It doesn’t love dossiers themselves, of course; they’re for nerds – unless, that is, they’re a “secret dossier”, which have a thrilling redolence of spy dramas, invisible ink and dead drops. Non-secret dossiers, though, are inherently risible: call something a “dossier” in English football and you’re immediately signalling: this is absurd poindextering. Dossiers were preposterous when Don Revie was – imagine the pretension! – drawing up scouting reports on opposing players, and they are preposterous today as Mikel Arteta collates images of rival managers stepping outside their technical area.
Arteta, it should be said, did not use the word “dossier”; rather it was swiftly applied to what he had called “a massive storage of images”. During Arsenal’s 2-0 win against Everton last Saturday, he received his second booking of the season for leaving his technical area. This, it turns out, is another part of the vast conspiracy against Arsenal.
Yes, Arteta accepted, he left his technical area (44 times before being booked, according to the former referee Graham Scott), but other managers do it too. Then it’s 36 yellow cards in 10 minutes for the managers.” There are two ways of looking at this. Perhaps Arteta really is a ludicrous Pooterish figure, counting the misdemeanours of others, the worst kind of neighbourhood watch curtain-twitcher who happens also to have been cursed with a persecution complex: “I got a fine because my parking permit was partially obscured, but Mr Emery at No 17 has been six inches out of his bay on at least three occasions this month and … nothing.” Or perhaps he really is an inveterate snitch, glorying in telling on his peers: “Please, Miss!
Miss, Daniel’s been chewing gum again, Miss.” Or, perhaps awed by the misguided defiance of Manchester City fans after their club was found to have perpetrated the greatest act of cheating in English sporting history, he is trying to persuade his base that everybody is against Arsenal to generate a siege mentality. Declan Rice mystifyingly got away with kicking Malick Yalcouyé off the ball against Brighton, but it’s important to remember that Arsenal remain the real victims here. The history of mind games in football is long and storied.
Before the 1939 FA Cup final, for instance, Major Frank Buckley, the flamboyant manager of Wolves, claimed to have injected his players with “animal secretions”. A French surgeon, Serge Voronoff, had begun transplanting tissue from monkey testicles on to human testicles as an anti-ageing treatment, and it was widely believed that it was this monkey gland treatment that Buckley was employing. In fact, he almost certainly gave his players nothing stronger than vitamins but the idea was that Wolves’ morale would be boosted, while their opponents in the final, Portsmouth, would be intimidated by the prospect of taking on players juiced up on simian fluids.
It didn’t work, Portsmouth winning 4-1 despite finishing 15 places below Wolves in the table, but the logic is familiar. The monkey glands were relatively benign, little more than a publicity stunt, but it’s easy for attempts at psychological manipulation to take on a darker aspect. Before Inter played Liverpool in the second leg of the 1965 European Cup semi-final, for instance, their manager, Helenio Herrera, had 100,000 leaflets distributed claiming that at the end of the first leg at Anfield, Liverpool fans had sung “Go home, Italians” to the tune of “Santa Lucia” which supposedly was intended “to deride us and make us feel we are just a race of cheap mandolin players”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
