Wenger Is Dancing With Danger
"Hey there, my name's Susie. People call me Rock 'n' Roll Susie, y'know, after the song."
Anyone named after a Pat Travers song was bound to get my attention,
add in 1980s rock chick hair, torn fishnets and assorted skimpy bits of
leather and turning away wasn't really an option.
I'm a nice, gauche kid from the rough end of nowhere and this lass
looks like an extra from a Whitesnake video. So I do what any one of you
would do, I steam in there.
She's on the strip for what she called a Saturday Night Special which
she explained in great detail meant rock 'n' roll, drugs and sex all
washed down with Jack Daniels and coke. She made it clear that I was
this Saturday Night Special's chosen son.
I had already realised that being English in these situations was
never a bad thing. It conferred a bit of exotic glamour on you, even
when you're a hairy Teessider. In California, no-one knew you were a
dirt bag Northerner who had crawled out from under a cloud of pollution.
So I reckon I've had my horizontal dancing card marked early on and
spend the evening with the righteous glow of a man who knows that all
the hard work has been done early in the night. You know that feeling,
it's a good feeling. No late night dine-a-dance romance for you. The
Saturday night lovin' is booked in nice and early. There's a lot of
hip-to-hip dancing, thrusting into each other in the dark shadows of a
hot club. Somewhere out in the neon and velvet black night, a motel room
awaits the moist glory of your combined electric passion.
But somewhere around midnight, she disappears to the restrooms and
fails to re-emerge in the requisite time for most bodily functions to be
performed. This disappearing act coincides with a number of our party
discovering their wallets, cash and other valuables have gone missing.
Rock 'n' Roll Susie turned out to be a robber and a bloody good one
at that. She was away and gone into the night like a heavy metal
Vampira. In retrospect, the warning signs had been there. All questions
about her family, job, life in general were evaded. We moved on a couple
of times because she'd spotted what she called ex-boyfriends but which
were, in retrospect, other people she'd ripped off. If this had all
happened in a social club in Billingham you'd have known the score right
away but this was a rock 'n' roll club in Southern California on a hot
July Saturday night.
Her lusty rock 'n' roll siren call was so irresistible that her
victims were blind to all the usual warning signs and Arsene Wenger,
should take note of this when putting down all that silly money for Luis
Suarez.
Suarez will always sucker a gauche manager into his world of
heartache. Like Rock 'n' Roll Susie, (though I somehow can't imagine
Luis is a Whitesnake video, not unless they do a song about a naked mole
rat) he has ulterior motives. Can Wenger handle that kind of player?
Suarez is a kind of feral footballer both in the way he plays and how he
conducts his business.
All the supposed mutual support and loyalty to Liverpool was all
rubbish, all a façade, a construct. Does Wenger have any experience of
signing and managing the mercenary modern footballer? I don't think so.
Suarez is a kind of footballing Urban Guerrilla - in the words of
that Hawkwind song, he's "a street fighting dancer/a revolutionary
romancer."
Wenger is often vaunted as a modern, progressive manager but this in
itself is an out-moded notion. These days he seems positively patrician
and old-fashioned. He wants to nurse young players into the side, he
wants to develop and not buy in world class talent. He's used to
long-term player relationships but Suarez is only ever going to be a one
night stand.
Perhaps Wenger feels the Arsenal girls' school needs a bit of a rock
'n' roll injection and maybe he's right but it's a dangerous game to
play. As I know only too well, he could easily end up losing his wad
having got nothing in return.
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