Kent author and Maidstone United fan, Fred Atkins, has written a book about the other love in his life, Arsenal Football Club.

The former Kent Messenger Sports Editor and now freelance writer came up with the idea of writing about the French players to have starred and disappointed under Arsene Wenger.

Titled Arsenal – The French Connection – How the Arsenal became L’Arsenal, the book takes readers through the Wenger era lifting the lid on the success and failure to grace the club in their time at Highbury and now the Emirates.

KSN caught up with the author, Fred Atkins, and put him through a Question and Answer session to get to grips with writing such a book.

Q: So what inspired you to write a book about the club you have supported for so long?

A: I was just a bit surprised nobody had already written it. The French contribution to Arsenal’s success in the last two decades has been so significant I thought a French writer would have produced a book on it but no-one had. I thought I’d better do it quickly before someone else had the idea but it took me three years because there were some great stories to tell.

The first and most obvious is Arsene Wenger’s. In some ways it’s a miracle Wenger is even here, because his family are from Alsace and his father was forced to serve in the German army on the Russian front, where the chances of survival were well under 50 percent. Then there was the match-fixing he had to deal with when he was at Monaco.

Petit is fascinating character. Some of the things he’s been through are absolutely horrendous. He might have won the World Cup but after reading the chapter on his life I don’t think too many people would swap places with him.

Thierry Henry was a far more complicated man than he seemed and then there was the way Robert Pires fell out of favour with the French national team. The rumour that he’d slept with Raymond Domenech’s wife wasn’t true, but Domenech seriously tried to claim that as he was a Scorpio he couldn’t pick him. A theme of insanity runs through the book.
Q: Following on from your book about the Tour de France in Kent, how liberating has it been writing a book about football?

A: Well I don’t recommend actually visiting Piers Morgan’s Twitter feed unless you’re able to control your gag reflex, but if you read his tweets during a game, they reflect one of the reasons I wrote this book.

I’d got to the point where I was tired of being carpet-bombed by the kind of bull**** you see every time a so-called big team, and not necessarily Arsenal, loses a game of football – or even concedes a goal for that matter.

In fairness Chelsea fans are taking it to a new level now, by asking for a manager to be sacked before his first game has kicked off.

Although ‘Arsenal: The French Connection’ goes up to the start of this season it does feel like a reflection on a different era.

I was bored senseless by non-stories about underachievers like Samir Nasri and what they thought they were worth. Instead I wanted to celebrate the achievements of some genuinely great players like Pires, Henry and Petit – although two of the most interesting chapters were about Nicolas Anelka and William Gallas.

Anelka is an incredible case: he thinks he’s one of the world’s best strikers and yet he resented being asked to take a penalty in a Champions League final! He didn’t seem to care if his team won or lost, wheras Gallas was almost the complete opposite. He took defeat as a personal insult, which wasn’t a bad quality to have. Both were misunderstood but I think Gallas doesn’t come out of it too badly.

I’ve become pretty disillusioned with top flight football in the last two years, though since “Tour de Kent” came out I actually think cycling has improved a lot.

The problem with covering cycling was that up until the last couple of years you knew that whatever you wrote about any race stood a fair chance of looking ridiculous as soon as the lab tests were done.

I was working at the Kent Messenger just after Floyd Landis won the 2006 tour and we heard he was going to be riding the Tour of Britain that September.

This seemed like a pretty big deal, so we splashed it over the back page, but about an hour after we’d gone to press the news broke that he’d tested positive for testosterone. The only consolation was that we hadn’t been able to find a picture of him – a lot of the specialist cycling magazines had earlier deadlines than ours and had beaming photos of him all over their front pages.

It was a cycle (excuse me) that kept repeating itself. We did a big build up to the Tour of Britain stage from Rochester to Canterbury – and when the day came the riders got lost in Luton Arches and decided to go on strike! So they poodled round at about 15mph for the whole distance and spat at Kristian House when he tried to attack because it was his home stage.

When the Tour de France came a year later it was a fantastic day – even if Mark Cavendish crashed – but by the end of the race it had become a joke. I’d cautiously estimate at least a third of the riders we saw that day were off their tits on something or other.

(I wouldn’t be surprised if a major scandal broke in football in a few years time).

Q: The Henry years have to be the best in Arsenal’s recent history, but can the club’s present French stars recreate that epic era?

A: I think it’s unlikely, bordering on the impossible.

My publisher, Greg Adams (who’s from Walderslade) has brought out a book called The Wenger Code, which asks whether Arsenal can compete against clubs funded by men for whom money is irrelevant.

And basically you can’t. You might nick a cup or challenge for the title every now and again, but when you do the players who made that possible will be offered three times their wages elsewhere.

When Wenger arrived in 1996 there were half a dozen or more clubs who could have become United’s main challengers, but his contacts and the wages Arsenal paid made the difference. For around five years Arsenal signed the top players from the French League. Everyone knew about Petit, he wasn’t a secret gem Wenger unearthed. Spurs offered him a contract – he’d told them he’d think about it, asked them to call him a taxi, which they paid for, and asked the driver to take him to Arsene Wenger’s house. Where David Dein offered him a better deal, which he signed!

He couldn’t do that now. Since 2003 the top talent in Ligue 1, eg Drogba, Ribery, Hazard has gone elsewhere and Arsenal have been left with Sagna (decent), Giroud (potentially decent) and Gervinho (filth).

I don’t think it’s going to get any better – for any club other than United, City and Chelsea – until Financial Fair Play comes in, or until the oligarchs get bored.

Q: Wenger has been criticised for giving French youngsters a chance ahead of English homegrown players, is that criticism fair?

A: No. If they’re good enough he picks them: Ashley Cole, Walcott, Wilshere, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Jenkinson. What he wouldn’t do was pay over the odds for English players, which probably comes from the mental scars he suffered from the Francis Jeffers deal. The fox in the box cost more than Pires.

Similarly if the French players aren’t good enough, they don’t play. The book also takes a look at the French players who didn’t make it, like David Grondin and Jeremie Aliadiere, because in some ways their stories are just as interesting.

Q: Your first love was watching Maidstone United, how good has it been to see them back where they belong?

A: It’s the best thing that’s happened to my home town in my lifetime. I didn’t really start supporting Arsenal till I was 13, but I’ve been watching Maidstone since I was three.

I think you get to a certain level in football where a lot of the fun goes out of it and hopefully we’ll have a few seasons before that happens.

You can take an entire family for half the price of a ticket to a Premier League game in London.

The fact that the team are doing well helps but the biggest attraction is that you can stand and that means you can watch the game with whoever you want to, not who you’re seated with.

Someone compared it to the atmosphere you get at a rugby game, because you can have an alcoholic drink on the touchline and it’s only a tenner to get in.

The ground erupted when Alex Flisher scored on Saturday. It’s like a feeling of liberation after all those miserable seasons at Dartford, Sittingbourne and Ashford. After 24 years of waiting I’d honestly much rather watch Maidstone in Maidstone than a Premier League game.

To order your copy of the book, click here: http://gcrbooks.co.uk/ or Amazon here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Arsenal-French-Connection-Became-LArsenal/dp/095714430X