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Saturday 7 July 2012

Who are these clueless idiots employed by Arsenal?

Definitely NOT the Premier League


One of my biggest bugbears in recent years has been the consistent errors in many of Arsenal's official publications. For some years after Cesc Fabregas broke the record we still had Stewart Robson recorded in the Official Handbook as the youngest goalscorer for Arsenal. Similarly, our Premier League attendance record was shown as a figure under 39,000 in the Handbook for the SECOND season at the new stadium.
There are a number of other publications which are endorsed by the Club and yet are so badly edited as to contain numerous factual errors. Two of the books that spring to mind immediately are "Arsenal On This Day" and "The Little Book Of Arsenal". Once you've been through the matchday programme for most weeks and found at least one mistake you can start to see what I'm getting at here.
Over the past year Arsenal have been using their official website and Twitter and Facebook to celebrate the 125 year anniversary. One of the initiatives has been the "125 Image" collection, which is a series of photographs chosen to represent iconic images from our history. A few months back there was a picture of the final game at Highbury, accompanied by a caption claiming the match that day was against Tottenham. I was one of many people to complain at such a ridiculous mistake and the text was altered. Regardless of the correction it was an outrageous error for Arsenal to make.
The picture above is the one that Arsenal issued yesterday and it shows Tony Adams with the Football League Championship Trophy, and George Graham with his Barclays Manager Of The Year award. The picture was taken during the open-top bus parade after the Title win in May 1991. However, whichever clueless idiot at Arsenal was writing the caption for the picture came up with this nonsense:

Today's 125 image sees George Graham and Tony Adams on the open-top bus with the Premier League trophy, May 1991. Arsenal finished with 83 points from their 38 games that season, seven clear of runners-up Liverpool. Graham's Gunners were worthy champions, losing only once over the course of the season!


Spot the obvious mistake.
I'm sad to say that this is indicative of the lack of care Arsenal have over their editorial policy. They claim that they have strict quality control procedures, and everything is edited in order get the "little details" correct (that quotation is from Gazidis' right hand man). Frankly it is embarrassing and any Arsenal supporter worth their salt would have got the caption correct. It may seem that I am picking on something small but I get genuinely irked by these things. Whoever is responsible for publishing this nonsense should be getting a serious shoeing from the powers that be on Monday morning, but there will be nobody at the Club who even notices the error. I daresay the incompetent fool at fault doesn't even realise that the Premier League is a recent phenomenon. It's an absolute disgrace.

2 comments:

  1. I think the folks at the club have a lot more to worry about than typo's at the moment mate. Get a grip eh?

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  2. MJB maybe you are right, but it is common knowledge that someone with an untidy house generally has an untidy mind. As such it is small but very noticeable errors like this that scale up throughout the club. A typo today is a league cup final howler tomorrow.

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