Published: 17 October, 2014

ARSENAL by Richard Osley

ARSENAL season tickets! More expensive than watching Barcelona and Bayern Munich! This was the headline news from a no-sugar-Sherlock survey commissioned by the BBC this week. What that headline doesn’t tell you is that both those European superpowers have season tickets cheaper than every club in the Football League, right down to League Two. But no, there is no attempt to wriggle out of this one. Gooners well know that they pay a barrowload of cash to see their team. It’s a barmy commitment some of them make. Go to any away match and you see the same faces. It leaves you wondering where their secret money trees are planted. The old argument that football costs the same as other forms of entertainment, say a top West End show, doesn’t really work. Only a crazed Andrew Lloyd Webber devotee could not appreciate that supporting Arsenal does not mean just one match. The high prices problem at Arsenal is a product of supply and demand. What is extraordinary, given the amount you, the Chelsea fan, and you, the Spurs fan, mock Arsenal for not winning enough trophies, is the huge reserve of fans that are desperate to keep paying their football tax to the Gunners every other weekend. The list for season tickets goes on and on. In fact, it is so large, the club was inevitably going to reach a stage where it felt like it could happily start bumping up prices. No other team in London has such historic support, even if it is sleepwalking, zombie-like, to financial ruin to make sure it is at every match. The point stands though: just because Arsenal can charge more, doesn’t mean they should. 

SPURS by Catherine Etoe

INTERNATIONAL weeks are usually a time for Gran to catch up on the important jobs she doesn’t usually have time for. You know, trimming her ingrown toenails, washing her jockstrap, that sort of thing. But now that watching England no longer means having to look at pretty boys John Terry, Ashley Cole, Rio Ferdinand et al, she has decided to put those vital jobs to one side and sit down with her tea on her lap in front of the box to watch the Three Lions again. Sadly, when England brought the fatted Calf on against San Marino on Thursday, her best-laid plans were suddenly thrown up in the air along with her tray of lasagne. “Big Roy may be rid of the smuggest footballers of the last generation,” she bellowed. “But he’s only gone and replaced them with the smuggest footballers of the next one.” Gran, it seems, reckons that as magnificent as Calum Chambers’s furry eyebrows are, and as enjoyable as it is watching Fag Ash Lil Wilshere huff and puff his way into blind alleys, she can’t support England when half the team play for Arsenal. In fact, she won’t be coming back to England until Andros Townsend, Kyle Walker, Eric Dier and Danny Rose are on the pitch. I’d like to join her one-pensioner protest but I have to write this drivel so will continue to endure England – in case the Gunners do something worth taking the mickey out of. The only thing at Wembley was Townsend showing them all up by nonchalantly knocking in a super goal seconds after coming on. It was only San Marino, but a few more like that and Gran might think it worth tuning in after all.