Perry was never the most talented or blessed player, never even a regular first choice player, so why is he an Arsenal legend to so many even now? Well we can easily say that to be an Arsenal legend you must have won things with the club. Perry came on in the latter stages of the 1987 League Cup final and crossed for Charlie Nicholas to win the trophy against the all conquering Liverpool, our first major honour in 8 years. Perry was also on the pitch as a substitute when Mickey Thomas lifted the ball over Bruce Grobbelaar to secure our first title in 18 years and he played 21 times and contributed 4 goals that season.
In 1990/91 he only failed to appear in 10 league matches as we secured a second title losing only one game, and only because our skipper was banged up in Chelmsford prison. There are a handful of players in our history who have won 2 league titles and as we all know none of our current crop has come close to one as yet. It comes back to the question of what defines a legend. Cesc Fabregas is probably one of the greatest players to ever pull on the red and white, but having won one FA Cup he is probably not an Arsenal legend.
However, with Perry Groves it is so much more than the trophies he helped us win. Why after so many years are there really only three ex-players whose names we still chant? We all sing Rocky Rocastle and we know sadly why that is. Rocky was a compatriot of Perry’s and we all remember him as an Arsenal great taken from us too early. We also on occasion sing about a Bergkamp Wonderland. It is a great song and he was one of our greatest. So why is the only other man who has his own chant, the Tintin look-alike Perry Groves? Why some 20 years after Perry left Arsenal for Southampton, where his career finished early due to injury, do we on occasion sing ‘We all live in a Perry Groves world’ to the tune of Yellow Submarine? You know the words – at no.1 its Perry Groves and no.2 its Perry Groves and so on and on…..
If you younger fans have been bemused please click here to a resounding welcome for Perry at the Rocket Pub in Holloway a few years back.
Perry, who just missed the big bucks of the Premier League era, tries to explain it in his book…why has he become a cult with Gooners, with his own song and websites such as www.weloveperry.com
‘Well during my days with the club I had a love-hate relationship with the fans. Some of them loved to hate me, but a lot recognised me for what I am, a Gooner through and through. They also realised that, even if I wasn’t the best player ever to pull on a pair of boots in the cause, I would still give everything, and I mean everything, for the 90 minutes I was on the field.’
‘I think my game had a special link with the fans. I wasn’t out of this world. I didn’t have talents that were way above anything they could ever dream of; it was as though I was one of them and had ended up playing for the team we’d all dreamed of playing for. And when they saw me having a bad day at the office (and there were a few) the distance between me and them probably didn’t seem very big at all.’
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Legend…