Why black and yellow?

When setting up this group, overall brand image was a talking point and colour scheme options were considered. All of those involved in the discussions were/are fed up with the club ignoring much-loved traditions and subjecting us to white kits, blue kits, overdoing the redcurrant (wasn't it for one season only?!) and generally going with whatever Nike tell us to go with.

We're all firm believers that our home colours are red and white, and that we wear yellow and blue when playing away. Therefore the colour yellow was chosen because it's the one our marketing and commercial people seem ever so eager to get away from. They might not love it, but we do.

Black? It's the one colour the club haven't had the team playing in as yet! And when canvassing some fans for opinion, it was felt that the way things have been going, it was like the club we grew up with - OUR club - was slowly dying. Our Arsenal had become this big corporate entity that had lost sight of its core values, the very values instilled by people like Herbert Chapman and values that had been continued since then.

BSM? Black scarves?

When starting the group and having decided the colour scheme, we had requests for merchandise - things that let fans show they were supporting us. Due to cold weather at that time, we agreed to produce some scarves in our colours and with our crest. These were the first items which identified supporters of Where Has Our Arsenal Gone and as word spread about this new group, we became known as the Black Scarf Movement, or the BSM. The scarves were simply produced as a way of fans keeping warm and showing support for us but that quickly became a key identifier.

What's the crest about?

Well, any Arsenal fan who knows his/her stuff will know that the latest club crest caused a lot of controversy when it was forced upon us. Images of the new crest were paraded around Highbury before our game with Southampton in February 2002, to loud booing as well as chants of "What a load of rubbish" and "What the f**king hell is that?". However, the Board were still inside munching on their smoked salmon canapes so wouldn't have heard the very vocal response. They did later state that they'd liaised with a supporters group in the design stages, however to this day nobody knows who was on that supposed panel.

The new crest had ditched the club's motto 'Victoria Concordia Crescit' but by far the biggest crime to most fans was turning the cannon round and facing it the other way. To the vast majority of proud Arsenal supporters this was unforgivable... it was like tearing down Big Ben and replacing it with an upside-down version. It was like reversing the colours of the Union Jack. It was something we felt should be untouchable.

So when setting up this group and where we felt a logo/crest was necessary, there was one thing definite - that the cannon would face the same way as it had in our much loved traditional club crest. We incorporated a hexagonal border design in a nod to the classic 30s Arsenal crest, and for those who remember our shirts in the 1970s, we once again have AFC contained in three cannonballs.