Monty91
10-09-2014, 02:36 PM
Arsenal Fan TV Is the Gift That Keeps On Giving
After drawing a home game with Tottenham that they clearly should have won, it’s hard not to feel that we’ve been here before with Arsene Wenger. The repeated injuries to key players, the dominance, the pretty play in front of the opposition, the concession of a **** goal – it leads us back to the same old debates. Is Wenger really football’s last romantic? Or just an old man left behind by history? We’ve been here a thousand times. So instead, let's talk about Arsenal Fan TV.
Arsenal Fan TV had its first big hit at the start of last season with this now-legendary “shape up or geehheeehhhh” interview, but since then there’s been a constant array of wallopers, bells, lengths, balloons and rockets queuing up every week outside the Emirates to have their say. None of them are remotely rational. One wonders whether, after that first taste of fame, the producers have hunted down interviewees on the basis of who looks the most likely to burst into tears and self-immolate while daubing “Wenger out” in his own blood over the Dennis Bergkamp statue.
This tactic is presumably what leads them to people who say things like "they bantered us off for 90 minutes with ****housery". And also to this belter, who sighed and grimaced his way through his post-Spurs interview on Sunday like he was being vox-popped by the BBC at the scene of an orphanage bombing.
To be fair to the channel, however, it does a decent job of showing Arsenal fans how they really are. We can say what we like about them, but no other set of supporters in the country does as well at having one uniform identity across their entire fanbase, which in today’s globalised era is truly remarkable. They might U-turn, knee-jerk and revise with all the ideological consistency of a paper shredder, but they also do it with the discipline of a Roman legion. Who decides whether Mikel Arteta is great or **** this week? Do they have party whips? f**k it, I don’t want to know. But it’s impossible not to be impressed by it.
After drawing a home game with Tottenham that they clearly should have won, it’s hard not to feel that we’ve been here before with Arsene Wenger. The repeated injuries to key players, the dominance, the pretty play in front of the opposition, the concession of a **** goal – it leads us back to the same old debates. Is Wenger really football’s last romantic? Or just an old man left behind by history? We’ve been here a thousand times. So instead, let's talk about Arsenal Fan TV.
Arsenal Fan TV had its first big hit at the start of last season with this now-legendary “shape up or geehheeehhhh” interview, but since then there’s been a constant array of wallopers, bells, lengths, balloons and rockets queuing up every week outside the Emirates to have their say. None of them are remotely rational. One wonders whether, after that first taste of fame, the producers have hunted down interviewees on the basis of who looks the most likely to burst into tears and self-immolate while daubing “Wenger out” in his own blood over the Dennis Bergkamp statue.
This tactic is presumably what leads them to people who say things like "they bantered us off for 90 minutes with ****housery". And also to this belter, who sighed and grimaced his way through his post-Spurs interview on Sunday like he was being vox-popped by the BBC at the scene of an orphanage bombing.
To be fair to the channel, however, it does a decent job of showing Arsenal fans how they really are. We can say what we like about them, but no other set of supporters in the country does as well at having one uniform identity across their entire fanbase, which in today’s globalised era is truly remarkable. They might U-turn, knee-jerk and revise with all the ideological consistency of a paper shredder, but they also do it with the discipline of a Roman legion. Who decides whether Mikel Arteta is great or **** this week? Do they have party whips? f**k it, I don’t want to know. But it’s impossible not to be impressed by it.