In Making the Arsenal, Allison becomes friends with Jacko Jones – and then Allison becomes editor of the Arsenal programme. He uses it to attack the team as being useless, in order to try to provoke Norris into putting money into the club.

Now sure how generally known this is but with the difficulties of getting to the ground very few reporters enjoyed venturing down to see our games, yet virtually every paper reported our games.

George Allison used to write most of them from when he moved down to London (1906?)! He’d do different versions of the match report and they’d find their way to print. Rather amusingly (in his own book) he also reveals that when he was younger he used to write match reports on his own games and get them published under a different name. I have always wondered how often he’d have been the Man of the Match if that concept had been as common as it is now.

After reading Making The Arsenal twice and I even liked it more after the second time. Then I have read the original book The Arsenal Stadium Mystery and really loved it.
Now I have just started on the book “Forward Arsenal!” by Bernard Joy and it really and looking forward to my travel with public transport to work where I can find the time to read those book. It is a great book from the start and all these books are a must have for the true gooner I would say.

Got to keep this in mind to order it one of these days.