One of the loudest and most intense chants on Saturday afternoon was 'There's only one Arsene Wenger'.

The chant was disappointingly short - why can't we have a Pompey style drummer beating out a rhythm over a long period of time!? -  but intense nonetheless.

So it's equally disappointing to see that there is no manager section in the new handbook.

Player history over the years, and rightly so. But no history section on managers.

And managers are critical to the development of a club.

We should know.

I start my 49th year of following Arsenal - and I know there are other veterans who can top this number. One who sits just in front of me!

So discounting the caretakers (Steve Burtenshaw, Stewart Houston (twice) and Pat Rice) we have, astonishingly, only had eight managers in that time which has contributed hugely to our current standing.

The lesson being the value of consistency.

I make a plea.

No one wants us to win something this season more than this veteran.

We have started well but it's very early days and clearly the squad would be short given an horrible injury toll.

But if we don't (win silverware), please, please don't bay for Arsene's head. The man is a genius. More to the point he is a genius with integrity.

And when you get to my age you get to understand that these are rare people. And he manages our club.

Rejoice. Silverware is great. But pride in what you do and how you do it - is even greater.

On Wednesday let's chant 'there's only one Arsene Wenger' not just with even greater conviction but for much much longer....

It takes two to tango - but heed this. For anyone living in the London area and who picked up, or who probably didn't pick up, the later editions of the Evening Standard on Thursday night (23rd): be warned.

That headline read: 'WENGER: OUR FANS ARE LETTING THE SIDE DOWN'

Now I bemoaned in an earlier column at the pathetic response as our 'kids' thrashed Sheffield United. And I accept that papers distort quotes - but has AW ever sent out such a message to Arsenal fans?

Coded - or uncoded?

I don't necessarily accuse Arsenal Addicts of such behaviour - but we have a responsibility to which I will return. As does the club.

I started supporting Arsenal in 1961. Look up our records for the next nine years. I was living in Australia in 1970 so missed the famous night at Highbury against Anderlecht in April of that year.

AA wanted me to write about my best Tottingham moments. Let me tell you. After ten years supporting the club, and to this day it is the only moment I haven't been able to get into a game, being locked out of the Lane on May 31971 was/is a moment I will never forget.

Ten years. And the fear.

Some people say there were 65,000 people locked outside. No one knows in a pre-multi media age (the game wasn't televised) - but I have never experienced a crush in a crowd like it.

So I won't romanticise/dramatise the moment. But ten pitiful, trophy- less years makes you, experiencing something like that, take nothing for granted

And so I never take a Wenger game for granted. Hence my call to action following the Carling cup game.

Do most of you have any idea how good this is? How could anybody boo at half time last Saturday?

In all the comments following my criticism of Bendtner some weeks back, I took the comment of 'an old man who loves the club' as a badge of honour. Some people know nothing of finishing outside the top four - and even then might take that as failure.......

I write out of love.

Wake up. Because to the twenty year olds that inhabit Emirates - and who know nothing of Gooner life beyond Arsene: you know nothing.

You don't know how good this is. There may not be silverware since 2005 - but in my lifetime there was nothing from 1953 to 1970.

Passion - and Newcastle comes to mind - is admirable but may, and in their case does, win nothing.

However apathy is an attitude that is more disgraceful. Our apathy is a disgrace in the beauty that is generally put on offer in front of us every fortnight.

Lambast me for my comments on Bendtner as many of you did - but I will never leave early. I will never boo. And I pray that we never become the prawn sandwich crowd that Keane railed against in his time as a Manchester United player. But wake up - because we are heading that way.

So. Where does this leave us?

It leaves Arsenal Addicts to take the lead. This probably isn't against you but..... we have a responsibility.

As does the club.

As I said, it takes two to tango. Arsenal still have a massive lesson to learn and should confront it. The crowd is not best dispersed to lend support. I don't care if amplification is used to 'heighten' the silence that surrounds Emirates at the moment.

Something needs to be done to raise the creativity, as I have written before, of our chants. But the club has a responsibility - and lets have us Addicts lead the way. Comments please. Now.

The headline in last night's Standard is a warning.

We should heed it.

Samuel

Virtually 26 years to the day, Arsenal signed whom I consider to be one of the worst players I have ever seen grace the red and white shirt.

His name: Lee Chapman and the fact that he then went on to win a Divison One Champions' medal with Leeds shows you how much I know about football and footballers.

Stop reading now if you want - as I am sure many readers from my generation have their own differing views (about our worst ever player). According to records, he played 23 games for us and scored 4 goals. He cost the very princely sum (in those days) of £500,000.

I don't mention all of this as a rant against Terry Neill, the manager at the time who signed him - but the fact that I'm writing this after returning from the Twente FC match - and I think I have seen a player who runs him close.

Yes, stand up Nicklas Bendtner!

Checking records, we took on Spartak Moscow at Highbury on September 29, 1982 in the first round of the UEFA Cup. I was there. We had lost the first leg in Moscow 2-3. Creditable.

In those days, for reasons, I don't think I have ever know, the home teams played in their away strip.

Someone that year had decided our away strip was green and blue. Yes, green and blue. Far worse than any concoction of yellow and blue - and we know there have been some bad ones in my time - which at least have been associated with our away strips.

I won't go on.

I have always loved European football. If I read the stats right, it was our first at Highbury for four years.

We lost 2-5. Somehow playing in green and blue shirts made the defeat even worse.

I don't recall the scoring sequence. But I do recall the fact that Lee Chapman was dreadful. Dreadful. Even though he scored one of our goals.

At least, last night we won.

Bendtner scored too. I rest my case.

If this player ever scores 20 goals in a season for us, I will gladly write again on Arsenal Addict that I know little of football and footballers after watching for 45 years.

I truly hope he does - and proves me wrong.

Does Arsene (always) know?

Samuel Mowbray responds to comments:

Fellow Addicts. I never suggested NB was the worst ever player I have seen play for our team. I suggested, on the evidence of last night's game, he was running Lee Chapman, on his current form, close.
 
Evidence?
 
Put through by Cesc in a pass of sublime vision and precision, he failed in a relatively simple one on one. Watch his assist for Theo's goal, and it is clearly a fortuitous stumble/mis-kick. Unlike many I have never and I will never leave a game early or boo an Arsenal player. I just don't think he is a talented enough player in a small squad to win us the title
 
Of course he will have his moments. He is a professional sportsman. An international. He's young. We didn't pay much for him. These shouldn't be excuses - they highlight part of our dilemma.
 
I truly hope I am wrong but I doubt he will ever score 20 goals for us. If he does, I will post on AA out of joy - and humiliation. It will be a pleasure. But I don't see what Arsene sees him - any more than I ever understood what he saw in Aliadiere.
 
My opinion. 
 

Well, marginally more bearable - because it's impossible, if you love the club, to wean yourself completely off the constant drip-drip-drip of news.

The addiction to Arsenal!

And of course that's one of the huge differences between way back at the beginning of the sixties when I first started following the club - and now: the plethora of news. Back then I kept an Arsenal scrapbook - I still have them. Match reports stuck in from the papers that I could get at the time - all dated and labelled.

But come the summer - there's virtually nothing. Why? Not because my love for the club died during those months - but because the papers back then - pre-red-top, pre-tabloid - really didn't cover the game in any great detail once the Cup final was over and only returned the week of the opening game of the season.

I only mention this because, yes, of course, the game has changed in the last fifty years - but so has the coverage. Not just back page, but front page. Constant choice of live games, 24 hour sports news coverage, dedicated TV channels, specials, blogs (!), supplements, online - and so on. Is it any wonder that the players then changed as their enhanced public profiles fuelled egos fuelled salary demands.....!?

Actually this summer has been marginally better than the last few miserable summers of stories about the comings and goings of Arsenal players - which really started at the beginning of the decade when Vieira was in his pomp and everyday there seemed to be stories about transfers, his loyalty to the club, his wage demands, his respect for Wenger, his love of Italy, the importance of the captaincy and so on. In other words, arrant nonsense to fill the acreage of space that the media now gives football...

But it's better (marginally) this summer (well at least Flamini had the good grace to bugger off as the kit from his last game was still in the spin dryer) because the rubbish being written about Hleb and Ade is still rubbish - but there's better rubbish being written about Him from Manchester, the Slave, and Mourinho's badge-kissing love child wavering at the Bridge. And don't we all love schadenfreude!

But when I say rubbish - I mean rubbish! Rubbish because editors have space to fill and will fill it with gossip, half-truths, lies, fiction, scandal. But rubbish because footballers (and their agents) become willing partners in this media dance. Did Hleb say all that rubbish about Arsene and Cesc that he then so quickly denied and retracted?

Yes! He probably did on some Belarus website. Did he then - and, oh, the delicious echo of Reyes (!) - spout some inanities about his sufferings at living in London! Yes - I am sure he did. Vacuous rubbish to fill back pages to hasten his exit... negotiations being conducted in public. Do I care if he goes? No!

At least Ade had some engagement of the brain - or PR company - to stage manage a quick philanthropic trip to Togo to display his love of his homeland as he courted any club in Spain or Italy and at least make his exit look like it was coming from a man that had a heart, that cared….

But cared about what? Cared about the club? The fans? And after all that the club and Arsene have given him to read his rubbish about wanting to be loved more – for which read paid more – I’d be quite happy never to see a player kiss a badge again. I don’t care if he goes too…. but I can only laugh louder at the more blatant infidelities from the Slave and the already grossly overpaid Bridge-Waverer.

Some of the earliest cuttings in my scrapbook are about George Eastham. One of the most elegant players ever to play for the club and to whom most modern players owe a huge debt of gratitude. Here was a man who wanted out of Newcastle so much that he put his career on hold and temporarily became a cork salesman before being allowed to join Arsenal and in the process helped to break the ‘retain and transfer’ system - and in part gave today’s players so much freedom.

Slavery? Let’s all laugh. At least this summer there are more laughs to be had at other clubs and the hollow whoring of other players. If Flamini, Hleb, Ade want to go, I don’t care. If they can’t appreciate that the Arsenal Academy and the alchemy that Arsene has applied to them, spare me at least their pathetic outbursts in the media.

I’m an Arsenal Addict and I sleep easy at night.