Andrew Mangan (Left) celebrates with Andrew Allen after the 2017 FA Cup final win
Andrew Mangan, AKA @Arseblog, is one of the original Arsenal bloggers with almost 20 years of writing about Arsenal under his belt.
Alongside his daily blogs, Arseblog News and Arsecasts, Andrew has written two Arsenal books, ‘So Paddy Got Up’ and ‘Together’ and he is also a successful voiceover artist.
When did you start supporting Arsenal and why?
I was actually born in England, in Croydon.
My dad was in the hotel trade in the UK and I think there was an inherent need to connect back to Ireland because my brother and I were brought up as Irish in England. There was never any question from my parents that we were Irish.
I loved football. I mean I was football crazy since I can remember, always kicking a ball around and what have you.
I can't ever remember making a conscious decision about it, but my hypothesis is that as a young Irish kid growing up in England, I was always seeking connections to Ireland.
At that time in the 1970s, Arsenal's Irish connection was something which caught my eye.
There was Liam Brady, there was David O'Leary, there was Frank Stapleton. There was also Pat Jennings, Pat Rice, Sammy Nelson, there was John Devine as well, and the guys from Northern Ireland and at that early age, I had no concept of what the difference was.
It just looked like different shades of green to me, you know? It was Ireland.
If you're in Ireland, the chances are you supported Liverpool or Manchester United. Obviously, in Liverpool there's a very strong connection between the city and Ireland itself, because so many people from here went there.
Manchester as well, the George Best thing, Johnny Giles...you know, when you're playing football, you know you're going to have the craic with your friends and Liverpool were obviously hugely successful, United not so much back then.
The banter, for want of a better word, wasn’t quite as intense as it is now, the way everything plays out all the time, all day long, 24 hours a day on Twitter and stuff like that.
But London, of course, is a big place where a lot of Irish people went to work and that’s where my dad went.
We later moved north just outside York for a good part of my childhood and then we lived in a castle just outside Hull. It was a hotel and my dad was the manager, so I spent the first 10 years of my life in England.
My room was filled with football comics and magazines and posters.
Before the internet, there was Roy of the Rovers and Shoot magazine and there were football annuals all the time and there was the Observer Football Handbook and there was the newspaper every weekend.....Panini sticker albums….
You'd have Nottingham Forest features and Man United features, Liverpool...only about 3% of it was about Arsenal so you kind of picked what you wanted to read.
The first Arsenal game I ever remember seeing was the 1979 FA Cup final and I remember listening to the 1980 Cup Winners’ Cup final on the radio.
There were ways of keeping in touch with the scores. We had this piece of furniture in the apartment we lived in, which was in the hotel, which looked like some kind of a table or dresser, but when you lifted it up on one side, there was a record player and a radio, and on the other side there was a cassette deck and you could get VHF – it wasn’t even called FM back then.
I was listening to the game and listening to the penalty shootout and Arsenal losing the game. It came just a few days after losing the 1980 FA Cup final to Second Division West Ham.
There were bits and pieces of coverage that you would get to watch, whether it was Match of the Day or the occasional live game.
What was your first Arsenal match?
As kids, my brother and I used to get taken by my dad to see Hull City, who were then in the Fourth Division maybe.
I always remember that they had a goalkeeper called Tony Norman, a Welsh international, whose language was industrial to say the least when you're eight or nine or ten years of age.
We used to go to some Ireland internationals but it was different back then, you know. It wasn't quite as easy and cheap to travel the way it is now so.
My first Arsenal game was when they came over and played Shamrock Rovers in Dublin at this beautiful old ground called Milltown. Sadly now it’s housing development which is the way these things go.
It was in Ireland, it was mid-80s and I think for some reason there had been weeks and weeks of bad weather in the UK which meant that the league had been postponed.
I can't remember what day of the week it was. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, but standing on a terrace to watch Arsenal on a freezing cold night here in Ireland for the first time was genuinely thrilling.
I can't remember who I went with, but we lost. To Shamrock Rovers. You know, I think there's something quite ‘Arsenal’ about the fact that the first game I ever saw Arsenal play we lost to a League of Ireland team!
But we weren't particularly great back then. We had a poor team in those days. It might just have been the start of George Graham or maybe it was just before. I can't quite remember.
These were lean times for Arsenal. They started to improve towards the end of the 80s and obviously ended very well but it was just such an experience to see the team in person and stand on a terrace.
I think there's something a bit sad about how terraces are no longer with us. I understand all the reasons why, but I think as an experience as a sports fan, to watch games from the terrace, I think is something a bit special and maybe that's something we can get back in the future.
It was a real treat for Arsenal to visit Ireland, let's put it that way.
Who was your first Arsenal hero and why?
It has to be Liam Brady.
I remember being heartbroken when he left in 1980 to go and play for Juventus.
The fascinating thing about football is that I had become emotionally invested in this guy who I'd never seen playing live because he was a brilliant player and he was an Irish lad at Arsenal.
For him to go and leave Arsenal was kind of heart breaking. Certainly as a kid, what Liam Brady could do with the football and the way he did it, the elegance with which he played was something I always wanted to replicate myself.
But sadly, when I played, I was never quite as good as Liam Brady! But, you know, just the fact that he went from us to Juventus in Serie A at the time was huge. It was where all the best players in the world played.
It spoke to the quality that he had, you know, so he was he was for sure my first Arsenal hero.
Andrew Mangan speaking at Arsecast Extra event at Union Chapel with James McNicholas, Amy Lawrence & Philippe Auclair. Photo by Jason Ilagan, for Humans of the Arsenal
Who is your favourite ever Arsenal player and why?
You know it's more difficult to have heroes as we get older.
Look, there are so many amazing players to choose from, and when you think about those teams that Arsene Wenger put together it feels ridiculous to pick out one over the other.
But I think somebody who sort of coincided with the start of Arseblog was Robert Pires.
For me, he was just an amazing player and I loved the way he played. I loved all of the goals he scored, the fact that he could score brilliant goals, but it was also the master of the tap-in or the scuffed goal.
You know when somebody made a save, there was Robert Pires on the rebound. I just love the way he played.
Obviously, Bergkamp was a genius, Henry was amazing, Vieira was landscape-shifting in terms of what he brought to the game as a midfield player, there was there was nobody like him before.
I don't know that there's been anybody quite like him since either, which is why we are all still waiting for the new Vieira to come along.
But for me, you can develop soft spots for players who aren't necessarily the best players, but when your soft spot develops for a player of that calibre, it's a hard one to shake.
He just he represents something in time that I that I look back on with real fondness. Not just because of Arsenal, what we did, what we achieved and the things that we won, although that is a major part of it, just the time in my life as well.
Arseblog came about in 2002 when I was living in Spain, just outside Barcelona.
I had a small web design business which didn't really go anywhere, but I thought I should learn how to design websites myself to see if I was any good at it and you know, I wasn't really.
I'm not bad, but like I wouldn't feel right selling my web design skills to anyone who wanted a good website!
But one of the things I did was set up a website in order to practise, and I thought to myself, well, what could you write about or what could you do that has a frequency and regularity to it, and football obviously sprung to mind with blogs just beginning to emerge.
So I just decided to set up a blog about Arsenal and called it Arseblog because what else would you call a blog about Arsenal?
It was really an exercise in web design which turned into something else entirely. It turned out I was much better at writing than designing. So here we are.
My first job was on pirate radio at 16, so I was always involved in radio, you know pop music radio, that kind of stuff. That was something I was always wanted to do, to become a radio presenter.
I went to college to do broadcasting and journalism so I went some way down that road but radio is a difficult business to get into. A lot of radio stations are very rigid and formatted in terms of what music you play and what you say and when you say it. I don't think I was ever really willing to be that kind of radio presenter, I always wanted to do something that was a bit more creative.
I became involved more in doing voice over work and radio production work and that kind of stuff, which has obviously served me well when it comes to doing things like podcasts and the blog itself, to have that kind of grounding and qualification in journalism and broadcasting.
The internet had obviously been a thing for quite a while because before I moved to Spain I worked for about four years as a manager in internet tech support so it wasn't brand new, but it was certainly developing and one of the things that I think was beneficial.
More people were getting broadband. One of the things that was exciting when I moved to Spain was the possibility of broadband. It was like 500 kilobyte broadband as opposed to the 56K modem we were all used to.
This internet connection was always on rather than one that was subject to being cut off when somebody used the telephone, which sounds crazy now, of course, but that's the way it was.
Capital Radio used to stream online and at that point they didn't have anything like geo-location, so you'd follow games online.
Back then, the better you were, the more often you are on TV and more often than not Arsenal were either on TV or, maybe a little bit later on in the mid-2000s, because of the likes of Fabregas and Reyes, Spanish TV would always show the Arsenal game because there were Spanish players.
And Arsenal were brilliant. We won lots of trophies and Pires scored lots of goals.
He had D'Artagnan vibes, he looked like a cool Musketeer and was brilliant at football. He ran like a constipated duck but he could cover the ground so quickly and the quality he had on the ball was something else.
People talk about that incident against Portsmouth, very unfairly in my mind, while you see serial offenders who were born and bred in England not get any of the same scrutiny, so I always feel a bit protective of him from that perspective as well.
What is your biggest Arsenal regret/disappointment?
The one that really stands out is the Champions League Final 2006.
The fact that we couldn't play the game with eleven men.
The fact that we couldn't hang onto a one goal lead for another whatever it was...12 minutes.
It is very bittersweet because as an occasion it's absolutely implanted in my mind.
As you get older you tend to forget a lot of details about things. You know you were somewhere or you did something but you don't remember a lot of detail.
But that's a trip that I remember pretty much from start to finish because I was living in Barcelona at the time.
I'm almost sure that we qualified for the final before Barcelona did and I remember looking at flights and it being just impossible in terms of the price of flights.
So I travelled from Barcelona to Perpignan on a train, then changed to go to Paris on an overnight train. I shared a carriage with two elderly Spurs fans, which was quite something!
The day itself was amazing with loads of friends and people outside an Irish bar in Paris, I think it's called Kitty O'Shea's.
We went to the game and that was obviously hugely disappointing, but I remember feeling at the end of the game so proud. That sea of yellow at the end where all the Arsenal fans, despite the huge disappointment, who just stood and applauded the team.
And we were proud of the team and what they had done to get to that final, particularly throughout those knockout stages with the makeshift back four with Eboue, Toure, Senderos and Flamini.
I remember being at the Real Madrid game that year, and it just being amazing as well. It was incredible in Madrid, a brilliant game and a brilliant experience as well.
Then there was the disappointment of coming out of the stadium and it was pissing rain. I was with my friend and we got off the train at the wrong stop and we had no idea where we were.
It was way before the time when you could just pick up your phone, look at the map and find out where you were.
Taxi drivers wouldn't stop because you're wearing an Arsenal shirt, a football shirt. They would look and slow down that they'd see your shirt and they drive off. Eventually we found our way back to the really crappy hotel and we had a kebab which still sticks in my mind is one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten.
The next day I had to travel back to Barcelona on a train and it was absolutely jam packed with Barcelona fans packed. I was like “fuck it, I'm wearing my shirt. I'm going to wear my Arsenal shirt on the train.”
The iPod had just been invented, I think, so I was listening to music and they were all in the carriage and they were singing and pointing and laughing and I was like “Yeah okay, come on guys, enough!”
The regret of course is what would have happened if our first season going into the new stadium, into the Emirates, had been as Champions League winners.
What does that mean for your stature, for your reputation? For maybe the kind of player you can attract? Maybe the kind of player that you could keep?
So it still feels a bit to me like a sliding doors moment for Arsenal as a football club.
Winning the Champions League is something I dearly want to happen, I'm not sure it ever will, but you know, I'd like to think it might.
Andrew Mangan (L) with James McNicholas aka Gunnerblog in New York in 2016
What is your favourite Arsenal memory (away from the pitch) and why?
I think that the events where the Arseblog community has come together have been very memorable, whether that’s book launches or some of the live podcasts that we've done.
Anything where you get to meet the people who you're writing for or talking to on the podcast is always really, really enjoyable.
We've done events in London and Dublin and New York, in Australia, and it is always great to meet the fans.
Look, I'm an Irish guy who started a website about Arsenal in Barcelona.
I've never held myself up as anything other than just a regular Arsenal fan, which is all I am. I'm no different to any other fan. Thankfully a lot of people like to read what I write and talk about and I feel very lucky and privileged about that.
But you know you go anywhere in the world and there's just Arsenal fans everywhere who had the same passion, the same love and desire for the football club to do well as anyone.
The experiences are different, there's no two ways about it. If you grew up on Holloway Road and you were taken to Arsenal and lifted over the turnstiles by your dad who grew up an Arsenal fan because of his dad, you know, who happened to live behind Highbury.
That's a very different experience to a guy who lives in India or Africa or North America or wherever it is. But the great thing about football is that the love that you have or develop for a football club is a great equaliser.
It brings us all together even though you could put three Arsenal fans in a room and within hours they'd be disagreeing and have formed their own factions about this guy, that guy or the other.
We find ways to fall out with ourselves as football fans but when people come together in support of a football club, it's a really powerful thing and a really positive thing.
I've been very fortunate to have had some great experiences in that regard. Whether it's meeting in the pub and watch a game at 7 o'clock in New York City or doing a book launch.
Those things really remind you of just how much people care for Arsenal.
I'm an Arsenal fan and that's first and foremost and I always find it really amusing when people accuse me of being biased. Of course, I am! I'm an Arsenal fan!
There is a need to embrace that partisanship, but also to keep a realistic outlook and also remember that football, as much as we love it, isn't the most important thing in the world, you know.
A lot of things can happen that put football in perspective, not just for me but for everybody.
Who am I to tell anybody how they should support or what's the right way to support or how you can only be a true supporter?
All I've ever tried to do is write what I think and be honest about what I think.
When you do this for 20 nearly 20 years as I've been doing, you don't always get it right. Your opinions can change on certain things, but I believe if you if you sit down every morning and write honestly about what you think, you can look back on those things and say well look, that's what I thought at the time.
If you fall into the trap of writing what you think people want to hear, you can't remember what you really think because you’re flip flopping between one thing and the other.
What I have tried to do for all these years on Arseblog is just be honest about what I think. It seems to connect with people and I'm very happy about that.
And I like the idea as well that within the seriousness of football you can try and make people laugh as well because you know at the end of the day, we could all do with a bit more of that.
What is your favourite ever Arsenal match?
I had to think about this one and I went at it from this point of view: if I could only choose one Arsenal match to watch again over and over, which match would I choose?
There have been some amazing matches and performances from Arsenal in all the time I've been supporting them. Big games, important games, games in which we have shown character and shown the quality to go and win things and big wins over rivals and all of that kind of stuff.
But from a sheer entertainment value point of view, like sit down, big screen is on, you've got a beer and popcorn and you're going to sit and watch 90 minutes of football, it’s Arsenal 5 Middlesbrough 3.
As a football match it must have been extraordinary for the neutral, a classic.,
But as an Arsenal fan, it had everything. It demonstrated our flaws, but absolutely highlighted our strengths. The quality of the players we had, the character that was in the team, that belief, the unwillingness to be beaten, the quality of the goals that we scored, the players that we had on the pitch.
It was a sunny day at Highbury, early in the season, and I think it just summed up everything that was great about what Arsene Wenger brought to Arsenal.
You know, we weren't perfect. We were amazing at times and you know, the fact that we went ahead and then Middlesbrough went 3-1 up and you think “What the hell is going on here?” And then we score almost straight away and there’s just this noise from the crowd.
It may not be necessarily my favourite Arsenal game, but in terms of re-watching? That is the one I would choose if somebody gave me a HD copy of that game I’d watch it again and again.
It was an amazing game of football.