Quiet again. Yup. The kind of quiet that screams like a banshee who caught her gee on a thorny hedge.
In some ways the quiet is good because the alternative to the quiet has been the football and the football has been, as we all know, a little hard to take. However, at least it’s something. So would you prefer the screaming quiet of nothing or the shrieking something of football?
Football for me. Troubling as it might be it’s much better than the nothing. Of course, I would say that. It’s much easier to get up every morning and write about something than having to get up and write about how there’s nothing to write about. Of course it challenges you to try and think of new things to say but a challenge once in a while is fine, every day for two weeks, that’s just cruel and unusual.
I’ve considered a few things to make Interlulls less lullish and more entertaining. For example, a serialised, one-week adventure featuring Nelson Vivas who is sent back in time for some reason to do something to someone in order to get something something something. As you can see, I haven’t quite managed to sort out the details of that one yet. I chose Nelson Vivas because I think of all the players Arsenal have had in the past he would be most suited for going back in time. And I think he’d be a cold-as-ice assassin. You could beg all you wanted but Nelson would show you no mercy.
For the sake of my audience I also considered taking a gansey-load of hallucinogens and then seeing what happened if sat down to write. As I’m ancient now though I figured my toad licking days were over.
I considered a ‘ways to make Arsenal win again’ series but I’m not sure the ways I thought up were all that good. The first one was to hypnotise the entire squad into thinking they were much better at football than they actually are, but I’m not a hypnotist and I think some of them already think they’re better than they are. The other one was to hire a load of sinister looking blokes to follow the players around and let them know they’d better win or there’d be consequences.
So, let’s say Theo Walcott is going around his local Sainsbury’s picking up some Pop Tarts and a jar of pesto and sinister looking bloke pops out from behind a display of baked beans (you know the kind that gets knocked over in cartoons and stuff), stands in front of Theo, says ‘You better win every game for the rest of the season, mate. If not …’, and then he does the slicey-throat gesture with his finger. He then walks off but such is his skill at being a sinister bastard he’d let Theo see him every so often, saying nothing, but doing slicey-throat. Like, Theo is off to training, driving down the road, and there, standing on the corner is our man, doing ‘slicey-throat’. Theo looks up from reading the Beano while having a poo and there’s our man at the window.
Then I remembered I tried that before and it freaked Bendtner out so much he drove his car into a field and was never the same again. The reason he wanted out of Arsenal wasn’t for first team football, it was to get away from sinister bloke and his threatening gestures. He also did that one where you make a circle out of your thumb and index finger and … well, I think you know the rest.
When you look at the state we’re in and think about it carefully, you’d have to hope we’ve considered the use of performance enhancing drugs. Or, at the very least, ensuring the opposition are taking performance dehancing drugs. Are we seriously supposed to believe that in a state of the art stadium like ours, it’s not possible to pump some kind of vaguely noxious, debilitating anesthetic into the opposition dressing room, rendering them pukey and dizzy before they hit the pitch? I know this would be more difficult for away games but perhaps we could make a nice gesture of some semi-poisonous cup cakes which would do the same thing.
And what about the refs and linesmen who cause us such woes? When you think of all the things we could be doing, bribery, kidnapping, extortion, threats of ultra-violence and ensuring that match officials are aware of our Phil Collins Dungeon, a padded room which loops the drummy bit from ‘In the air tonight’ and occasionally a chorus or two of Sussidio forever, you just have to question whether this club is being run properly at all. These are desperate times, we need to be looking at desperate measures.
Instead we just seem to be chugging along, doing the same old things, making the same old mistakes. It’s like when you see a player who gives everything on the pitch, you’re much more likely to forgive him a bad game because at least he’s trying. We don’t even look like we’re trying any more. Where has the Arsenal that would threaten the lives of its own players and try to poison the opposition gone?
I miss that Arsenal.
