Here’s a lesson for Andy Gray and Richard Keys.  Wait until you’re in your 70s to speak your mind and disrespect women.  If you do that, you don’t even have to worry about privacy; you can talk directly into the microphone.Peter Hill-Wood, the Arsenal Chairman, who will turn 75 in just under a month, demonstrated the technique in giving an interview to the Daily Star this week, days after the Gray/Keys scandal broke.  In answering questions about the Gunners stubborn refusal to spend money in the manner of Sheikh Mansour or Roman Abramovich, Hill-Wood shared a short conversation he had with a female fan in the Emirates, a year ago.

“I remember a year ago, standing in the front of the directors’ box, there was a woman shouting, ‘Spend some f*****g money’. I said, ‘Don’t worry, darling. Leave it to us – we’ll sort it out’, or some similar patronising statement, which probably p****d her off even more.”

If ‘Don’t worry, darling, leave it to us’ isn’t a kissing cousin of Andy Gray’s plea to Karren Brady, ‘Do us a favour, luv,’  I don’t know what is.  When you’re on the cusp of your diamond jubilee, however, you can get away with a lot more than whippersnappers like Gray and Keys.That people forgive you those outbursts because of your age is a nice little perk when you’re often in the public eye, as Hill-Wood is.  Yet, while they may think he’s a bit senile, he’s actually far sharper than most of his contemporaries in the league, as evidenced by the fact that he admits his tone was ‘patronising.’  Further, he’s a survivor who knows when he can speak freely and when to keep his head down.

“It is important for me and the board to not lose our nerve when the media and the fans are all screaming. We’ve had some tough years. Once, in the mid-1980s, I was smuggled out of Highbury, lying in the back of the car. We were having a bad run and there were 500 standing outside the boardroom shouting, ‘F**k off, Hill-Wood.’”

When you’ve been the Chairman of a club like Arsenal for 29 years, following in the footsteps of your father and grandfather, there are bound to have been some ‘bad runs’ along the way.  Hill-Wood, though, is a survivor.  How else do you explain that while he sold all but 500 of his Arsenal shares to David Dein, gradually, in the 80s and 90s and leaves the current day-to-day business of running the club to Ken Friar and Arsene Wenger, he still holds a position of authority at the club?Unlike many of the fresh faces in the business, the Damian Comollis, Gary Cooks et al, stumbling over themselves to strike while the iron is hot, Hill-Wood truly understands the importance of the long-term planning and the satisfaction of building a club around youth rather than just outspending your competitors for prefabricated players.

“These days the bar has been raised but I’m surprised people keep saying Arsenal haven’t won anything for five years. Liverpool haven’t won the league for 20 years and I remember when they were in the old Second Division and Manchester United were in the old Second Division.I don’t believe in the way Chelsea and Manchester City have achieved whatever they have achieved. It is so much more satisfying to build something – to get boys of 15 to 18 and see them develop sufficiently well to win the Premier League or other trophies – rather than sitting there and saying, ‘I want to buy the best striker in the world and I don’t care what it costs.’I think the boys and girls who support us are very lucky.”

Hill-Wood isn't above taking a well-placed dig at in-house rivals, when the opportunity arises.

He then went on to note that easy money can depart in the same manner as it arrived, while a strong, seasoned organisation is much harder to tear down.

“If some bloody Russian [hands off my Chair, Mr. Usmanov!] wants to buy the place and everyone else wants to sell, then, okay, I will go and grow tomatoes in Kent, but if you have a benefactor and he gets run over by a bus, you are gone.We have got to have 50,000 people run over by a bus before we have a problem.”

No doubt there are a handful of people in the business that one would like to see at the front of that long queue but when one knows what one’s talking about, blunt and no-holds-barred can be quite refreshing.  Here’s hoping that Peter Hill-Wood is around to offer us a better, if less sensitive perspective on the business for years to come!