So Paddy got up - an Arsenal anthology by So Paddy Got Up- An Arsenal Anthology (mobi)

Author:So Paddy Got Up- An Arsenal Anthology (mobi)
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Arsenal Football Club
Publisher: Portnoy Publishing
Published: 2011-12-08T17:00:00+00:00

***

Stuart Stratford is the author of Arsenal blog, A Cultured Left Foot

15 – WEMBLEY. BASTARD WEMBLEY - Tim Clark

Wembley. Bastard Wembley. For some, it must be a Champagne-splashed coliseum of pleasure, forever ringing to the sound of ‘Campeones!’, fireworks, and Laura Wright lustily belting out the National Anthem. Not for me. For me it’s the kind of shithole that gives shitholes a bad name: an ugly, rain-blasted concrete mausoleum. It is the place where my Carling Cup dream crawled to die.

Yes, that’s right: dream.

Okay, look, I know. I really do know. IT WAS ONLY THE BLOODY CARLING CUP. The Mickey Mouse, none-of-the-big-boys-care Cup. Except, the thing was that in 2010-11 we did care. The manager did, ditching his kids-only policy for far stronger sides than he’s selected in previous seasons. And so did the players, desperate to finally see some, dammit, any kind of pot-shaped reward for their efforts. None more so than Cesc Fabregas, who cruelly ended up missing the final with hamstring twang from a (as it eventually transpired, heartbreakingly irrelevant) league game against Stoke’s travelling Orc army.

But perhaps most of all, it had come to mean something to the fans. Largely, what it meant was the chance to reset the miserable stopwatch that hangs around every pundit’s neck, detailing down to the last nanosecond how long it’s been since the Arsenal last won anything. At time of writing: 6 years, 3 months, 18 hours and 31 seconds. Ugh. All of us needed that monkey off our backs. In fact we needed that monkey off our backs and shot into space without so much as a Russian flag to wrap his tiny body in. “Fly, Dimitri, fly!” While I can’t really excuse the hyperbole of saying that winning the Carling was my dream, I can at least try to explain it. You see as a relatively late Arsenal starter, I’d never seen one of our captains lifting a trophy in the flesh. And although technically we were still stuttering along in four competitions at the time, in the wake of the debacle at St James Park, and several other spectacular capitulations, the season was already starting to feel like quite the bum-clencher.

Having limped past such luminaries as Ipswich, Huddersfield and Leeds, I’d come to see the Carling not exactly as a sure thing, but certainly as sure as things ever got. By the time February 27th rolled around, I’d mentally built it up to be some unlikely combination of the Jules Rimet trophy and getting my 500m swimming badge. It was to be the spark from which further glory would surely follow. No longer would our players resemble a small copse of haunted trees before big games. This. Was. It.

Or so we thought. The other half of ‘we’ being Arse2Mouse’s co-blogger Dave Meikleham. At the time, both of us were working in Bath, writing about videogames for pennies, and had bonded over a mutually destructive love of the Arsenal. When the chance to rent a season ticket appeared

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.