may 13th
Picture the scene. It’s summer 1995. I’m sitting in the newsroom of the radio station I was working in at the time, listening to the cattle prices. The girl doing the sports news is getting her bulletin together. She knows I’m an Arsenal fan.
“Erm…you should come and have a look at this!” she says. So I wander over and she’s got Ceefax on with the headline “Arsenal sign Dennis Bergkamp”.
Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Dennis Bergkamp, signing for Arsenal? How? What? Why? Was Bruce Rioch more respected in European football than we’d realised? An amazing signing, just amazing. And it’s been a signing that’s meant a lot to the club. To have a player of his stature and ability join us made other players want to come here, made Arsenal a more desirable place to play football. And he’s certainly made it a more desirable place to watch football.
So now he’s signed a new one year deal which will mean he’ll have spent ten years at the club. In an era of mercenary foreigners and club swapping we sometimes forget how loyal Dennis has been. If he’d walked away last summer when the club were fucking him around, could anyone have blamed him? Anyway, we don’t have to worry about it, he’ll stay, the youngsters can learn so much from him, and he’ll grace the turf of Highbury for another season. Glad to have you on board, Den.
Also set to sign new deals are Edu and Sol Campbell. The Evening Standard says that talks with both players have gone smoothly and new contracts will be chugging out of the Arsenal printing press in the next couple of weeks. No deal has been made with Sylvain Wiltord though, and his hopes of making Euro2004 look a bit slim as he’s suffering from the same ankle problem that kept him out for so long in the second part of the season. Kanu and Martin Keown could both end up at Portsmouth as long as Harry Redknapp stays in charge there.
Well, the poxy grey weather appears to have gone back to northern Europe where it belongs. The sun is shining here today, the clouds are non existent and the sky is blue. Here comes the summer.
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This Saturday I have to work. Painful, but I was looking forward to coming home, having a beer or two and watching Arsenal play Leicester. Now, thanks to those greedy, covetous, craving, parsimonious, avaricious, miserly, prehensile, gormandizing, insatiate, gluttonous cunts at Sky, I won’t be able to.
The Arsenal v Leicester game is only on Pay Per View. Despite the fact we could make history by going the whole season unbeaten, despite the fact they’ve covered almost all of our last games in the last couple of months on normal Sky channels, and most importantly despite the fact that’s it’s fucking impossible for me to ring them up and ask for the PPV game, they’re still putting in on the PPV channel.
I hate them so much right now I’m thinking of building a giant catapult and firing boulders at the Astra satellite. Apparently they’ll go back to Highbury to cover the presentation of the trophy etc, but that’s not much consolation.
