Arsenal’s defending is incompetent/So is their recruitment

As I a journalist, I was always straight.

I wrote what I thought and never twisted a quote and or sensationalised anything.

As a blogger, I say what I think because that’s a compulsion. I can’t do it any other way.

If you’ve always had a sports editor or a features editor or an arts editor subbing your reports and previews and reviews before they’re published, and then suddenly you are released onto the World Wide Web and writing off the top of your head and thinking you are Hunter S. Thompson……

Doing that, anybody would make mistakes and misjudgements.

However, let me get one thing straight today.

I still love football, still enjoy the match action, always get a buzz from a great game in which the best players do memorable things.

Kroenke and Wenger have not killed my love of football.

I think Arsenal’s defending is incompetent. And their recruitment is also incompetent.

And I don’t see it as my job to regurgitate the latest piffle from King Wenger, who says that Sanchez, Ozil and Oxlade are in the final years of their contracts but that is OK, it’s fine.

It’s much healthier for me to not see what he says, and not read what he says.

I judge a manager by his team’s performances and results, not by what he says.

Since 1998, I’ve had a lot of abuse from Gooners and some of that has been deserved

And I totally accept that some readers will never understand where I’m coming from.

Almost a decade ago a guy wrote to ANR Comments and said : Harvey Goldsmith my bum.

That was his email. He didn’t believe that I knew the rock promoter.

In fact, everybody knows Harvey Goldsmith, and he knows everybody.

I recently saw Harvey at a Richard Neville/Oz memorial party at the V&A, to which we’d been invited by Tony & Janey Elliott.

The first woman I talked to was very bright and political and after a while I asked, “Did you know Howard Marks?”

She said, “I was at Oxford with Howard.”

It was that sort of party.