6 May 1991, 1998, 2018. Winning the league before kick off and saying goodbye

Three anniversaries for 6 May, all within my time of going to see Arsenal.  Perhaps I should call it my Arsenal Day.

6 May 1991

Arsenal 3 Manchester United 1.  Arsenal had won the league before kick off – we stood in a totally packed bar just off the Seven Sisters Road, watching Liverpool get beaten, meaning we had won the league with just one defeat, and thus received a guard of honour from Manchester United coming onto the pitch

Throughout the whole match I recall supporters singing but one (rather rude) song in reference to the two point deduction levied by the league earlier in the season for the game at Old Trafford.  The song had just one line in it relating to where the Football League could place their two points.

If ever there was a case of making up the rules to suit your prejudice that was it.

We sang it over and over through the entire game as Alan Smith gained the first hat trick by any Arsenal player in the season.

6 May 1998 

 Liverpool 4 Arsenal 0, and we didn’t mind, again because Arsenal celebrated as champions in Game 37 of the 2nd Double season having won the league the game before.  In fact Arsenal had just won 12 games in a row to win the title and to get to the FA Cup final.

So yes we were thumped by Liverpool and lost the next game away to Aston Villa, but then went on to win the FA Cup beating Newcastle United 2-0. 

6 May 2018

Arsenal 5 Burnley 0.  Arsene Wenger’s last home match as manager.  After the game he was given a very positive send off by the crowd as he toured the ground.  It was all very much in contrast to the regular “Wenger out” placards that had been waved during the season.

Prior to the game, with the support of members of AISA and readers of the Untold Arsenal blog some friends and I negotiated with the club to have a banner put up in the Emirates Stadium.  It took a lot of doing, but we got there, and Match of the Day honoured Mr Wenger in part by focussing on that banner as Mr Wenger emerged onto the pitch.  We were rather proud.

He was the most successful Arsenal manager of all time with three league titles and seven FA Cups.  Not only the record number of FA Cups for Arsenal, but a record for anyone in the history of English football.  He also took the club to its second and third double, three being the all-time record, shared with Manchester United.

I didn’t go to the Liverpool away game, but I did make both the 1991 league victory and the 2018 game, and they will remain my 6 May memories for the rest of my life.

5 May 1966: just 4554 turn up for a league game

 Arsenal 0 Leeds Utd 3. 

For many years it was a boast among hard core season ticket holders that they were at this match.  A boast because the game was notorious for its crowd: just 4,554. 

There was an excuse in that there was a European match on TV on the same night – something that in those days was not normally allowed.  But even so this was shocking, and it made headline news as the newspapers loved then, as now, to knock Arsenal.

So the old phrase “The Bank of England club” was rolled out, and much merriment was had by those who made a living out of knocking the club. 

Billy Wright, the club’s manager, was finally removed from Arsenal in May 1966 after four years at the club in which we ended up 7^th, 8^th, 13^th and 14^th never once getting beyond round five in the FA Cup.  In his final season, Wright’s team won just 12 out of 42 league games.

And there was no sign of improvement: Wright’s final four matches were three 0-3 defeats and a 1-0 victory.   And even in that 1-0 win no Arsenal player scored – it was a Rodrigues own goal.

It was not surprising the crowds went down.  The final game saw 16,435 turn up – an unsustainable level of support.

To put the 4554 in context, the final match at Plumstead in 1913 had a crowd of 3000.  The first match at a half-built Highbury also in 1913 had a crowd believed to be about 20,000.

Wright’s final team in 1966 was:

Furnell

Court  McGill

Storey Ure Walley

Nelson Simpson Radford Eastham Armstrong

To give some idea of the chaos, Ure had played the previous match at centre forward, and Court was actually an inside left and left half.

In this dreadful season Arsenal did actually manage to win 12 of their 42 league games and came 14^th out of 22 in the league.  Northampton Town and Blackburn Rovers were relegated, but it was Arsenal’s lack of crowds that was the talking point.

But it was the end of the season that was so awful.  As Arsenal approached their final game of the season, against Leicester, they did so knowing they had only won one (yes 1) game of their last 20.

Everyone was thankful there were some teams that were even worse.

4 May 1976: Bertie Mee leaves Arsenal

On this day Bertie Mee left his post as manager. 

He managed 539 league games – the largest number of any manager until Arsene Wenger.  Mee won three major trophies, as did both Chapman and Allison before him.  But his win percentage of 44.71% making him 10th best manager, worse than not only Chapman and Allison but also Howe and Neill.

The reason for the low win percentage was that after the years of comparative success from 1966/7 to 1972/3 Arsenal went into deep decline.

His first year was average – 7^th in the league and going out of the FA Cup in the 5^th round, but then we had six years of comparative success which included two League Cup finals, winning the Fairs Cup, winning the League and Cup double, and another Cup final

But then, after being runners-up in 1972/3 everything went into a tail spin – Mee’s final three seasons seeing us flirting with relegation and ending up 16^th and 17^th in the final two years. The trophy and near miss level is therefore, over a 10 year period.

During the period of decline he attempted to reform the club introducing strict discipline measures for the players, winding up the youth teams, and suggesting that the club could survive on just 18 full-time professionals.

He was born in Nottinghamshire and had a very modest and short career with Derby County and Mansfield as well as appearing for Southampton in the war time league of 1940/1.

He trained as a physiotherapist in the Royal Army Medical Corps where he became a sergeant (something that seemed to influence his approach to players) and then worked as a remedial gymnast with disabled servicemen for 12 years.

Mee took over from Billy Wright as a caretaker manager initially.   One story is that he asked for a clause in his contract that would allow him to be the physiotherapist once again if things did not go well in the first year.

It is perhaps a further measure of the man that he made no secret of the fact that his hobby was ballroom dancing.  Now I come to think of it I heard Mr Wenger say that he was a very competent dancer – maybe that should be a question when we interview prospective managers.   But Bertie could also swing a left punch – there is a story that when the restaurant fight broke out in Rome after the Lazio game he waded in with the rest of the team. 

Bertie Mee brought in George Graham and Bob McNab as early signings, and worked with Don Howe and Dave Sexton as his assistants.  (Don left to manage WBA after the double).

After leaving Arsenal he joined Watford as general manager, working with  Graham Taylor and Elton John, with special responsibility for scouting, and was appointed an OBE in 1983.  He retired in 1991 and died in London in 2001.

3 May: It’s Arsenal Day

3 May really ought to be called Arsenal Day, and celebrated by Arsenal supporters everywhere.  For it is the day of three incredibly important moments in Arsenal’s history.

On 3 May 1893 George Lawrence signed the documents to turn Royal Arsenal formally into Woolwich Arsenal.  He then ensured the freehold of the Manor Field was obtained by arranging contracts and the deposit with the freeholder of the Manor Ground.  

That was an incredibly important thing to do because a faction within Royal Arsenal were attempting to derail the plan by bribing the owner of the Manor Field with the purpose of getting him to increase the rent on the ground massively, and thus bankrupt the club, allowing a second club (run by the rebels) to open up in the Invicta Stadium opposite.  

Arsenal saw off the threat, but the second club did open up and survived for a few years in the Southern League as Royal Ordnance Factories FC.

On 3 May 1971, as you may have read elsewhere, Arsenal beat Tottenham 0-1 at WHL to win the league, with Kennedy scoring.  With much of north London blocked for most of the day tens of thousands entered the ground through broken turnstiles making much of the ground unsafe.  Two minutes from time Kennedy headed in an Armstrong cross.  In the final minutes of the final game, 78 years to the day after the formation of Woolwich Arsenal FC, Arsenal moved towards the Double for the first time.

On 3 May 1998, 105 years to the day after the formation of Woolwich Arsenal, and 27 years to the day after the winning the league as part of the first double, Arsenal beat Everton 4-0 and won the League in game 36 of the second Double season.  Tony Adams scored his most famous goal on 89 minutes in front of the north bank as Arsenal secured 10 successive wins, a new Premier League record. 

Arsène Wenger became the first non-UK manager to win the English league, with an unbeaten run of 18 games starting on Boxing Day.   Even the commentary of the Arsenal v Everton game became famous as Martin Tyler said, “That sums it all up” as Adams scored and turned to the crowd, arms out wide. 

2 May 1891: Arsenal vote to become the first professional club in the south

Arsenal vote to become the first professional club in the south

On this day Royal Arsenal’s club committee held the historic Extraordinary General Meeting where they voted by 250 to 10 to turn professional. 

The fifth season in the history of Royal Arsenal FC was an utterly momentous season in every way.  Arsenal had played their first game at the Invicta Ground on 6 September 1890  – a friendly against the 3rd Highlanders, and drew 1-1 in front of a crowd of 7,000.

Arsenal played a number of games against professional clubs from the north during the season, and lost them all, and I suspect it was this thought that was particularly on the minds of the General Meeting members when it came to the vote.  If Arsenal wanted to play against clubs at the top level, professionalism was what had to come.

Interestingly Arsenal did not play Tottenham this season.  Possibly the 10-1 thrashing of Tottenham the season before had made both clubs realise the gulf between the two was too great to make a re-match worthwile.

That then was the season – pretty much as the previous but with more crowds measured in the 5,000 to 8,000 bracket, and a new ground.

As Andy Kelly pointed out in an article on the Arsenal History Society website,  “The club held its 4^th annual dinner at the Freemason’s Hall, Mount-pleasant on 25 April 1891. At this point, the club was still amateur and had not stated any intention to turn professional. The club secretary, George Osborne, stated that the following clubs had agreed to play Arsenal during the 1891-92 season: St Bartholowmew’s Hospital, Old Carthusians, Casuals, Crusaders, Cambridge University, Chriswick Park, London Caledonians, Clapton and Chatham.”

There’s nothing particular in that list, as they are much the same sort of clubs that Arsenal had played in the 1890/91 season.  (No Tottenham again, we may note!)

But the list became important in what follows.   To return to Andy’s commentary…

“On 2 May 1891, the club’s committee held an Extraordinary General Meeting where they voted by 250 to 10 to turn professional. The club knew that the London FA and Kent FA cup competitions were open only to amateur teams so they resigned from the two associations.

It is an important point: Arsenal offered their resignation.  For years the club handbook and other publications suggested Arsenal had been thrown out of the two regional associations, but this was completely untrue. 

So clearly, with Arsenal getting good results against other local amateur teams, but not doing well against the northern professional teams.   If Arsenal wanted to continue its growth, professionalism was a way forwards.

Second, this was a working men’s club – not a club with a middle class benefactor running the show.   The players deserved reward for their work – so the idea was that they should be paid.   The gentlemen of leisure could afford to play for nothing, but the working men needed a proper wage.

Third there is the story that after the Derby County FA Cup game Derby tapped up at least one if not two Arsenal players.   The reports of this story are wrong in detail (Buist for example is mentioned as one of the tapped up players, and yet he wasn’t even at Arsenal at the time).

But it is possible that the word would be passed around that this or that player at Arsenal was particularly good, was playing as an amateur and might be open to an approach.

Thus Arsenal had a dilemma.  If they continued to improve so they could beat the professional teams from the north they had to keep their best players, not lose them to the northern teams Arsenal wanted to emulate.

And if Arsenal paid their players, then Arsenal would be able to do the tapping up themselves – attracting the very best amateur players from all over their own region in which Royal Arsenal would be the only serious professional team,

Andy takes up the tale here:

“On 16 May 1891, the club held its Annual General Meeting. It voted against forming a limited liability company [this did not happen until Arsenal won its place in the league two years later].  It was reported in the local press that the club had tendered its resignation from the London FA and the Kent FA after the Extraordinary General Meeting on 9 May but had not yet had a response from either association.”

In fact the members of the FAs voted against a boycott of professional teams. And to prove it, during 1891-92, Royal Arsenal played against eight out of the nine amateur teams that they had originally announced prior to the professional players decision.   Many more amateur teams were added to the list as the 1890/91 season drew to a close, as we will see in the article on Season 6. 35 Southern clubs that Royal Arsenal played during 1891-92. They played a further 16 Southern clubs during 1892-93. Allison got this wrong.

So there we have it, Arsenal turned professional, but not in the way, and not really for the reasons that the books say.

1 May 1953: Arsenal win the league on goal average

Arsenal win the league on the last day of the campaign

On 1 May 1953 Arsenal beat Burnley 3-2 in the final match of the season.  As a result Arsenal won the league on goal average.  With Arsenal 3-1 up at half time, and Burnley attacking in atrocious conditions, it was widely reported that part way through the second half manager Tom Whittaker, left the dugout and poured himself a stiff drink.

At the time and for years after, this was one of the most famous season ends.  It was only displaced as such when George Graham’s team beat Liverpool 0-2 away, and Bertie Mee’s  Double with that last match win at Tottenham.

But this was just as dramatic and for decades just as famous.

To tell the story we need to go back to January 3 1953, a day on which Arsenal lost 1-3 at home to Sunderland.

It was hardly a catastrophe, because Arsenal were undefeated in the previous seven games and in this era, and besides losing 10 or 11 games while winning the league was the norm.

And although it was a home defeat, it was also only the fourth defeat all season for Arsenal, with over half the games now played.

What’s more prior to the match Arsenal had beaten Bolton 6-4 away from home on 25 December 1952,  and indeed the recent run of results had also included Liverpool 1 Arsenal 5 on 15 November 1952.

As a result of this run of form Arsenal were standing a promising second in the league, one point behind Wolverhampton.

What’s more Arsenal were not only second, but second with a game in hand and a far superior goal average to other teams around them.

This was the team of Logie, Lishman, Goring and Holton, a team beat out of the side that had won the cup in 1950.

But the defeat against Sunderland knocked Arsenal down the league table to 6th – and some of the fans showed what is perhaps not, after all, such a modern trend, of taking the last match alone as the indicator of how things stand.

The volume, “Highbury: the story of Arsenal” by John Spurling recounts the story that Peter Goring was confronted after the Sunderland game by a drunken fan who said that he’d seen the Arsenal team of the 30s and that the current team wasn’t fit to lick their boots.

Peter is quoted as saying, “I wasn’t the only player to be confronted in such a way.  Some of the other boys also got hassle from fans which wasn’t nice”.

Jon Spurling’s book continues with the quotes saying that “One of Goring’s team mates snapped and told the Daily Mail journalist… that he was ‘ashamed of the crowd and considered them the most unsporting collection in the country’.”

The book contains some unfortunate inaccuracies as to Arsenal’s position in the league through the season, but it gives a good view of the era as Arsenal recovered quickly from the Sunderland game and the next seven games showed their intent by scoring 25 goals.

Of course there were defeats – Arsenal went out of the cup in the 6th round to Blackpool, one week after losing to them in the league.  And there was another difficult run of four draws and two defeats in the league between March 7 and March 28.

But then on April 3 another run started – a run of seven undefeated including five straight wins.  Indeed not just five straight wins, but five wins that involved scoring another 18 goals. By the end of the month Arsenal were top of the league with two games in hand over second placed Wolverhampton.

But then with the season drawing to an end, and Arsenal needing just three points from three matches to claim the title, there was another twist.

• 22 April 1953:  Cardiff 0 Arsenal 0
• 25 April 1953: Preston 2 Arsenal 0

Now either Arsenal or Preston could win the league.  If both clubs produced the same result, or if Arsenal did better than Preston, then Arsenal would win.

Preston played their game in hand first and won 1-0, taking them up to 54 points but still with a worse goal average than Arsenal.  So Arsenal had to win.  It didn’t matter by how many but they had to win.

The Highbury pitch was in a terrible state by this time – utterly covered in mud and without a blade of grass in sight with the edges utterly unplayable – but it was at Highbury that Arsenal had to play their last game, against fifth placed Burnley.

The teams had drawn at Turf Moor 1-1 back on December 13, and this was certainly not seen as a certainty for Arsenal.

This match was played on a Friday evening, to avoid clashing with the Cup Final the next day, and when Arsenal went for their normal pre-match meal at Kings Cross station they were met with fans already turning up for the Cup Final.

There were also people hanging around Highbury from mid-day onwards – a precursor of the game at Tottenham in 1971.

But surprisingly come kick off the ground was not full.  Only 51,586 turned up – perhaps because it was a Friday night.  Perhaps because everyone expected it to be impossible to get in!  Perhaps it was the awful weather which had seen heavy rain off and on through the day.

Doug Lishman stated later that the earlier antagonism of some of the crowd vanished for this match, saying, “The crowd was at their best that night.  The noise they made was unbelievable, it was really ear piercing…. However much the players and the fans were in conflict that season I can’t deny they were superb on that night.”

Burnley took the lead on six minutes, but then midway through the first half Forbes and Lishman scored within minutes of each other to give Arsenal the lead which Logie extended to 3-1 just before half time.

Then at half time the heavens opened once again and there was talk in the crowd of the match being abandoned as the pitch clearly got utterly waterlogged.   The game however did re-start, and within minutes Burnley had got one back.  The conditions meant players started to pick up injuries – Joe Mercer said playing in that match crocked him for good while Don Roper played on with torn ligaments.  Logie and Goring were hardly able to move and so were just put behind the ball as Arsenal tried to hang on for virtually the whole of the second half.   Fortunately for Arsenal, Burnley were feeling it just as much.

Part way through the second half Tom Whittaker, the manager who had won the league in 1948 and the cup in 1950, left the dugout and reputedly poured himself a stiff drink.  Fortunately there were no TV cameras to capture the moment or we’d never have heard the last of it.

Burnley hit the bar, and had a call for a penalty, but at 8pm the match ended and Arsenal had won the league on goal difference.

It turned out to be Tom Whittaker’s last trophy, for tragically during the 1956/7 season while still manager, he died suddenly.   Jack Crayston took over for one and a half seasons, followed by four seasons of George Swindin and four seasons of Billy Wright.

The club did not win another trophy until 28 April 1970.

30 April 1908: The craziest Arsenal tour ever!

The craziest Arsenal tour ever!

On 30 April 1908 Arsenal played the last match of a Scottish tour, a 2-1 victory over Kilmarnock. 

Nothing very special in that you might think, unless you look at the details.   For Arsenal had played eight matches had been between April 21 and 30th.

As footballing ideas go, this one looks to have been just about the craziest of all time.  To have a tour of Scotland immediately after the Football League season had finished, and end up playing nine games in ten days, is, well, bizarre.

But that is what happened, and the games are listed in the record books.   However the question that has not been tackled is “why”.  Why do it?

In this article I offer an answer to that puzzling question – but first, let’s take a look at the games themselves.

The 1907/8 season ended on 20 April 1908 with a 1-1 home draw to Sheffield Wednesday.  The team for that final match was

Ashcroft

Gray Sharp

Bigden Sands McEachrane

Mordue Lewis Lee Hoare Neave

The following day Arsenal played Heart of Midlothian, in Edinburgh, and not surprisingly lost 3-1.  We don’t have the full team for that match but we know that Gray, Mordue and Neave were certainly playing.  The crowd was 3000.

On the next day, 22 April, Arsenal played again and lost 0-1 against Raith.   Here the team was

Fisher

Chisholm Shaw

Bassett Theobald Low

Neave McLean C Satterthwaite Lewis McLaren

Now there clearly were some changes in the team from the last league game of the season, so they were not making all the players play every day, but poor Neave appears to have ratcheted up three games in three days.

So the tour continued (with the crowd size where we have it, in brackets).

• 23 April: Aberdeen 1 Woolwich Arsenal 1 (4000)
• 25 April: Dundee 2 Woolwich Arsenal 1
• 27 April: Motherwell 1 Woolwich Arsenal 1 (1500)
• 28 April: Rangers 1 Woolwich Arsenal 1 (2000)
• 29 April: Greenock Morton 1 Woolwich Arsenal 0 (3000)
• 30 April: Kilmarnock 1 Woolwich Arsenal 2 (2000)

Sadly we don’t have the team sheets for each game, but there are four games where we have pretty much the whole team, and we can see that, for example, Ashcroft, Theobald, Low, and David Neave all played in at least four of the games on the tour.

However we also know that some relief was provided through the use of guest players – in the match against Rangers for example Stirling (of Clydebank) and Hastie (of Ashfield) played for Woolwich Arsenal.

And this might give us a bit of a clue as to what was going on.  Were Arsenal on tour recruiting new players?  It certainly is possible, for the crowds that we know about were not up to much, as shown above.  (This was an era in which Arsenal normally pulled in 10,000 to 20,000 crowds for home games – and indeed 30,000 turned up for the home game with Chelsea in March).

Friendly matches were commonplace at the time, and in fact in the 1895/6 season in addition to a full league programme Arsenal squeezed in 48 friendly games between 9 September 1895 and 29 April 1896.   They were quite simply a way of getting in some extra cash.  Even a crowd of 2000 was worth playing in front of, when the alternative was no income at all.

And perhaps one other clue as to the thinking of those managing the club’s finances was that at the end of the previous season (1906/7) Arsenal undertook their first overseas tour, taking in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Hungary.

This gave them eight games in 15 days, and presumably the management of the club thought that without all the country to country touring, the players could play more than that when in Scotland.

So there’s a question of money.  But were Arsenal really so short of cash that they would take the squad on this tour, playing match after match, day after day?

In fact there is another issue that needs to be considered.  In 1906 Jack Humble, the man who had held the club together from the very start, who had played for Royal Arsenal, and who had been the first chairman of Woolwich Arsenal in 1893, resigned from the board for family reasons, and over the next couple of years the rest of the board changed.

At the same time the club shifted its policy, as concern grew about the growing debt of the club.  The club’s prime benefactor, George Leavey was showing signs of not wishing to bankroll the club any more (he was a successful owner of a chain of gentlemen’s outfitters) and clearly money was the problem.

But it seems that without the stabilising hand of Jack Humble the club started to lose its way.

In fact life for Woolwich Arsenal between 1906 and 1910 was one constant struggle, and the club tried all sorts of ideas to try and balance the books, including selling off their star players while attempting to develop a policy of bringing in new young players from the region and then selling them too on to league clubs in the north.

But all these policy changes failed and by the summer of 1910 Woolwich Arsenal were unable to carry on.

Indeed, it was only the intervention at this point of Henry Norris (just plain Mr at this time, his knighthood and military rank being gained in the first world war) that saved the club, and eventually transformed Woolwich Arsenal into The Arsenal, and finally Arsenal, playing at Highbury.

So the explanation for this extraordinary expedition to Scotland seems to be money pure and simple.  The club had tried an overseas tour, and thought they could replicate the success of that without the cost of the travel, by playing in Scotland.

As an idea it wasn’t really one of the best, and it wasn’t repeated in future seasons.  But it remains a monument to a club that was willing to try anything to make ends meet.

29 April 1950: Arsenal win the FA Cup

Arsenal win the FA Cup

Say “The 1930s” to any football fan who knows his/her history and you will undoubtedly get mention of “The Arsenal” – the team that came from just having never won either of the two main trophies to dominate the decade.

Arsenal survived the death of Herbert Chapman, and completed a hat trick of titles without him.   And amazingly, George Allison, the nominated successor won first the league (1935) and then the Cup (1936), and then the league against (1938).

1938/39 – the last season before the second world war, was disappointing by Arsenal standards.   We were fifth in the league and knocked out of the FA Cup by Bradford of the second division in the third round. But still the 1930s gave us:

The FA Cup: 1930, 1936

The Football League: 1931, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1938

During the first world war football had continued for a season (1914/15) but in the second world war the season was abandoned after three games as war was declared.  The results from that abandoned season were…

• 26 August 1939: Wolverhampton 2 Arsenal 2
• 30 August 1939: Arsenal 1 Blackburn 0
• 2 September 1939: Arsenal 5 Sunderland 1

That Sunderland game was the end of the 30s for Arsenal.

By 1946/47, when football resumed, everything had changed, but George Allison stayed on for one more season – seemingly because Tom Whittaker had not been demobilised in time to return to the club as manager.  .

Tom’s opening record was a sensation beyond belief.  In his first 17 league matches as a manager he was undefeated – including six straight wins at the start of the season.   True, Bradford knocked Arsenal out of the cup in the third round but that was almost as if to get rid of the distractions.

1948/49 Arsenal came fifth in the league and were knocked out in the 4th round of the cup, but then in 1950, although finishing a disappointing 6th in the league Arsenal won the cup again.  The tradition of the 1930s was continuing.

One interesting footnote to the cup run is that at this time there was no attempt to play the FA Cup final after the end of the league season.

After the cup final on 29 April 1950, Arsenal had two league matches left – although obviously nothing to play for in terms of title contention.  But there was the Cup to see and the victory to celebrate.

On 3 May 1950 Arsenal played Portsmouth at home and won 2-0.   The crowd is recorded at a suspiciously rounded figure of 65,000 – which makes me think it was an all-ticket match, although I’ve not confirmed that.  (Some other games were recorded with rounded numbers too, so I await some digging in the archives to confirm).

Three days later Arsenal ended their season with a 5-2 win over Stoke away in front of 18,000.  Yep, that’s Stoke for you.

One final point.  Reg Lewis played in all seven cup games – one of eight players to do so.  He scored five of the 11 goals in the cup run including both in the final.  He was also the highest scorer in the league that season with 19 goals in 31 games.

28 April 1934

Remembering the wonderful Joe Shaw

On 28 April 1934 Arsenal went into their penultimate match of the season as firm favourites to win their second trophy in a row, but still needing a point to secure the championship.

The title had been won the previous year by Arsenal under Chapman.  This year it was won under Chapman for the first half of the season and Shaw for the second half.  But just as Arsenal had won the league last season at Stamford Bridge by beating Chelsea 3-1, this year they went there again, and got the draw they needed.

Last season the crowd was 72260, this year a mere 65,344.  Victory in the final match beating Sheffield Utd 2-0 on 5 May 1934 rounded it all up.

The main chatter from the press was that Newcastle went down – having won the league back in 1927 and the Cup in 1932.   Also relegated were Sheffield United who had been in the top division for 40 consecutive years.

Journalists were also distracted by the plight of Manchester United of the second division who missed relegation by one point only through a win on the final day.  

But most interesting of all was the fact that Arsenal’s manager was Joe Shaw.  He played for Arsenal, managed the reserves, and it was he who took over after Chapman’s death part way through the season. 

Joe was born in Bury in 1883, and thus was just three when Arsenal was founded.   He joined Bury and then moved to Accrington Stanley.  Woolwich Arsenal by then were a first division side, and when Joe moved it was a significant leap from the Lancashire Combination to the top league in the land.

Joe Shaw played his first game for the first team in September 1907 and went on to play at total of 309 games for the club.   Joe was part of the 1912/13 campaign which saw Woolwich Arsenal relegated and was thus one of the players who played under the old club pre-1910 and the new club created by Henry Norris.

He played for the two seasons in the second division and was Arsenal’s first captain at Highbury.

He continued to play on until 1922 and then retired, and was immediately appointed as a coach by the first post-war manager, Leslie Knighton.

When Knighton was at last removed from his post, Herbert Chapman was brought him, and he made Joe the reserve team manager.   Chapman argues in his book of articles written for the Express, that the reserves should play in the same tactical format as the first team – which was a fairly revolutionary idea.  Thus Joe Shaw mirrored Chapman’s work week by week, month by month.

In “Forward Arsenal”  Bernard Joy says of Shaw and Whittaker, who ran the club under Chapman, “Their personalities helped fashion the club and Chapman relied on them for discipline, tone and smooth working of the administrative machinery.”

Eddie Hapgood added, in his book, “Shaw is cut of the same mould as Whittaker. Kindly, helpful, always ready to lend an ear to a player`s troubles.”

Joe Shaw was in charge of the reserves for 12 years and they won the Combination nine times.

Thus when Chapman died in January 1934 it was obvious that Joe Shaw should be appointed Caretaker Manager.   The story of what happened is told in the article Joe Shaw wins the league and introduces a genius.

Joe made it clear from the off that he was only there for that half season, and was happy when George Allison took over at the end of the season, leaving the Shaw/Whittaker axis in place.

After the second world war, Joe worked briefly with Chelsea, but when Allison retired in 1947 Tom Whittaker brought his old pal back to the club, and the two old-timers gave Arsenal two league championships and an FA Cup win.

Upon his retirement Joe was appointed club ambassador – although it was not a job that Shaw particularly wanted and in 1958 he retired fully from the club, after 49 years with Woolwich Arsenal, The Arsenal, and Arsenal.  The one man who was with the club in the pre-Norris era, the Norris era, and the post-Norris era.

During this time he was there for seven championships, three F.A. Cup victories, and 9 reserve league titles.

He died in 1963 at the age of 80, the greatest long term servant the club has ever had.

27 April 2004: Thierry Henry voted PFA Player of the Year.

On this day Thierry Henry was voted PFA Player of the Year.  Overall he was runner-up for the FIFA World Player of the Year twice, was PFA Players’ Player of the Year twice, and the FWA Footballer of the Year three times.

He arrived on 3 August 1999, and I think it is fair to say he didn’t make much of an impact, although I do remember one of the guys who sat near me saying “Another bloody foreigner”.

What on earth can we say about Thierry Henry that has not already been said?  Maybe the story that when he was 13 the scout of Monaco went to watch him play in a match.   He was so utterly brilliant (scoring six that day apparently) that they gave him a contract without even asking him to go for a trial.  Monaco’s manager was, of course, Mr Wenger.

Or that the director of Clairefontaine Academy – the elite French training school for footballers of the future didn’t want Henry there because his school record was too poor.

Or that when Mr Wenger got him into the team at Monaco it was he who put Thierry on the wing to beat the full backs and run rings round everyone else.

He was  French Young Footballer of the Year in 1996, and the following year the Wenger-Henry duopoly won the league.  By 1998 he had won the World Cup.

And then Juventus screwed it up.  They had Thierry Henry, one of the greatest players the world has seen, and they screwed it up!   (See also the Barcelona bit below – it begins to tell you something interesting – Arsenal got Henry right, Juve and Barca got it wrong – and yet we lose players to Juve and Barca – how odd is that?)

The story is however that while he was there he spoke on the phone regularly to Mr Wenger, and that contact paid off for on 3 August 1999 he came to Arsenal.  £11m he cost.

So let me do the personal bit.  I was there, in the north bank, watching.  1999.  New season.  Mr Wenger had bought a lot of players to the club and we were struggling to see which ones were supposed to be the highlights and which the makeweights.  Who was bought for now, who for the future?

Henry had a price tag, and Anelka had gone, so surely he was the main man.  But I sat there next to my pal  we couldn’t work it out.  What was he doing on the wing?

Thierry scored 26 that season.  By 2002 he had won us the Double.  In 2002/3 he scored 32 goals in all competitions.

You know all this stuff – it goes on and on.  In October 2005 he broke Wright’s goal record – I remember Ian Wright coming out and standing in the centre circle to embrace Henry, and then having to wait there for several minutes because Arsenal weren’t ready to come out.  I think Wright ended up doing a dance.

It all ended on 25 June 2007 when Thierry went to Barcelona for €24 million – but that was not the end of the story because this transfer became one of the celebrated examples of what we now call the Flamini Fallacy.  It was a process in which Mr Wenger soldl top players to foreign teams for huge amounts of money, and the foreign team doesn’t get that much out of it while Arsenal re-invests the money in younger talent.  You’d think other teams would have learned over time, but apparently not.

Henry played 80 games in the two-team league that is Spanish football.   His salary was reported £4.6m per season.  He was there for 3 years and the total cost to Barca was £35.8m.  His goal account dropped to 0.43 per game from the 0.69 he had at Arsenal over a much higher number of games.  The cost to Barca was thus £447,000 per game, and considering that a number of these games were as sub, it doesn’t look like a great deal for them. Amazingly he was none the less their top scorer in one of those three seasons!

In July 2010, Thierry went to New York and on 6 January 2012 he signed for Arsenal to cover for forwards who were playing in Africa.  He came on against Leeds as a sub, and scored a typical perfect Henry goal.  Right in front of me.  I was close to tears – only the sheer excitement, the screaming, the jumping up and down, the everything, stopped me crying. It was one of those “I was there!” moments that stays forever.  And ever.

In his last game he came on and scored the winner against Sunderland on 17 Feb 2012.