waiting list.

Lastly, if you interviewed the ‘crowd’ I think many would give you a message of disenchantment not KEEP DOING WHAT YOU ARE DOING. WE LIKE IT.

…. yet the board can and most probably will choose to interpret it as per what you say because it suits their purposes.

So, more of the same. Yawn.

Chelsea storm it. Arsenal seal third place at a canter. And – joy of joys – Spurs bottle a 2-0 lead.

If we don’t ship out our antique stop-gap defenders and buy three big nasty full-on grown-up players this summer, we will not get anyway.

We did win a trophy today!

The best pitch.

Thanks Steve for letting us know.

The game is not showing in my part of the world, but even if it was, I wouldn’t watch it. I think it will be a 0-0 draw. In which case, we will be ahead of Spurs, but only on GD. Wow!

What progress we made. In 2006, when we made it to 4th place on the last day, we were still ahead by one point and we had just sold Vieira and we at least had a CL final (with a fantastic run) to show for.

What do we have to show for this season? Not even the CL and FA Cup semi-finals of last year. Just an illusion of a title fight.

I hardly make predictions but I can’t jinx this team anymore. So here goes…

Arsenal to win 3-0 in a game that will look and feel like an early round Carling Cup game. The Fulham players will be busy having tea in their own half and Arsenal will be busy setting a new record for the most passes (forward and sideways) made in a game.

And after the win, Wenger will praise the mental strength of his players and hail the team’s unity. He will emphasize this squad is ready to win the title next season and will urge the players to stay at Arsenal and be ready to bask in the glorious future that lays ahead for them. Also, Wenger will claim that he may sign 1 or 2 world class players but since all the world class players are playing at Arsenal, there is no one else left to sign…except a brilliant 12 year old striker from Bolivia for 5 million pounds. Also there will be raises given to Theo & Fabianski to boost their morale and reward them for all the hard work they have done this season.

Gotta love progress!!!

oh and interestingly, this game is being shown live on Canadian cable tv, because the other two networks are carrying the title deciding ties.