2011, Arsenal and Me

It’s that time of the year again. December, a month full of top lists, reviews of the past year, remembering what happened. I decided to do the same, to write about my year with Arsenal. I’ll look back on 2011 and share with you what I’ll remember, what made me cry, and what made me furious.

 First thing that comes in mind, the thing that hit me the most (although I hate to admit it), is Cesc Fabregas. He left, as everyone loves to remind us oh so often. He was our captain, the Arsenal kid, someone I always said would bleed Arsenal if you cut him, and, most important thing, the reason why I became a gooner. Yes, I was a diehard fan girl, hard to believe, I know! Thank God I realized Arsenal is waaay better than Cesc. Anyway, I didn’t believe it ‘til they announced it on arsenal.com. It hit me hard, even though I stayed kinda cool on the outside and said, “I don’t really care.” I took his posters down long before that, but the image in head was very much alive. So, yeah, I cried. I cried because he was such a nice boy, great player, all about Arsenal, and now he just left. It took some time till I stopped. I took Fever Pitch, ultimate helper, and read that part about how players come and go, and us fans are the one that stuck with the team. Then I unfollowed him on twitter, I deleted 2000 photos of him and found courage to watch his goals for THEM. Yeah, that story is over. Thank you, Cesc, for everything. Good luck. We have other heroes now.

 That last sentence made me thought of crazy transfer dead line day. So not Arsenal! But it was awesome, it was my first transfer dead line on twitter and I liked the rush, the anticipation, all the gossips and speculations, it was awesome. Our gooner community on twitter is amazing, there’s a lot of us and everyone seems to be so chatty and friendly and extremely funny. There were so many different opinions about our new transfers. Unknown, too young, too old, not good enough. But I trusted Wenger, as I always do, and oh, he was right. Santos is awesome, Arteta beyond awesome, Per is, ah, Per, and Park needs more minutes (one of my wishes for next year!). We are also witnesses of how amazing Robin van Persie is when he’s not injured. This is his season, he’s on fire, he scores all the time, he’s a great leader, and good with fans. Just amazing, I’m so glad we have him. So yeah, I’m happy at the moment.

 Now, the unhappy part of the year. When I think about 2nd half of last season, first thing that comes to mind is Newcastle away (bet 80% of us think of that). That game was…hm, historical. I think it will stay in my head forever. It comes to mind whenever we have a lead bigger than 1-0 (both home and away). I have phobias ‘cause of it, I can’t really be happy until the final whistle. It is good, in a way; I don’t get sad if/when opposition scores/equalizes/takes lead. So, I should thank Newcastle for keeping my nerves safe. Next game I think is, of course, the Carling Cup final. I hate to talk about it, really, so I’ll just mention it. We all know what happened there, and how our season looked after that. Thank you, Birmingham, you’ve always been a pain in the ass. And the 3rd game I want to mention is the one others (non gooners) love to forget. It’s the win against Barcelona on Emirates. We are the only team that beat Barcelona in Champions League last season. It’s not big, I know, but why the hell do they keep forgetting that? We all know we should have gone through to the next round. Stupid Masimo Busacca in Barcelona made me wonder: how often do refs actually give yellow cards for kicking the ball after whistle? Not very often. But of course, we are the Arsenal, they hate us. How would it look if there was another all English Champions League final?! God forbid. Now I’m making myself angry while thinking about that. Stop it, Roza. It’s ancient history.

 So yeah, this is kinda my little review. Of course there’s so much to talk about in 2011, all the wrong decisions, player mistakes, amazing away fans in this season, Verma is back, we have amazing youngsters, problems with injuries once again, etc etc. I’d say it was a bad year, but this ending is what made me put behind all this bad things and made room for the excitement that brings 2012.

They hate us, we DO care

Okay, I totally forgot that I started writing a blog. I was reminded yesterday by lovely Jen that they miss my posts, so I thought I’ll write one, just to keep the fans happy. Then I ran into first problem. The only one, actually. What the hell should I write about? After hours and hours of thinking (haha), I realized what the problem was. Arsenal are not only playing great but winning (you understand that playing great doesn’t always mean you’re also winning) and there’s nothing to complain about. There goes the most famous reason to write a blog post on Arsenal.

But hey, we are Arsenal fans. If there’s nothing bad, we have to make some good things sound or look bad. So here I am, with several possible subjects(all collected from my Twitter Time Line): why the hell are we putting lame banners on stadium?, why the hell is there still no signature on new Robin deal?, who will get injured on international break?, and other important topics. Boyfriend, the United fan, read Fever Pitch recently, and came to conclusion he could never be an Arsenal fan (quote: Too much masochism in watching your team lose the “unimportant, small” games). I actually realized us, Arsenal supporters, are sad and bitter bunch of people quite on purpose. Let’s face the facts. We are doing great in Premiership, Robin is best scorer so far, we are 1st in CL group, against WBA we actually looked like the old Arsenal. But, let’s put all this happy things behind and focus on shortest ever MOTD match report. Hehe, typical gooners. (Author’s note: MS Word keeps changing “gooners” into “goners”. Thank you, MS Word.)

Of course our captain is going to sign a new contract. They’re just talking about, I don’t know, how many tweets will he be allowed to send each day. People, he IS our captain, we adore him, he adores Arsenal, he’ll stay. Let it go. And banners. I love the Robin banner, catchy, funny, only ours. You do realize no other team has a Robin, so I think we can look at this banner (just like the Verminator one) like one more thing that makes us special. What’s next? Oh, injuries. Oh well, it’s not like we don’t know how it is. IF it happens, we’ll handle it the best we can. It didn’t happen yet, so chill, don’t tempt bad luck, you know the bitch loves us. Focus your thoughts on the sweet problems like will Robin score 2 or 3 goals this time and how much more Szczesny’s skills right outside the area we have to see ‘till he takes the ball and dribbles it across the pitch and scores.

So, reading this blog you might have noticed I only write about us supporters. I don’t talk much about tactics, the football itself, because I’m always scared I’ll screw up with something. But I think I know fans, supporters, people who live for their club. I’ve always been a passionate person, especially when I get dragged into something. And oh how easy it is to be dragged into a relationship with Arsenal. I remember I was crying when we lost CL finals, and I was an Arsenal fan for 4 months before that, haha. It gets under your skin. And no matter how much “unimportant” games we lose, or how many players we don’t buy, we are all stuck with Arsenal, for good and for bad. But let’s not say “They hate us, we don’t care!”. They do hate us (by ‘they’ I mean some of the neutral football-loving people out there, most of the reporters, all of the opponents, and that bitch Sports Luck), we enjoy it, we want it to keep coming at us, because that means we are actually good, and they all want to stop us, but we just come back stronger.