Arsenal fans gloriously happy as doom mongers seek solace (satire)

By Sir Hardly Anyone

Chief econonononmics correspondent at the Toppled Bollard.

The peace of the day was shattered by what appears to have been sixteen members of the anti-Arsenal Arsenal brigade falling over each other as they attempted to enter the Toppled Bollard simultaneously at opening time (or 5am as it is called in civilised society).

To a man and woman they looked miserable beyond sin as one pair of shaggy eyebrows above the sort of piercing eyes that one does not want encounter on an empty stomach, followed another of the same, and entered the bar. 

At their head was Blowtorch McGuiness, and I had never seen him like this before.  He looked like a dictator of a small eastern country that has been admitted to Uefa and now wants to start a purge.  It would be too much to say that Blowtorch actually snorted. Generally scribblers of his upbringing do not snort.  But still one could see, these were terrible times. 

As you might expect of a man who had been running the same anti-Arsenal story for five years without having to think of another one, and then finding it shattered into pieces, he made the unmistakeable sound of a journalist whose number has been called and he has found no other story in the locker.   No matter that at 5am in the Bollard the beer tastes like blotting paper, he wanted to forget.  The five year gravy train was dead.  He would drink anything.

Being on Bollardic duty for Untold, I watched them as these distraught story tellers each came in looking at each other as if to say, “How could that ruse be spotted now?”   Ice formed on their upper slopes as each looked to the other to see who might pay for the considerable amount of alcohol needed to get over this blow-up.  No one was willing, for none knew when the gravy train that had supported their one story existence for the past five years might start up again – if it ever would.

As the drinking started murmurings of “£40 million a year,” could be heard.  It was the only story they had ever known, and now it was dead.

And indeed how would you feel if you had been successfully running a show which without warning is exposed as being just a little bit, well actually a large bit, off the mark?  But that was what the man on the street was saying, for these lads and lassies who had been caught out playing “our accountant says” once too often, now knew the story was out: their five year tale about Arsenal having a £40m budget was, well, as lively as the 5000 year old entombed dog of an Egyptian mummy.

Indeed speaking of dogs there were indeed some there who seemed to be taking on the attitude of a pet dog which wanted to persist in laying a dead rat before its adoring masters and mistresses, despite it having been made clear both by word and a swift push in the posterior that the market for the old story at this time, following the bursting of the great fib bubble, was somewhat sluggish.

For they had been running the same story for so long they just couldn’t stop themselves doing it.  Arsenal has £40m to spend this year and either a) they are sitting on it and not spending it because they are miserable gits, or b) it is so little as to be irrelevant in the current transfer market, or maybe c) the owner of the club has nicked it or d) well who cares what d) said when most supporters reading the guff don’t get past a).

As drinking commenced a silence fell across the room, interrupted only by the occasional unmistakable sound of an accountant of dubious provenance falling to the ground.  The TV screens flickered into life, but each one simply had the slogan “£40m” plastered on it over and over and over again.  The floor grew more crowded.

One or two of the scribblers did try to keep scribbling, one seeming to forget totally that the gaff had been blown and so was instead shouting out his copy.  “Arsenal fans are reduced to publicly begging the owning Kroenke family to invest more, but they still buy pricey season tickets and then don’t attend matches,” he said.

There were groans across the room.  Seemingly no one had told him.   “We’re blown,” said one.  “Some bright spark went back through our history and saw that we were running the same story about our accountant finding hidden things in the Arsenal books over and over again.  We’ve been doing it for five years, I can’t understand what it doesn’t work any more, but there it is.”

Members of the throng, totally disorientated now that the story – their one and only story – had been blown, moved across the bar with as little uproar as a jellyfish that has lost its sting, until inevitably one of the whistle blowers came in with his bon mot of the day saying, “I find economics increasingly satisfactory, and I think I am rather good at it. I want to manage a railway or organise a Trust, or at least swindle the investing public.”

There was silence.

“Do we have anyone here who gets things done?” asked another, but reply came their none.

And what, you may wonder are the pretty little things who write the blogs doing, now that the £40m story that has been their bedrock for the last five years has been blown.  Their allies have gone.  The man from FoLo has just shouted in a story about Arsenal having made four summer signings and still having plenty of money to spend.   I think he was going to call those about him “pessimists” but somehow couldn’t remember the word.

Of course some people just can’t stop being negative about Arsenal – after all they’ve been doing it everyday for so many years it is, like smoking, consuming four bottles of red a day or taking cocaine, is hard to stop.  Even the sudden withdrawal of the drip drip drip drip of negativity from the bloggettas that have fed off the same source, is not enough to help them give up.

Even the man from the Metro looked dazed.  “My boss has been running the byline, ‘News but not as you know it’,”  he complained between pints.  “What is that supposed to mean?”

And really no one could say.