8 October 1932: Final appearance of Tom Parker – the club’s first trophy winning captain.
In March 1926 Tom signed for Arsenal, having made 275 appearances for Southampton, and played on April 3 against Blackburn in front of 31,000 at Highbury. Tom took over from Alec Mackie who had suffered a serious injury, Tom taking over the number 2 shirt, going on to hold the all-time record of 172 consecutive games.
Tom Parker was captain of Arsenal in the first cup final (against Cardiff) and again in 1930, when he was the first ever Arsenal player to lift the FA Cup.
He was captain again as Arsenal won the league in 1931, and in the 1932 cup final. Amazingly he missed only six league games in seven seasons.
By the start of the 1932/3 season Tom was 34 and he was initially replaced by Leslie Compton who was just starting out on his career although Tom regained his place after four games.
His final game was the 3-3 draw with Derby on October 8 and after seeing out the rest of 1932/3 in the reserves he became player manager of Norwich City. Norwich came third in 1933/4, so were clearly a decent third division team – but Tom took them to the championship in 1933/4 – seven points clear of second placed Coventry.
In March 1937 he returned to Southampton as manager and helped the club avoid relegation by four points. He then used Chapman techniques to buy in good players – most notably Bill Dodgin and Ted Bates. However by the time war broke out Southampton were still resolutely stuck in the lower reaches of the second division.
When football was abandoned in 1939 Tom worked for the Ministry of Transport, managing Southampton part-time, until June 1943, when he resigned. After the war he worked as a ship’s surveyor for Lloyd’s in Southampton Docks.
In 1955 he returned to Norwich for a second spell. The club were back in the Third Division South by then, and the return finished badly with Norwich ending 1956/7 bottom of the league and having to seek re-election.
Tom then retired but was then asked by Ted Bates (whom Tom had signed for Southampton and who was now Southampton’s manager) to become a scout. He eventually became chief scout, and finally retired in 1975. He died aged 89 in 1987.
7 October 1920: Arsenal purchase Harold Walden – a music hall star!
Harold Walden had been Bradford City’s top scorer in their 1911/12 campaign, which sounds very impressive but in effect it meant a total of 11 goals. Two Arsenal players had scored more than this in 1919/20 – the season before Arsenal bought him. In fact Bradford City scored only 46 goals in 1911/12, so he was the best of what we might take to be a modest bunch. Worse, from that high point he had declined considerably as a goalscorer thereafter.
But as is so often the case, there is more to this story.
Walden played as an amateur in the GB football team at the Stockholm Olympics in which 11 countries competed. Great Britain got a bye in the first round, beat Hungary in the 2nd round 7-0 (Walden getting a double hattrick), Finland in the semi-final and Denmark in the Final. But a subsequent injury meant that he played little thereafter.
In April 1915 he joined one of the Pals Battalions. These battalions were encouraged particularly by Lord Derby as a way of getting local friends to sign up together in the same regiment and were particularly popular in the north of the country. The Footballers Battalion that Arsenal owner Henry Norris created was a southern variation on this, focusing on the interest in the game rather than the locality, given that many Londoners had far less of a connection with their locality than their compatriots in the north.
Harold Walden joined one of the Bradford Pals battalion but having been injured in a training exercise he returned to England and started to work on the stage and became a full time entertainer and film star.
Thus by the time Walden signed for Arsenal, also on 7 October his football career was pretty much over, but he was at the height of his career as an entertainer in the music halls. His Olympics Gold Medal was displayed outside theatres when he performed, several of the songs he wrote were becoming popular. So what on earth was this man who had played football, but had been injured and was now a musical hall act, doing signing for Arsenal?
However this was the era of the celebrity player, and Arsenal had purchased such players in the past including Dick Roose the famous goalkeeper.
As an amateur Walden he would not be paid unless he played – for which he got “expenses”, and both he and the club could get some publicity from the affair. Walden on stage would be able to talk for a moment or two about one of the most famous clubs in the country (Arsenal still being associated with the military from the Royal Arsenal days, being the club that was closely linked with the creation of the Footballers’ Battalion, and now one of the top three supported clubs in the league) and Arsenal would be able to get a little more publicity out of his name. Every extra person added to the gate would help – it was a good bit of mutual publicity.
Meanwhile Walden was able to carry on his music hall work and could now be billed as not just the famous Harold Walden, but also as an Arsenal player. His audiences around the country would never know he wasn’t actually turning out for Arsenal, they might well believe the publicity that he gained from appearing in a silent film which was being shown across the country in this season and think he really was a top goalscorer.
He even turned out for a couple of reserve games, which added to the profile of Arsenal’s reserve team (who of course played exactly at the same time as when Tottenham were at home – another way of having a dig at the team who had worked so hard to keep Arsenal out of north London and Arsenal out of the first division.)
Arsenal actually had to wait until February 1921 for Walden to get his first team games – and then he only had two – although he did manage to get one goal in a 2-2 draw with Oldham. But the publicity value for the club was enormous.
6 October: Changing the facts to fit the prejudice
6 October 1888: How the media used an obscure match from this day to do down an Arsenal record.
On 6 October 1888 Preston beat Stoke 7-0, with Jimmy Ross scoring four. When in December 1935 Ted Drake created the all time 1st division record of scoring seven in one game the story was put about that Drake’s achievement was not a first and that Ross had done the same on this day.
It was a complete fabrication. How strange that someone should bother to make it up just to knock Arsenal! So let’s look at the story as a whole. On Saturday 14 December Arsenal played Aston Villa away.
As we all know Ted Drake scored seven that day, and according to Tom Whittaker in his autobiography (George Allison, the manager, not going to the game as he was ill), Drake had just eight shots on goal, scoring with seven and the other hitting the bar. Drake said that the shot actually came down off the bar and bounced downwards and into the goal, although the goal was disallowed with officials ruling the ball had not crossed the line.
However, Drake still secured the goal-scoring record in the final minute of the game making this the individual record for scoring in a top division match, establishing a new record which stands to this day.
The question then arose in the press (as anxious then as now to do down any Arsenal claim to success) if this was an all time record, and those who set themselves up as being the arbiters of football’s history claimed that Jimmy Ross had also scored seven in the game between Preston and Stoke on 6 October 1888. That story circulated for months.
In fact, the official record books kept by the League show Ross only scored four. He had never claimed seven, nor had his club. What he did claim, and what is undoubtedly true is that he actually scored 8 against Hyde in the FA Cup. It was a typical anti-Arsenal bit of reporting.
What is true is that the record for the most goals scored in a league match came just 12 days later as Bunny Bell of Tranmere Rovers scored nine in the Football League Third Division (North). That was on Boxing Day as Tranmere beat Oldham 13-4. The report says Bell also missed a penalty.
But there was something very odd about this game. Tranmere had played Oldham on the day before – Xmas Day, as was the habit of the league at the time – and had lost 4-1 away to Oldham. So what had made them able to reverse their defeat and win by such an outrageous score the next day?
Tranmere weren’t even the top scoring club in the league that season, and didn’t get promotion. And Oldham weren’t pushovers either – they finished the season seventh in the league. Nor did they have anything like the worst defence. Crewe, who finished one place above them, let in more goals.
Even more oddly Tranmere didn’t keep on getting high scores. Yes they scored six twice, but otherwise there was nothing unusual about their results.
So did Tranmere really scored 13 on that day? Presumably yes. But was it a normal game? I suspect not. I have no information on the game, but I would not be surprised to find that Oldham turned up two men short – or something like that. It did happen in the third division in the 1930s. Even the official Tranmere web site has only the slightest details of the match, which seems to suggest that there are no contemporary reports from the local paper – which again seems most odd. More likely the contemporary reports don’t confirm the claim.
5 October 1922: Arsenal summoned to FA headquarters
Sir Henry, William Hall, Charles Crisp, John Humble, Leslie Knighton, and the Arsenal players involved in the match against Tottenham, plus the directors, managers and players of Tottenham, were summoned to the FA headquarters, to give evidence to an FA Commission of Inquiry into the game played at White Hart Lane on 23 September.
This game became notorious both for the roughness of the play and as a result of press coverage of the match with the allegation that the crowd at White Hart Lane unduly influenced a referee’s decision-making.
Tottenham’s forward Walden went off injured after 10 minutes leaving Tottenham a man short for the rest of the game (no subs in those days). With Arsenal having come to play a defensive game (a fairly reasonable decision based on the position of the two clubs at the time) the Reds continued to hold a solid line at the back and play long balls up the pitch hoping to catch Tottenham on the break and exploit their one man advantage. And it worked, as having held the game at 0-0 at half time, Arsenal then went 2-0 up in the second half as Tottenham tired.
But with ten minutes to go Tottenham got the ball in the Arsenal net. The referee disallowed it for offside but was then surrounded by the Tottenham team and was “persuaded” to change his mind. Arsenal obviously protested at this change in the decision, and as a brawl broke out on the pitch Alec Graham punched Tottenham’s Smith. A certain amount of uproar followed but the game was completed with no more goals. Arsenal had an away victory at Tottenham and in the space of two games had risen four places up the league away from an unwelcome proximity to the relegation zone.
Of course, the press felt this was the story of the week and spent much time mulling over the events as the FA began an enquiry – to which Sir Henry was of course called along with William Hall, Charles Crisp, John Humble, Leslie Knighton, and the Arsenal players involved in the match against Tottenham, plus the directors, managers and players of Tottenham. It must have been quite a crowd!
The subsequent report censured the Arsenal players and suspended one Tottenham player for a month. It also, rather amusingly reminded crowds attending matches that they had to accept referees’ decisions, even when the decision was wrong. Tottenham were particularly warned about the behaviour of their crowd at WHL, which the report stated had influenced the referee’s decision-making. The referee seems to have got off scot-free though and as far as I can discover, he was not called to give evidence.
But what made matters worse was that the League had continued with the policy it had introduced for the first time in 1919/20 of playing the home and away fixtures between clubs in consecutive matches for most of the season. Arsenal had already played Liverpool, Burnley and Cardiff twice and now having played Tottenham at the Lane, the next match (with the fight on the pitch still the prime talking point of London football) was the return game at Highbury. However that match passed off peacefully.
4 October 2018: FK Qarabağ Agdam 0 Arsenal 3.
Mkhitaryan did not go to the match because of the political tensions, and Uefa were made aware of this situation – a relevant point given that the final was to be held in the same country.
Uefa assured Arsenal that all steps would be taken to overcome the problem should Arsenal play in the final. Arsenal did make the final but the assurances were mere words and Mkhitaryan did not travel.
The failure of Uefa to deal with the issue was undoubtedly because of the contract Uefa had signed with the Azerbaijani Football Association and their wish not to pay a penalty for moving the event. The media failed to comment very much on Uefa’s inability to secure the safety of an individual player in an international game.
3 October 1925 Arsenal lost 0-7 to Newcastle, and tactics changed
On 3 October 1925 Arsenal lost 0-7 to Newcastle, and Chapman immediately began discussions to transform Arsenal’s tactics. Buchan in his autobiography claimed that he was the key adviser to Chapman in this, but it seems from other sources that others were involved in the discussion – which was about far more than pulling the centre half deeper down the pitch to play between the two full backs.
Certainly it seems that there is good reason to believe that Joe Shaw, ex-Arsenal player and now Reserve team coach, and Tom Whittaker, ex-player and now recovering from the career-ending injury sustained playing for an FA XI in Australia, were both involved in consultations – although perhaps not in the final decision making.
The “WM” system is often considered to be a simple move to pull the centre half of the old approach (who carried the number 5 and played in the middle of the midfield) back into the middle of the defence.
In fact there are two things wrong with this view. First there is clear evidence that some teams were already pulling the centre half deeper into the back line before 1925. And second the front five had not been playing as a straight line of attackers for many years. Instead the general approach was
A 2-3-2-3 approach in modern parlance, morphing into 3 2 2 3 when the centre half moved into the back line.
However Buchan says (page 95 of his autobiography) that “New methods were required and Arsenal were the first to exploit them”.
It is probably this phrase that has led to commentators believing that Buchan was talking about the WM tactical formation – but it turns out he wasn’t, for he subsequently says,
“It has many times been said that the change in law brought into operation the ‘stopper’ centre half, but there were many such ‘stoppers’ long before that eventful day.” He then proceeds to mention four of the most famous centre halves who played in the final line of defence between the two full backs before the 1925 law change.
On page 97 Buchan moves on to the post-match meeting after the 7-0 defeat on 3 October 1925, held in the Newcastle hotel. Buchan reports that he had been pressing for a change to the way Arsenal lined up since he was transferred to the club in the summer of 1925 and says that finally, after this game, Chapman asked him to explain his views more fully.
Buchan’s first point was not to have a centre half playing between the full backs, and marking the opposition’s number 9, but rather to have him guarding the edge of the penalty area. Buchan was, in fact, inventing zonal marking for this player, leaving the others free to cover the flow of the play.
Now that notion of the centre half patrolling zonally does give us a “W” defence. Moving across the W from left to right we have the left top of the W as the left half, the left bottom as the left back, the midpoint neither as high as the left half nor as low as the left back – that is the new “centre half position”, and then the right side of the the W – the right back and the right half.
So here is the invention of WM, and it was (it seems) the invention of Buchan not Chapman. But we must be clear, WM does not mean pulling the centre half back to play between the two full backs, because other clubs were doing that already. Instead it means playing the centre half further away from the goal line he is defending than the full backs.
But that was not all. What Buchan also wanted was that the centre half should be a “dominating personality around his own goal. And he should not be content just to get the ball away anywhere, but to send it, with head or feet, to the roving inside-forward”.
So, an end to the big man hoofing it up the field.
Thus now comes the next part of the equation: the “roving inside forward” – part of the “M” in the equation. Buchan nominated Andy Neil – a man who could receive the ball with either foot and pass it on quickly to get the counter attack going, resulting in a goal from three or four touches out of defence.
This is much more than WM – this is zonal marking with a centre half who would always find one particular player who had the skill to move the ball on at once for the counter attack. It was a system ultimately perfected with Herbie Roberts at centre half, passing to Alex James who moved the ball instantly on to Joe Hulme or Cliff Bastin.
As Buchan says, “the novelty of Arsenal’s new methods took the other League clubs by surprise,” and by Christmas Arsenal were top of the league. Indeed but for illness and injury Arsenal would probably have won the league in Chapman’s first season. As it was they had to settle for second.
2 October 2016. Arsenal beat Burnley. Burnley manager questions referee’s competence. Nothing happens.
Away to Burnley Laurent Koscielny scored in the last minute to win the game. Burnley manager Sean Dyche publicly questioned the referee’s competence after the game claiming the goal was both offside and handball.
Although such attacks on refereeing competence by managers are prohibited by the PL no action was taken.
It was one of those odd inconsistencies (for when Mr Wenger criticised the referee he was regularly sanctioned).
Mr Wenger claimed that Arsenal were often involved in matches where the referee was incompetent (he generally avoided claiming the referee was dishonest) and did state that he felt the governing bodies of football had not done enough to eradicate corruption.
After a particularly awful game (from a refereeing point of view) against Porto Wenger called on Uefa to clarify the criteria it uses for selecting officials, saying that this was particularly important in view of past incidents of corruption around the continent. “A lot of things have to be clarified at Uefa,” he said. “They have to be much more open about how they rate referees. Nobody knows really how or why they name them or how they rate them. The history of refereeing in Europe over the last 30 years is not very good for football. Too much has gone on.”
European football has been afflicted by many incidents of corruption. One of the best known surfaced in Portugal in 2004. Following investigations into the so-called Golden Whistle scandal officials from two clubs, Porto and Boavista, were found to have bribed or attempted to bribe referees. Porto were subsequently docked six points in 2008 and banned from competing in the 2008-09 Champions League, though the latter sanction was overturned on appeal.
Wenger himself was the victim of corruption in France in 1993, when his Monaco team finished runners-up in the league behind Marseille, who were subsequently stripped of their title and demoted after it emerged that the club’s president, Bernard Tapie, had masterminded a plot to pay players from an opposing team, Valenciennes, to throw the last match of the season. Wenger’s first-team coach at Arsenal, Boro Primorac, was the manager of Valenciennes at the time. No one from any other club was implicated in that scandal.
Wenger also revealed in an interview that he has managed a team in which players have been corrupted by opponents. “I’ve seen much worse [than Hansson’s alleged mistakes] in my life, my own players were bought,” he said. “I didn’t become paranoid. You have to trust people in my job.”
Wenger refused to identify the team or players that he believes were bought, saying, “I do not want to come out about the past.” Asked whether he believes corruption is still prevalent in Europe, he grinned and said: “In my job you always have to prove what you say. I don’t have anything to say. That’s good work for you to do. You can make good inquiries, it’s a very interesting subject.”
Perhaps the most interesting point is why the media has never taken this overt challenge up.
1 October 1966: George Graham’s debut for Arsenal
George Graham was the youngest of seven children from a working class Coatbridge family. He was born on 30 November 1944 and his father died on Christmas Day that year from TB, as did his eldest sister in 1951.
He signed for Aston Villa on 30 November 1961 and played eight times for them, including the League Cup final which they lost.
In July 1964 he signed for Chelsea for £5,000 and played 72 league games for them scoring 35 goals. He won his first medal there – again in the League Cup, in 1965.
Arsenal paid £75,000 for Graham, and supplied Tommy Baldwin as well, and George played his first Arsenal game on 1 October 1966 at Highbury v Leicester City. He became a regular member of the team, being top scorer in both 1966–67 and 1967–68.
He was in fact seen at first as a replacement for Joe Baker at centre forward with John Radford on the wing. Radford then moved into the centre and Graham became a central midfield playmaker (“inside forward in the parlance of the time) who never broke sweat – hence “stroller”.
Continuing his affiliation with the league cup he played in both the 1968 and 1969 finals and then won the Fairs Cup in 1970 and of course was part of the Double team of 1970/71. He won his first of 12 Scottish caps while at Arsenal, on 13 October 1971
But then just as George Graham had himself replaced Joe Baker, so he in turn was replaced by Alan Ball and in December 1972, after 77 goals in 308 appearance in all competitions, Graham was sold to Manchester United.
However Manchester United were in poor shape at the time, and were relegated to the second division. After two years he went to Portsmouth and then Crystal Palace before playing in the US in 1978 for California Surf.
After that he returned to coach Palace, and then QPR. On 6 December 1982 George Graham became manager of Millwall, who were playing to tiny crowds at the foot of the 3rd division. In 1985 they were promoted, and looked ready to go up a further division which they did. But then Arsenal came along once more…
30 September 1996 Arsène Wenger formally appointed as Arsenal manager.
30 September 1996 Arsène Wenger formally appointed as Arsenal manager.
He had played football for four clubs: Mutzig, Mulhouse, ASPV Strasbourg and RC Strasbourg, and then before coming to Arsenal he managed Nancy, Monaco, and Nogoya Grampus Eight.
Of course you’ll know a lot about him already, including perhaps that he won more league titles than any other manager at Arsenal (Chapman, Allison, and Whittaker each won two) and more FA Cups than anyone else in history (seven) – and that includes those managers who won during the time when only a handful of clubs entered the FA Cup.
But perhaps what you might not know is that of all our permanent managers he holds the record for the highest win ratio (57.25%) of anyone in the history of Arsenal. Interestingly the nearest there is to him in terms of win percentage is Unai Emery on 55.13% and after that… Mikel Arteta on 53.19%.
Of all the men who have managed Arsenal only three managers (all on short term non-permanent contracts) have beaten Mr Wenger.
Joe Shaw, who took over the management of Arsenal after the sudden death of Herbert Chapman and managed the club for 23 games had a win percentage of 60.87%.
Above even that between March and April 1898 Arsenal were managed by someone whose name we have never discovered for eight games, and Mr Unknown got a win ratio of 66.67%.
And then finally, top of the tree is Pat Rice, who managed the club for four games while waiting for Mr Wenger to arrive from Japan. He won three of his four games, giving him an unassailable 75% win ratio.
29 September 2007: Arsenal beat West Ham away 0-1 as he says he’d hand £100m back to the club.
It was the latest in a wonderful run that had Arsenal at the top of the table, although the season ultimately faded and we ended up in third.
Prior to this match with West Ham we had beaten Fulham, Manchester City, Portsmouth and Derby at home, and Tottenham away. We’d drawn away with Blackburn.
The discussion in the build-up to the game concerned a revelation that the late Danny Fiszman had asked Arsène Wenger what he’d do if the club gave him £100 million to spend on players.
Mr Wenger supposedly replied, “I’d hand it back,” according to comments made in the pre-WHU press conference. Arsenal.com quoted Mr Wenger as saying, “I said that because I think I would ruin the work I have done in the last five years. You develop players and, just in the last minute, you put £30 million into a player who is not necessary better than the ones you have, just to keep everybody saying ‘oh, have you seen Arsenal, they’ve bought a super player’.
“There might come a time when I need to put my hands on it and I say ‘listen we need to put the money in for one special player who could give us a plus’. But I don’t see this player at the moment anywhere.
“Take Ronaldinho, maybe one year ago he was the best player in the world. Is he today? No. What people have problems to accept in football, like tennis, you can be No 1 in March and No 10 in November.
“You have to trust your judgement knowing you will make mistakes. I always say you have to be relaxed about that and smiling knowing that you have a bomb in the right hand and a hand grenade in your left and that it can explode in your face because you were wrong.”
So, with the claim that there was no one who was available could better his team Mr Wenger put out this side..
Almunia Sagna Senderos Toure Clichy Diaby Fabregas Flamini Hleb van Persie Adebayor
The used subs were Eboue who replaced Hleb on the half hour, Gilberto Silva and Bendtner.
