By Tony Attwood
At 10pm on Saturday 22nd June the commercial radio station Talk Sport are doing a programme about the history of football.
I don’t have much in the way of details about the programme but I do know a little because in preparation for the programme Talk Sport came and interviewed me about the history of Arsenal from Chapman to Wenger.
If you have ever done a TV or radio interview – or indeed been interviewed by a newspaper journalist – you will know that you can talk for hours and then have 20 seconds of your commentary broadcast or reported.
This of course could be the situation this weekend but the gentleman who interviewed me has told me that I “feature quite a bit” in the final cut. So maybe…
Of course I also appreciate that 10pm on a Saturday night is not exactly the peak listening time, and indeed even I shall miss the live broadcast since it is my birthday and I shall be out with my daughters and grandchildren. But a lot of people have worked so hard to develop the AISA Arsenal History Society, and this web site, so I do think any exposure and recognition we get is good. And I will hear a recording.
What’s more it is on an important anniversary (and here I don’t mean my birthday). 22nd June is the anniversary of Woolwich Arsenal’s inaugural Statutory Meeting, at which Jack Humble was elected chairman. That was in 1893, just a few weeks after Arsenal were elected to the Football League. It is a day to be celebrated each year.
My one worry about the broadcast is that when writing history material my fellow officers within the Arsenal History Society (Andy and Mark) keep me on the straight and narrow in terms of facts. This interview was done entirely off the cuff, and I didn’t know where the interviewer was going to take it, so I may well have made some enormous blunder. If you hear one, don’t laugh too loudly.
Please.
The books…
- Woolwich Arsenal: The club that changed football – Arsenal’s early years
- Making the Arsenal – how the modern Arsenal was born in 1910
- The Crowd at Woolwich Arsenal FC: crowd behaviour at the early matches
Other sites from the same team…
- Untold Arsenal
- Referee Decisions – just what are the refs up to this season?
I’ll look forward to hearing it – with interest; not so much because of (I assume) what you say will be news, but because it will be a thrill to hear it aired.
On the possible problem of knowing what they will broadcast, at least with an interview for the spoken media it must be harder for them to misrepresent what you say than the printed, who I would not trust.
You sounded great Tony (interesting to put a voice to the face and the writings) and it was, as far as I got, a decent potted history of the club.
I had to give up by 1970, however, as the background music did my head in – totally unecessary.
But as that was where I started with the club it was okay with me.