My Clubcall Hell

It’s been a strange few days. Two games and two three nil victories in four days over Newcastle at the Emirates, punctuated by the transfer that never was on Monday. We were suitably clinical in both games, with Adebayor and Eduardo particularly superb on Saturday, and Mathieu Flamini putting in a truly heroic box-to-box performance last night. There was no Jonathan Woodgate though , oh no, he was gearing up for the dramatic race to partner Ledley King at White Hart Lane, rather than being triumphantly introduced to the Emirates faithful as many (ahem) had predicted. The wide-scale fervour which greeted Woodgate’s apparently inevitable move to the Emirates told us a lot about transfer speculation, and what it does to us.

When I was 12 years old, Bruce Rioch faced his second summer as manager of Arsenal, I had just seen Euro 96 and was positively salivating at the great players our magnificent leader was set to move for. Having finished 5th the previous season I was convinced that we were just a few players away from winning the Premier League for the first time. But nothing happened, I searched through the tabloids everyday of that school holiday, and when the papers offered nothing substantial I searched elsewhere. I had toyed with Clubcall and Teamtalk a few years previously, they would advertise on teletext with headlines like ARSENAL: MIDFIELDER SET TO SIGN and I fell for it. You can imagine my disappointment when some jumped up ex-hospital radio DJ read out some soporophic ‘club’ news before finally announcing that David Hillier was rumoured to be starting talks on a new contract! David Hillier? A rubbish player who already played for us was going to ‘sign’. But I couldn’t resist returning to the premium lines when rumours emerged that Rioch had handed David Dein a transfer wish list headed by the tenacious Jamie Pollock, wow, I thought Jamie Pollock!! So each day of those long holidays I guiltily picked up the phone and dialled the numbers. Then, out of the blue Rioch left, and suddenly Johann Cruyff or Bobby Robson were set to step in!! My excitement was uncontrollable, and my dialling increased. A few months later, our BT bill arrived, (it was quarterly back then) and my mother calmly but sternly explained that I wouldn’t be getting anything for Christmas that year.

Eleven years on though, and the totally irrational excitement remains! Thankfully the world wide web and its scores of blogs, fansites and digital newspapers has usurped the financially crippling phone line for fanciful transfer gossip, but we still get sucked in. On Sunday night, I checked on Newsnow, and saw that Wenger had intimated he may be in for a new player if Kolo’s injury was serious. Then on Monday morning I got to university and checked my emails, my exciteable blogging partner Mr. Webb was full of the Woodgate rumour. Keith Lamb had suggested that a third club was in for him, and the Guradian, the Telegraph and the oracle Myles Palmer had all said that the club was Arsenal! Wow!! A top quality, experienced English centre-back was coming to Arsenal, and we’d nicked him off Spurs!! Brilliant!! An hour later, both Lamb and Wenger had rubbished the reports, and deflated, I got back to reality.

The whole business got me thinking, what is it about transfer speculation that makes us regress into excitable pre-adolescents? I decided that whatever your team, however good, you always hold on to that Roy of the Rovers dream, that this player could be the missing piece in the jigsaw, having the dream debut; coming off the bench and scoring the winner; becoming a legend, it never happens like that, but we can but dream.

Dave Forrest