Week Nine – 11 Sleeps to Go….
The penultimate instalment of my
pre-season diaries comes to you a day late, due to me being on holiday last
week. I took this week away as an opportunity to stay away from Twitter and
pretty much all media coverage of anything for a week, so this week’s piece
comes to you pretty much from my mind and my mind alone. If that’s not enough
to make you run a mile straight away then thank you very much, and read on…
As some of you may know, I was in sunny Majorca last week. I stayed away from the madness of Twitter for a whole seven days. A break from constantly checking my phone for any news, a break from watching meltdown after meltdown, you know what I mean.
And it was nice. This is not me criticising anyone for having Twitter meltdowns, I’m not up myself enough to deny the fact that if it wasn’t for Twitter there’s a very good chance nobody would be reading this, and believe it or not this week off has actually given me a brighter outlook regarding Twitter and the like.
This was epitomised on the last day of my holiday when a kid said to my boy “I’ll see you on XBOX live if I don’t see you before you leave”. And he probably will. How cool is that? There you have the light and shade of the digital age. Grown adults reduced to ridiculous cyber bitching over football, and two young boys from opposite ends of the country that will keep in touch by shooting aliens or whatever the fuck it is kids do on Xboxes these days.
And it got me thinking about the top people I have got speaking to on Twitter over the last year or so. Yes, there are arseholes – there are arseholes everywhere – but what we sometimes need reminding of is the fact that cyber arseholes are a lot easier avoided than arseholes we are actually forced to interact with every day. And I like to think that I will continue to talk with some top people this coming season, and hopefully even share a beer with.
Funnily enough, everything you have read so far today was supposed to be a brief introductory paragraph, which I started writing the day I got back to England. I got a bit carried away, obviously, so let me now bring to you what I wrote on a beautiful beach in S’Illot, Majorca…
Blogging on the Beach…
You really notice how possible it is to become reliant on technology to fill the minutes between conversation and actual social interaction when you stop doing it yourself.
Here I am in this beautiful little resort in the Balearics, and I’ve not been to one place here where someone isn’t on their phone or tablet, updating their Facebook, or cheating on quiz night and still not winning…
I haven’t cut myself off from all news outlets though; I’m on holiday in Majorca, not Tom fucking Hanks in Castaway. I checked the Sky Sports News app “Window Watch” one day and saw this, which reassured me I wasn’t missing anything.
Just as I was struggling to put this week’s instalment together in my twitter free mind, some twat went past on a Segway, reminding me of exactly what it is I’ve been writing about these past few weeks – the transfer window. How did a twat on a Segway remind me you of the transfer window? I hear you ask. Well, a Segway, like the transfer window is an utterly fucking pointless invention. Like lager shandy, like Piers Morgan, like any c*nt that has ever been on The X-Factor; pointless.
A Segway will allow an idiot to grab your attention for two precious seconds of your life that you will never ever get back. The transfer window will allow a whole bunch of idiots to grab your attention for two precious months of your life that you will never ever get back.
A person on a Segway is a twat making himself look an even bigger twat, just moving slightly faster. Jim White is a twat, looking an even bigger twat during the transfer window, just talking – and at times possibly masturbating – slightly faster.
Honestly, the transfer window should be renamed “the Sky Sports sponsored transfer window sponsored by Sky Sports” It is purely a job creation scheme for men who look like they would usually be out kerb crawling to stand outside stadiums or training grounds surrounded by window licking freaks like this…
It’s some sort of rehabilitation for serial kerb crawlers I reckon, and the bloke with the fetish for dressing up as a baby and paying a lady of the night to breast feed him gets the Stoke job.
“Transfer Deadline Day”, a day that gets its own day long program on Sky Sports News, how great is that? Imagine a species from a faraway galaxy landing on earth on transfer deadline day and experiencing only Sky Sports News. They’d think we were a race of excitable morons who worship some kind of blancmange faced half man, half car hybrid, twitching away like mad uttering things like “I ain’t no fackin’ wheela deala!” They would then jump back into their spacecraft and return to wherever they came from quicker than you can say “this just in…”
Some
thoughts on the Transfer Window so far, inspired by sun, sea and San Miguel…
We all expected this summer to be different given the fact that we have money to spend and were quite boisterous in announcing early on our intentions to spend it. But looking at it now I can’t say I’m surprised we are where we are now if I’m honest, because everybody else knows we have money to spend, and with that comes the fact that nobody is going to make it easy for us to spend it, why would they?
The fact of the matter is that we are in the financial position we are in now largely down to sticking to our principals these last few years, so is it fair for us to want the club to just abandon those principals now?
The problem is as fans we sometimes want to have our cake and eat it, and it’s quite the conundrum. Just because we have a few bob now should we just spunk a few million here and there above what a player is worth? I know that the market dictates the over inflated prices that some players go for these days, but can we really sit here shaking our heads over the fees some clubs have paid for players, taking the piss out of Liverpool over what they paid for players such as Stewart downing and Andy Carroll, and then get the hump when we won’t just make a “name your price offer” for whoever?
It really is a difficult situation for the club and us as fans to be in, and I don’t mean to be patronising to all those that are concerned at the way the summer has gone so far – I’m sure we’re all concerned to some degree – I’m simply trying to point out that it may not be entirely fair to chastise the club for how it has gone so far.
I can see this transfer window going right down to the wire myself, so I’m making the most of this week away from the pressure cooker that is Twitter as an Arsenal fan, and just enjoying being an Arsenal supporter who cannot wait for the football season to start. Just like it used to be.
Next week is the final instalment of the pre-season diaries, and I will
spend the next week preparing a stirring, emotional speech. Or I might just
hire a fucking Segway….
Darren
Berry
Islington born and bred, Arsenal through and through.
Published author.
Is Yours Gold? The Arsenal Invincibles Twentieth Anniversary – available now,
Over Land and Sea (and Lockdown), Arsenal 20/21 – The Corona Diaires – released 2021.
Clickbait: Life as a Modern Football Fan – released 2019
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