So Paddy got up - an Arsenal anthology Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  LINE UP

  1 – IN THE BEGINNING - Andrew Mangan

  2 – ONE GEORGIE GRAHAM - Amy Lawrence

  3 – THE ARSENAL: FROM OPEN SEWERS TO OPEN SANDWICHES - Tim Stillman

  4 – DENNIS - Paolo Bandini

  5 – HIGHBURY V EMIRATES - Jim Haryott

  6 – CONTINUED EVOLUTION - Tom Clark

  7 – HERBERT CHAPMAN - Philippe Auclair

  8 – WHAT IS ARSENAL? - Julian Harris

  9 – LET’S GET DIGITAL - James McNicholas

  10 – ALL HAIL THE ALMOST INVINCIBLES - Chris Harris

  11 – ARSENAL AND FAMILY - Sian Ranscombe

  12 – ARSENE WENGER AND TACTICS - Michael Cox

  13 – OUR PRIVATE GARDEN - Tim Bostelle

  14 – ARSENAL’S STANDING IN THE MODERN GAME - Stuart Stratford

  15 – WEMBLEY. BASTARD WEMBLEY - Tim Clark

  16 – BEHIND THE 8-BALL - Tim Barkwill

  17 – ON ARSENAL’S FINANCES : A GAME OF TWO HALVES - Kieron O’Connor

  18 – SUPPORTING ARSENAL FROM AFAR - Leanne Hurley

  19 – STRENGTH FROM WITHIN: FROM MEE TO GRAHAM - David Faber

  20 – STAN KROENKE : INVESTOR TO OWNER IN 5 YEARS - Tim Payton

  21 – GLORY DAYS - Jake Morris

  22 – FROM CHAMP TO CHAMPIGNON - Jonathan Swan

  23 – ON THE ARSENAL BEAT - John Cross

  24 – A NEW ARSENAL: BUILT ON A BELL LANE DYNASTY - Nigel Brown

  25 – MR F - Nick Ames

  26 – WE’RE ON OUR WAY - Andrew Allen

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Arseblog Presents:

  SO PADDY GOT UP

  Edited by Andrew Mangan

  “Bejesus,’ said Paddy ‘I sang it so well,

  I think I’ll get up and I’ll sing it again!’

  So Paddy got up and he sang it again,

  Over and over and over again.”

  Bejesus,’ said Paddy ‘I sang it so well,

  I think I’ll get up and I’ll sing it again!’

  So Paddy got up and he sang it again,

  Over and over and over again.”

  (repeat to fade)

  Arsenal fans – traditional

  To Mrs Blogs, for understanding

  First published in 2011 by Portnoy Publishing

  1 – Digital edition, Kindle

  Copyright © arseblog.com and the contributors, 2011.

  The Authors have asserted their moral rights.

  The right of Andrew Mangan to be identified as the Author of the work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior and express permission of the publishers.

  This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be circulated in any form or binding other than that in which it is published.

  ISBN: 978 0 956981 36 3

  Cover design: David Rudnick

  Portnoy Publishing

  PO Box 12093, Dublin 6, Ireland.

  www.portnoypublishing.com

  Twitter: @portnoypub

  LINE UP

  1 - In the Beginning – Andrew Mangan

  2 - One Georgie Graham – Amy Lawrence

  3 - The Arsenal: From Open Sewers to Open Sandwiches – Tim Stillman

  4 - Dennis – Paolo Bandini

  5 - Highbury v Emirates – Jim Haryott

  6 - Continued Evolution – Tom Clark

  7 - Herbert Chapman – Philippe Auclair

  8 - What is Arsenal? – Julian Harris

  9 - Let’s Get Digital – James McNicholas

  10 - All Hail the Almost Invincibles – Chris Harris

  11 - Arsenal and Family – Sian Ranscombe

  12 - Arsene Wenger and Tactics – Michael Cox

  13 - Our Private Garden – Tim Bostelle

  14 - Arsenal’s Standing in the Modern Game – Stuart Stratford

  15 - Wembley. Bastard Wembley – Tim Clark

  16 - Behind the 8-Ball – Tim Barkwill

  17 - On Arsenal’s Finances: A Game of Two Halves – Kieron O’Connor

  18 - Supporting Arsenal From Afar – Leanne Hurley

  19 - Strength From Within: From Mee to Graham – David Faber

  20 - Stan Kroekne: Investor to Owner in Five Years – Tim Payton

  21 - Glory Days – Jake Morris

  22 - From Champ to Champignon – Jonathan Swan

  23 - On the Arsenal Beat – John Cross

  24 - A New Arsenal: Built on a Bell Lane Dynasty – Nigel Brown

  25 - Mr F – Nick Ames

  26 - We’re On Our Way – Andrew Allen

  Acknowledgements

  1 – IN THE BEGINNING - Andrew Mangan

  ‘How do you write a blog every day for 10 years?’

  Well, it’s quite simple. You get up every morning. You go to the bathroom, after which you make coffee, you take said coffee to your office upstairs/across the hall/in the back bedroom (location has changed due to various house moves), and you sit down and write it. Depending on seasons/location you work wearing a dressing gown and slippers or shorts and flip-flops (this is what I call the Dublin/Barcelona dichotomy). You do that 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, for nigh on ten years and it becomes something of a habit; part of your routine. If you wake in the morning with a bladder that needs emptying, soon enough you wake up with a head that needs emptying. Not of piss, thankfully. That would suggest a serious leak or some badly plumbed pipes. But essentially that’s how. You sit, you drink coffee, you scour the morning papers (well, their websites), you flooter around on NewsNow, perhaps a bit of Google News, lately a bit of Twitter, and then you bash it out. Spell check it, still miss a few errors, wait for le correction, and publish. Simple.

  ‘Why have you written a blog every day for ten years?’

  Well, because I found a subject matter I love, because, as I explained above, my head needs to metaphorically (no Redknappian ‘literally’ here) piss out words, and because I really love doing it. Ok, there are some mornings when I might have taken a drink the night before when I don’t exactly feel full of the joys of spring, but I could count on one hand the amount of times I’ve opened an eye and said ‘Mrs Blogs, there are about 513 things I’d rather do now than write a blog’. And you know me, being a moderate drinker at the best of times, it tends to affect me if I have more than a couple of halves of shandy. Or halves of bottles of Havana Club.

  The why, back then, was because it was something new, interesting, exciting and which allowed me to write. The why now, well, I write a blog because that’s what I do. Some people have peculiar talents. Contortionists, for example, who can pick their nose with their toes, or that bloke who was in that freaky circus and discovered that he was able to lift heavy weights which were attached by a hook to his scrotum. Don’t ask me how he discovered this was his talent, but I find it unlikely that Scrotumy Joe had a moment of serendipity when his life’s calling was made clear to him. What I do might not be as niche as those two but after forty years on this earth I’ve realised the thing I’m best at is writing a blog about Arsenal. So that’s why I do it.

  ‘Ok, but what made you write a blog about Arsenal in the first place?’

  Ah, here’s where it gets interesting. In so much as a condensed version of four years of my life can be interesting. We have to go back in time a bit, to late 1997. At the time I was a DJ, amongst other things. Not a particularly great DJ, I’ll admit
, but I could slap together a few hours of bouncy house tunes with only the odd horrendous, beat clashing mix. So, my friend Daragh called.

  ‘Do you fancy doing a gig this evening?’

  ‘Well, I was going to sit around connect to this Internet thing with my spanking new 28.8k modem but sure go on then’.

  ‘Right, I’ll pick you up later. One more thing, you’re from Ibiza’.

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Yeah, we sold tickets saying some cool DJ from Ibiza was coming’.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘We just made up a name’

  ‘What name?’

  ‘Jon ‘The Mixinator’ Jonson’.

  ‘Ah here …’

  ‘Seriously’.

  ‘Fucks sake’.

  ‘So you’re him’.

  ‘You’re an awful spoofer, you know’.

  ‘Pick you up around 9’.

  So, I got my records together, thought of something to say when the first person said ‘You know, for a DJ from Ibiza you’re not very tanned, are you?’ and soon we arrived at the venue. A suburban nightclub more used to ‘Sing Hallelujah’ and bottles of Ritz than a load of pilled-up, face the DJ merchants who would stop occasionally to gasp ‘water … water …’ for fear of over-heating and dropping dead.

  I should have known the night was going to be bad when I set up the Technics and tried to plug them in. It being 1997, and at that time the height of modernity, the plugs were standard. You know, square pinned. The plug sockets, however, had obviously been installed some time in the late ’50s and accepted only round plugs.

  ‘I think we might have a small problem here’, I said to Daragh.

  ‘Have you got any CDs?’ he asked, looking at the two nicely-plugged in CD decks.

  ‘I think I have a copy of Brothers in Arms at home but that’s not much use to us here’.

  ‘Oh fuck’, he said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Quite how the situation was resolved, I don’t remember. I have vague recollections of standing around drinking things until someone found a late night hardware store – not easy to come by in 1997, let me tell you – or we cut the plugs off the CD decks and attached them to the record players. Anyway, despite the round-pinned plugs, the gig was fine. I don’t think anyone asked me why I was so milky for an Ibiza-based DJ as I stood there and played records until 2am or so. Not quite as seminal as Sasha at Renaissance or anything but generally fine and I pocketed a whopping £40 for my night’s work (hey, back then you could buy a nice suit, go on a foreign holiday and still have enough left over for a night at pictures with that kind of money).

  The problems started on the way home. I was in the front seat as Daragh drove me back to my house on the South Circular Road. We came to a crossroads, complete with handy traffic lights so you knew it was your turn to go. Traffic was light, as you’d expect at that time of night. In fact, there were only two cars on the road – us and another man heading in the opposite direction. As we went through the lights, which were green, he decided this would be the perfect time to turn right. It wasn’t. The perfect time would have been when we weren’t halfway across the junction. The perfect time would have ensured that he didn’t crash right into us, exploding the airbag in Daragh’s face and leaving me completely unscathed apart from a hideously broken arm and most of the windshield in my forehead. I got out of the car imploring somebody to commit an act of unspeakable violence on the other man before I noticed my second elbow. It hurt. Anyway, the ambulance came and brought me to hospital, where they X-rayed me, picked as much of the glass out of my head as they could, and left me sitting on a trolley in a room off the emergency department. Surgery was to take place the next morning.

  Mrs Blogs arrived at the hospital and I asked the nurse if it might be possible to have something for the pain.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘But you’ll have to stand up and undo your pants’.

  I went to an all boys school run by priests so was immediately suspicious but figured I didn’t have much choice.

  ‘This,’ said the nurse, ‘is just the legal side of heroin.’ She then jabbed me in the arse with a giant needle. I know people tut-tut at drug addicts but at that precise moment my intense love of morphine was born. It’s almost worth really hurting yourself just so you can get some. Soon the pain was replaced by a warm glow, I recall telling Mrs Blogs about how the stupid nightclub only had round plugs.

  ‘Can you believe that? In this day and age, round plugs?’

  ‘I certainly found it hard to believe the first few times you told me,’ she said nicely. And from then it was a slow drift off into nothingness. I woke in the morning, on the trolley, pants still not done up properly, having slept for hours sitting up straight. God bless you sweet delicious morphine.

  So, the accident changed your life so much you decided to write about Arsenal?

  Hold your horses! There’s still a way to go yet. Suffice to say I didn’t take being badly injured well. Especially when after three months of weekly visits to the hospital, wearing a shoulder to wrist cast, a doctor calmly announced, ‘Your arm is still broken.’ This was no surprise to me as I’d been telling them this for weeks in my out-patient visits.

  ‘I think my arm is still broken,’ I would say.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘No, really. When I lie in bed at night I can crunch the two broken bits of bone off each other.’

  ‘You are being silly,’ the doctor would reply.

  ‘Well, you’re the doctor, I suppose.’

  Turns out he was a bit of a shit doctor and when a better doctor took a look at the X-rays he was happy to conclude that my arm was indeed still broken and required surgery. This was depressing news but there you go. I went in for surgery, they sliced my arm open from shoulder to elbow, put in a metal plate, some screws, closed me up and gave me some more morphine for a few days. It was a during a blissed-out haze I watched us beat Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on the TV in the room they gave me (I think out of guilt at being so crap earlier). Stephen Hughes scored both goals that day. Anyway, my arm was sort of fixed. I had to get the stitches out, learn how to bend it again, and all that other awful physio stuff. Yet the worst was still to come. Broken bones, second elbows, busted heads, glassy bits finding their way to the surface of my skin months later, surgery, rehab and all that paled into insignificance when I hurtled through the windscreen of life into … middle management.

  I had spent the previous years of my life working as a DJ, sound engineer and voice-over bloke, but after the accident and a grand total of nine months out of action I had to get a job. I lied my way into AOL as tech support agent. That was fun. The call-centre for the UK was based in Dublin.

  ‘Hello, I can’t sign up with this AOL software.’

  [Insert 20 minutes of installing, reinstalling, removing and adding back the TCP/IP control panel, rebooting computers, modems, toasters, anything you can think of. Then brainwave!]

  ‘Excuse me, madam. Can you please tell me your address?’

  ‘It’s 52 Flotheringtominham Crescent, Scunthorpe, County –’

  ‘There’s your problem!’ I’d say.

  ‘What? My address?’

  ‘Yes, you see the AOL software has powerful anti-swearing software. It doesn’t like part of your address.’

  ‘Which part?’

  ‘Erm, the bit between the S and the H …’

  ‘You mean…? Oh! Eeek, Clive, you should hear what this awful Irishman almost made me say.’

  And that was the highlight of a life in technical support. A move to Ireland’s national telecoms company and a job as a team leader/middle manager guy didn’t make things much better. On the one hand I rarely had to speak to anyone who had a tech support problem, on the other I only got to speak to really, really angry people. And then there were team meetings, team building, management meetings, stats, spreadsheets, and a seemingly never-ending procession of stupid things and stupid people who existed solely to make my life miserab
le. Anyway, it got to the point where I would come home from work, sit out the back garden having a smoke (not of morphine sadly), and gaze fondly at the sky at passing planes. In fact, I would spend a lot of time gazing fondly at planes, wanting to be on them. And I hate flying. That’s how bad it was.

  Anyway, long story short, me and Mrs Blogs decided to move to Spain. We’d sell our house, pack our stuff, pets and Blogette up, and move to a medium-sized town just outside Barcelona. No, we did not speak any Spanish beyond ordering calamari and various cocktails, but that was of no great worry. We decided to do the sensible thing; we’d make it up as we went along.

  Fast forward to Barcelona airport in August 2001. Mrs Blogs and I are standing at the luggage carousel awaiting our various baggage. People are shuffling around, doing that thing they do to get as close as they can to the plastic flaps which birth the bags into their new realm, and we’re standing waiting, for we know what is to come. The carousel starts up, suitcases of all kinds start to appear, people are clutching greedily at them as if everyone else on the flight is David Hillier. And shortly afterwards our stuff emerges. There’s a sequence. It goes: suitcase > small bag > suitcase > cat > suitcase > basset hound > suitcase > suitcase > cat > cat > suitcase … well, you can imagine.

  The first thing Opus, the basset, did when he got outside the airport was stop and do an enormous poo on the zebra crossing outside the airport. An inauspicious start to life in Spain, but considering how the relationship between Arsenal and FC Barcelona was to develop down the years perhaps you might say it was prophetic.

  Ok, so you got to Spain and you started an Arsenal blog? Please. I can’t take any more of this.

  Yes. And no. Sorry. After all that time with spreadsheets (hold me) I decided it would be good to take some time off. So I did. We got there in August and Arseblog started in February. In that time I spent every day on the telephone to telecoms company, Terra, trying to have ADSL installed. I ordered it in August; it arrived some time in the new year. I can’t remember exactly when, all I know is that it was the longest, most frustrating time of my life. You know when you take a trip to the dentist and the time in the chair crawls? Well, this was a bazillion and fifty times worse. I spoke little or no Spanish, but they did have an English-speaking department. In retrospect I think ‘department’ might be pushing it. It consisted of one woman. She got to know me quite well.