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The following article was published in the March 2010 issue of Gunflash - The Official Arsenal Supporters' Club Fanzine. The latest issue for May 2010 is out now.
Like thousands of others, my favourite Arsenal moment from the past 55 years was that last-minute goal by Michael Thomas at Anfield which clinched the league title for the Gunners in 1989 as well as wrenching it from Liverpool’s grasp. My favourite Arsenal moment from the past 55 years at Highbury was when the final whistle went to end a gripping European Fairs Cup final, second leg between Arsenal and those Belgian high-flyers Anderlecht. It is incredible to think that we are celebrating its 40th anniversary because the memories of that euphoric evening are still fresh. The Gunners had to overturn a 3-1 deficit from the first leg when they were outplayed. They accomplished it in real style, running out 3-0 winners to claim their first major trophy since 1953 - a gap of 17 years. It was the first major trophy I had seen them win, so the date on which it happened, April 28 1970, will always be special to me. It was one of those magical nights when you were thrilled to say, “I was there.”
After years of disappointments, anti-climaxes and living in the shadow of the great Tottenham team of the early Sixties, featuring famous names such as Danny Blanchflower, Dave Mackay, Jimmy Greaves, John White and Cliff Jones, it was as if a big black cloud had suddenly lifted from Highbury. Arsenal, managed by Bertie Mee and coached by Don Howe, were entitled to feel proud of themselves again and there was a feeling that the balance of power in north London was shifting from one end of the Seven Sisters Road to the other. This was confirmed the following season (1970-71) when Arsenal became only the second club in the 20th century to win the League and FA double. Spurs were the first 10 years earlier and it must have been gut-wrenching for their supporters to watch Arsenal clinch the first leg of their double before a packed house at White Hart Lane in the final league match of the season on a memorable Monday night in May. The FA Cup triumph over Bill Shankly’s Liverpool followed five days later.
The European Fairs Cup breakthrough made Arsenal players and supporters believe that the club could go on to greater triumphs. This is why it was one of the most important victories in Arsenal’s history. Before April 28 1970 Arsenal players were used to being compared unfavourably to the marvellous footballers of the Thirties when Arsenal won the League Championship five times and the FA Cup twice. This was hardly surprising because in 17 long, lean years between 1953 and 1970 Arsenal never finished higher than third in the old First Division and failed to progress beyond the sixth round of the FA Cup. But once the Fairs Cup had been won, the names of such Highbury legends as Alex James, Cliff Bastin, Eddie Hapgood, David Jack, Joe Hulme and Ted Drake weren’t heard quite so often from the club’s older supporters. Those players from 1970 had made their own history and the following year they achieved something which was even beyond the great Arsenal side of the Thirties - the Double.
Arsenal had begun catching up with Spurs by the late Sixties and reached consecutive League Cup finals at Wembley in 1968 and 1969. Leeds, one of the best teams of that era, beat them 1-0 in 1968. There was no disgrace in that, but it was a different story a year later when Swindon, then of the Third Division, beat the Gunners 3-1 in one of the biggest upsets of the decade. The strange thing is that Arsenal did not play badly. It was just their misfortune to come up against a goalkeeper, Peter Downsborough, who played out of his skin. Because of Downsborough’s heroics, the match went into extra time with the score at 1-1 and Arsenal, handicapped by a dreadful pitch and weakened by an outbreak of flu earlier in the week, succumbed to two goals by the highly rated Don Rogers.
It took a painfully long time for the Arsenal players and fans to get that result out of their system. The depression carried over into the next season (1969-70), which for the most part was undistinguished. There were four goalless draws at Highbury, the Gunners could finish no higher than 12th and suffered early exits in FA Cup and League Cup. Thankfully, the Fairs Cup results provided a relief from all the gloom. By the spring things were looking much more promising. Dinamo Bacau were beaten 9-1 on aggregate in the quarter-finals, and in the semi-finals Arsenal made surprisingly short work of Ajax, winning 3-1 on aggregate.
Anderlecht proved a major obstacle in the final, especially on their own ground where they were convincing 3-1 winners. Arsenal’s saviour in the first leg was a young Ray Kennedy, who came on for Charlie George towards the end with Anderlecht leading 3-0. Kennedy reduced the arrears with almost his first touch - a header from George Armstrong’s centre - to give Arsenal a fighting chance of rescuing the tie. With away goals counting double in the event of the scores being level on aggregate, Arsenal knew that 2-0 in the second leg at Highbury a week later would be sufficient to prevail. As it happened they went one better.
A crowd of 51,612 saw Arsenal make a tentative start, but the turning point was Eddie Kelly’s opening goal midway through the first half after Anderlecht had failed to clear an Armstrong corner. The Belgians were on the back foot after that and yielded to two Arsenal goals in the 70th and 71st minutes. From my vantage point in the North Bank I had a bird’s-eye view of both of them. John Radford thundered in an unstoppable header from a centre by Bob McNab for 2-0. The Arsenal fans were still jubilating when Jon Sammels scored the third with a shot that went in off the post. The final whistle brought the next wild celebrations. Supporters poured on to the pitch in their thousands as captain Frank McLintock, a winner at last after playing in four losing cup finals at Wembley, showed off the trophy to the adoring masses.
I often wonder what would have happened to Arsenal if they hadn’t risen to the occasion so gloriously that night, and instead lost their third consecutive cup final. How much longer would the players and supporters have had to wait for some silverware? The let-down of an aggregate defeat to Anderlecht would have been so huge that they would surely not have won the Double the season afterwards and those players responsible for the successes of the early Seventies would not be such household names today.
The 11 Arsenal heroes on that memorable April night were (in 4-4-2 formation): Bob Wilson, Peter Storey, Frank McLintock, Peter Simpson, Bob McNab, George Armstrong, Jon Sammels, Eddie Kelly, George Graham, John Radford and Charlie George.
Since 1970 Arsenal have added to their European silverware collection by winning the now defunct Cup Winners’ Cup in Copenhagen in 1994. Since the turn of the century the Gunners have enjoyed some outstanding results in Europe, including winning at Inter Milan, Real Madrid and AC Milan, but the greatest prize of all - the European Cup - eludes them.
There was no disgrace this season in going out at the quarter-final stage to last year’s winners, Barcelona, who have become a very special team featuring a very special player, Lionel Messi. Their first-half performance in the first leg at Ashburton Grove was the best I’ve seen from a visiting team in more than 50 years of attending Arsenal home matches. The word awesome is frequently overused these days but in this instance there was no other way to describe them. Barcelona were the side everybody wanted to avoid in the draw and it was rotten luck for Arsenal that they were handed the short straw. Even worse luck was the fact that Arsenal were away in the second leg. Let’s hope that if the Gunners play Barcelona in next season’s Champions League competition it won’t be before the final.
The following article was published in the March 2010 issue of Gunflash - The Official Arsenal Supporters' Club Fanzine. The latest issue for April 2010 is out now.
Whatever the rest of 2009-2010 has in store for Arsenal, there is the sobering knowledge that Aaron Ramsey will not be part of it. The serious injury to the highly rated young Wales midfielder - he broke his tibia and fibula in the 3-1 victory at Stoke last month - has not only cast a giant shadow over Arsenal’s season but revived memories of similar injuries to Abou Diaby four years ago and Eduardo two years ago.
The good news is that the injury is not career-threatening. The bad news is that Ramsey faces at least eight months out of action and that unless something is done to curb the kind of reckless tackle by Ryan Shawcross which caused the trauma, it is likely that another serious injury will happen sooner rather than later. These sort of challenges are a consequence of too many Premier League managers thinking Arsenal are a soft touch, especially away from home, and encouraging over-aggressive methods to combat the flair and artistry of the Gunners.
Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger has seen it all before. The tackle by Martin Taylor at Birmingham which caused so much distress to Eduardo, not to mention his team-mates, and the even worse foul by Sunderland’s Dan Smith on Diaby at the Stadium of Light which was made near the touchline and came about 30 seconds from the end of a game in which Arsenal were winning 3-0. In a season when Arsenal have been suffering from an abnormal amount of injuries, this was the cruellest blow of all. Full marks to the Arsenal players who, having been visibly dismayed by Ramsey’s injury, had the character to go on and win the match with two goals in stoppage time. Their resolve, togetherness and fighting spirit bodes well for the rest of the season.
Apologists for Shawcross point out that he did not mean to hurt Ramsey and that in a contact sport like football accidents will sometimes occur. On the first point I’m sure they are right, but the unnecessary force of the Stoke’s defender’s challenge ensured that it was an accident waiting to happen. The announcement of Shawcross’s promotion to the England squad for the game against Egypt only minutes after the Stoke-Arsenal match had finished was particularly unfortunate timing.
The Ramsey February horror story highlights the lost art of tackling. Too many of today’s players seem unable to distinguish between fair and hard and foul and dangerous. Don’t get me wrong, there were dirty players 20 and 30 years ago and most clubs had their “enforcer” or “hard man”. But I can’t remember any of them committing the sort of challenges we are seeing all too often these days - fouls which endanger players’ livelihoods.
Tackling is as much part of football as shooting, passing, dribbling and heading. Long may it remain so, for I would hate to see the game become a non-contact sport. However, there is a proper and improper way of executing it. Sol Campbell gave an example of the former only last month when his brilliantly timed tackle thwarted Porto striker Falcao as he was about to shoot from close range. However, youngsters would be well advised not to follow the example of Birmingham centre-back Liam Ridgewell. His spiteful two-footed lunge at Wigan teenager James McCarthy last month took out the player and also the corner flag which flew up into the face of a linesman, who was unable to continue and replaced in the second half by the fourth official. Incredibly, Ridgewell was not punished by the referee and the FA, perhaps more incredibly, dismissed reports that they would act retrospectively. Ridgewell was also involved in an incident at the Emirates last October when his shuddering challenge led to Theo Walcott hobbling off. He also got off scot-free on that occasion, so he’s riding his luck. It’s time that Birmingham manager Alex McLeish had a quiet word with the former Aston Villa defender and told him to calm down.
The importance of firm but clean tackling cannot be overstated. If you get a shot, pass or header wrong at least you don’t risk causing damage to somebody else, but if you tackle without, in Wenger’s words, due care and attention then the result, as we have seen recently, can be disastrous. In some cases the punishment does not fit the crime. Alex Song missed Arsenal’s recent matches against Burnley and Hull because of an accumulation of bookings, yet this was only one game fewer than Shawcross was banned for his tackle on Ramsey, for which he was sent off. Incidentally, Song’s yellow card against Stoke was harsh.
Ironically, Robbie Savage, now plying his trade with Derby in the Championship, was the innocent party to one of the worst assaults I’ve seen in many years. Ironic because Savage has had more than his fair share of run-ins with referees in a long, turbulent career. The guilty man this time was Gorka Pintardo, of Swansea, in the match at Pride Park last month. Pintardo’s wretched two-footed tackle thankfully missed his target and predictably provoked a mass brawl. That man of many clubs, Steve Claridge, commenting on The Football League show, rightly suggested that a suspension of three months would have been far more appropriate than three weeks for a challenge that could have inflicted grave damage.
Kieran Gibbs must be cursing the fact that his broken metatarsal has ruled him out for the rest of the season just when England manager Fabio Capello has a problem with finding a World Cup replacement at left-back for the injured ex-Gunner Ashley Cole. With Manchester City’s Wayne Bridge reluctant to play in the same team as John Terry, Aston Villa’s Stephen Warnock unconvincing in the League Cup final defeat by Manchester United and Everton’s Leighton Baines only average when gaining his first cap against Egypt, Gibbs, had he been fit, may well have called into the squad.
It’s touch and go whether Walcott, Arsenal’s only other World Cup candidate, will make the party to South Africa. His hat-trick in England’s 4-1 win over Croatia in World Cup qualifying in the autumn of 2008 seems a long time ago now. Since then a succession of injuries and the lack of a regular 90 minutes at Arsenal have drained his confidence and belief. After his performance at Wembley against Egypt when he was too often on the periphery, one fears Walcott has fallen behind in the pecking order to Shaun Wright-Phillips, Aaron Lennon and David Beckham. The Arsenal supporters are willing him to show some of the form that persuaded Wenger to buy him from Southampton for £5 million four years ago and there were signs in the home victory over Burnley - not least a terrific individual goal - that he is at last emerging from his trough.
Draws: Colchester have fallen away badly in League One and I predict that Leyton Orient, at last safe from relegation, will hold them on Saturday. Millwall and Swindon, who play each other at the New Den, have their eyes on automatic promotion but I reckon both will be disappointed as Saturday's game looks like ending in stalemate. In League Two, Rotherham have drawn only once away this season. I believe they will add to that tally at Hereford. There may be another draw at Plainmoor where the division's in-form teams, Torquay and champions Notts County, meet.
Aways: Sunderland have fared poorly on their travels but they can improve that record at Wolves. Relegation-threatened Tranmere will surely defeat bottom club Stockport, who are already doomed, and Accrington are also tipped to take maximum points at Cheltenham, who, as well as being fourth from bottom in League Two, are completely out of sorts.
Homes: Although Brighton's home record is appalling, they should be able to beat Yeovil, who have nothing left to play for except pride. I'm taking home advantage - and sheer desperation - to see lowly Exeter through against Huddersfield, while Northampton are fancied to make life more uncomfortable for Bury, who have lost their last five away matches.
Treble chance (home teams): Bolton, Colchester, Millwall, Crewe, Hereford, Morecambe, Port Vale, Torquay, Hoffenheim, Wolfsburg.
Best draws: Colchester, Millwall, Hereford, Morecambe, Torquay.
Aways: Liverpool, Sunderland, Charlton, Tranmere, Accrington.
Homes: Arsenal, Chelsea, Everton, Manchester United, Brighton, Exeter, Walsall, Lincoln, Northampton.
