On the pitch: long balls, boggy pitches and hard tackles. Off the pitch: minimal physical conditioning, little focus upon nutrition and too much drinking. English football was, literally and metaphorically, in the Teletext era. This was the world Wenger was coming into. At the time, however, no one thought to question it – it was all we knew and performed its job perfectly, the same way Joe Kinnear, Frank Clark and Peter Reid won LMA Manager of the Year between 19, and no one complained they didn’t know much about Ligue 1 youth talent. In hindsight it was slow, clunky and extraordinarily simple in terms of user interface. Teletext was perfectly serviceable and extremely useful in the mid-1990s, because it did the simple job of providing the basic information you wanted. Dennis Bergkamp said his transfer to Arsenal in 1995 only sunk in when he’d returned to his hotel room, checked P302 (having been able to pick up English teletext in Holland, he knew the numbers) and saw the headline ‘Bergkamp agrees to join Arsenal’. Matt Le Tissier discovered he’d been omitted from England’s World Cup 1998 squad by reading Teletext. Teletext and mid-1990s English football go hand-in-hand. To football fans, it was a vital part of everyday life, the only on-demand place for updates on team news, transfer gossip and, of course, live scores. To the majority of the general public, Teletext was largely an irrelevance occasionally used for holiday deals or lottery numbers. This applies to every major football news story from the mid-1990s. So yes, I’ll recall where I heard about Wenger’s departure, just as I remember where I read about Wenger’s arrival back in 1996: at home, reading it on Teletext. But then, like every football fan, I can essentially tell you where I was for almost every major football game over the past two decades, and so it’s only logical that the concept extends to major footballing news too. On the day Arsene Wenger announced his departure from Arsenal, two separate people suggested to me that it was one of those ‘you remember where you were’ days.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |