Paul’s choice of image, he’s 25yrs younger and top left with the rest of the Arsenal Vision Podcast crew (courtesy Eddie Longbridge)
Paul Cassidy AKA P.I.M.P. @PoznanInMyPants is a regular on the Arsenal Vision podcast, where he is renowned for his irreverent observations (toothpaste sales have rocketed!).
When did you start supporting Arsenal and why?
When I was young and growing up in Dublin, Arsenal had a great FA Cup team. They were in five FA Cups in the 70s.
That was the age where kids in my class were deciding which English team to support and Arsenal had just won the FA Cup so that was easy. I was a young trophy-seeking seven-year-old.
FA Cup Final Day was just electrifying. You'd get up early in the morning and watch the parades on TV and Arsenal won it twice which was great.
Unfortunately, back then you just couldn't watch First Division football (the precursor to the Premier League) on TV. You certainly couldn't watch Arsenal on TV unless they happened to be in an FA Cup final or you caught their five minutes on Match of the Day.
Still, I became a soccer addict, even though I was at a rugby school. (Yes, we called it soccer.)
What was your first Arsenal match?
The first game I ever went to, when I was living in England, was at Coventry City in around 1987.
It was 0-0 and it was it was not a great game. There was a lot of mud and the ball looked very heavy. It was a bit underwhelming and I didn’t love the experience. Sorry.
That was probably because I was going to a Coventry City game with some friends who were Coventry supporters and I was keeping the Arsenal thing a little more low key.
And it felt a bit alienating. Football in the 80s could be a bit intimidating, or at least you felt it was going to be.
It was all a bit grey. It was a dull match and it did not make me think, oh, this is what I've been missing!
What I realised was it was a very different culture. I was a bit unprepared for this match-going culture back then with the travelling Arsenal away supporters who were having a great time in the corner of the ground. It’s just not something you enter into “solo.”
These days you can watch every game live on TV but back then, even if you lived in England, they rarely showed the Arsenal games live. So it created a huge disconnect for me.
Consequently, in my late 20s when I did live in England, in the Coventry area, I was more interested in hanging out with my mates, drinking, meeting girls. Football coverage was so bad, random and rare that even if Arsenal WERE on the TV, I wouldn’t have known. I didn’t read the TV programming times.
Ben White and I ended up having a lot in common.
I moved to the US and it was even harder to follow there UNTIL slowly they started to show coverage of the PL. And at the same time social media began to kick in. For the 1st time, I had Arsenal matches I could watch somewhat regularly PLUS a community to share that with.
I think our supporter base is wondrous in the sense that you have these different kinds of fans with different relationships with the club and it’s all interwoven – online and match going – and they exchange and “feed” each other. You have the online fans connected to the match-going fans.
There was a time early on after these 2 communities first merged online where you would see some snobbery about “proper fans” versus foreign/online fans. But people grew out of that rubbish quickly enough, thank God!
And I've made real friends through this online supporter community – they're not just virtual Twitter friends. And fair few I have also met in person now.
Twitter changed everything for my chance to engage and support and join the supporter base properly. Like holy crap! Suddenly you had this non-stop flood of information, reporting, blogs, podcasts, and analysis that was not remotely possible by any other means in the past. It quickly became 24x7x365.
Who was your first Arsenal hero and why?
It was Liam Brady. “Chippy.” A Dubliner. The great thing about Arsenal around that time is we had like five or six or Irish players from the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland.
David O'Leary, Sammy Nelson, Pat Rice, Pat Jennings…but yeah, Brady was great, he even had the socks down thing as I remember the end of FA Cup final in ‘79.
It was a hot day and we went two goals up and it looked all in the bag. But with 4 minutes to go Man United scored two late goals in the space of a minute to make it 2-2. Oh the agony, the drama. But wait…in the last minute of ordinary time, we go up the wing, Brady, socks down, knocks it up to the Rix and the wing who crosses it first time and Sunderland slides in to get on the end of it. 3-2. Mental.
It was a crazy finish. And Brady was, for me, so relatable.
When he left Arsenal for Juventus a few years later it was a big shock for me 'cause that was the first time my hero left and I didn't think that kind of thing could and should happen.
How was there a club bigger than Arsenal? It kind of changed how I viewed football.
Who is your favourite ever Arsenal player and why?
Thierry Henry was just astounding and you just look at him in awe.
There's a coldness about Thierry, as if he were an assassin. He's got the personality for that job, no problem.
You probably need to be a different kind of animal to want to compete at that level in that way he did, you have got to see yourself above other mortal men.
Then, as a contrast, there was Cesc Fabregas and I had a much warmer connection to him, just 'cause he's more accessible, more human and still brilliant. Those were the two for me, and in different ways.
What’s your biggest Arsenal regret/disappointment?
I watched the Champions League final in 2006 and that was the hardest match in terms of emotional impact, especially looking back over time.
I watched that one in the pub and I just didn't think, especially after we had the sending off after 18 minutes. I just didn't think it was going to be our day even though we got the first goal.
I couldn't see how Barca weren't going to score.
Over time it’s become clear it was a sliding doors moment for Arsenal. It becomes sadder because it coincided with the end of the Highbury era, and that generation of great players. We were transitioning into something new that was never at the same level.
You know a lot of teams get to the Champions League Final for the first time and lose and then they come back and they win it the next time. But we haven't had that next time, so that's made it more poignant still.
What is your favourite Arsenal memory (away from the pitch) and why?
Probably a decade ago, I took a trip to London, I just had like four or five days where I could hang around the Islington area and London in general. I met up with the people that I knew from Twitter, bloggers like me: Dave Seager, Linus from the original ArsenalVision blog, Daniel Cowan…
And it was the off-season, summer, it was very “slow around Islington, which added to it feeling almost like a spiritual trip. It was just me and the area. Piebury Corner for lunch most days. A few pints at the Tollie.
I did the Emirates tour at that time with Perry Groves. I did a London bus tour, not that I hadn't been to London 100 times, but it was just a kind of a spiritual time. Like visiting Mecca for the Hajj. Just me and Arsenal and London at my pace.
What is your favourite ever Arsenal match?
I think it’s the 2-1 against Barcelona at the Emirates (2011).
As you know they absolutely hammered us for the first half, they were a blur of tiki-taka, but we hung in there.
Van Persie had got our first goal to level it, where he squeezed it in near post, a phenomenal goal in its own right and then late on we just came back and we played our football.
The Arshavin goal where he swooped in to meet Nasri’s cut-back pass, after Wilshere and Cesc with the build up. It was just a beautiful goal.
Across that game we showed our football and it was phenomenal and I damn near lost my mind when Arshavin scored, absolutely.
I don't think I've lost it more than that, it was just absolutely incredible.
I may not have been at the game, but I think they heard my scream along with everybody else!
It was just unbelievable noise and atmosphere from start to finish and you could feel something was coming.
Then in the second leg, there was something strange going on, something fishy. Arsenal losing after Van Persie was sent off for kicking the ball away after the whistle had blown for offside. It wasn’t right.
We were just roadkill in the story that was being written for Barcelona in the Champions League. It was a crime, an absolute fucking crime.