When the League had no idea who was top of the league, and an asteroid named Arsène Wenger

This is our daily review of Arsenal anniversaries taken from the Arsenal day by day  files prepared by the AISA Arsenal History Society.

Our headline is taken from this day in 1888 and 2007


Special feature:

Highbury: from start to end with previously unseen pictures of the end of the stadium.

Below are the Anniversaries from  November 21

 

21 November 1888: Despite the first League season being underway since 8 September, the notion of two points for a win, one for a draw, as a way of working out who stood where in the table, was not agreed until this date!  Before then, no one really knew who stood where in the League.

21 November 1914: League debut for Billy Blyth v Huddersfield, Arsenal losing 0-3.  During the month Arsenal won 6-0 and 3-0, lost 0-3 twice, and drew 1-1.

21 November 1931: League debut for Frank Moss in a 1-2 away defeat to Chelsea.  This game was part of a series of nine games in which David Jack scored 13 goals, including at least one in every match

21 November 1945: Arsenal 3 Dynamo Moscow 4 – Stanley Matthews and other guests players turned out for Arsenal in this friendly played in such thick fog that no one really knew what was happening.  54.620 had to wait for the next day’s papers to hear that the Soviet team had won 3-4.

21 November 1955: Rangers 0 Arsenal 2 first appearance of Stan Charlton.  It was a series that started through the work of Chapman due to his friendship with Bill Struth of Rangers.  Struth had been at Rangers longer than Chapman and had watched Arsenal grow from being relegation fodder into the dominant side in England.

21 November 1970: Ipswich Town 0 Arsenal 1.  League match 18 of the first Double season.  Arsenal were now four points behind Leeds but with a game in hand.  Jon Sammels playing his first game became the 16th and last player to be used by Arsenal – the lowest number ever for a season equalling the 1968/9 record

21 November 1962: Alan Smith born.  He won the league as Arsenal’s centre forward in 1989 (scoring the first goal of the final game against Liverpool) and 1991.

21 November 1987: Arsenal 0 Southampton 1.  The first of a run of 11 league games in which Arsenal won 1, drew four and lost six.  Only once in the 11 did Arsenal score more than one goal.

21 November 1992: Leeds 3 Arsenal 0 – the first of four consecutive league defeats, and the start of an eight match sequence without a victory during which Arsenal scored just two goals.  Allan Miller was the first Arsenal keeper to come on as a sub.

21 November 1995: Arsenal got one of only four wins in 15 matches during a dreadful mid-season run beating Sheffield W 4-2.  This was the second and final time Arsenal scored more than three in a match in the season – both games ending 4-2.

21 November 1998: Arsenal lost 1-0 away to Wimbledon.  It is part of a run of five without a win for the champions and part of a sequence of just one goal in four.

21 November 2006: A 3-1 defeat of Hamburg left Arsenal only needing to avoid defeat in final match to win their Champions League group

21 November 2007: An asteroid that circles the sun between Mars and Jupiter once every 4.23 years was renamed Arsène Wenger by the International Astronomical Union.  It was previously known by the slightly less memorable name of 33179

21 November 2008: The BBC reported that William Gallas had his captaincy of Arsenal removed following a verbal outburst against other players.  Almunia was given the captaincy for the next match.

21 November 2012: Arsenal secured their place in the next round of the Champions League with a 2-0 win over Montpellier.

 And elsewhere on this day in 1979

On this day in 1990 Michael Milken was given 10 years in prison and fined a total of $600m for a who variety of frauds involving junk bonds.


 

Yesterday’s anniversaries:

Arsenal bottom of the league


 

The latest post from our series on Henry Norris at the Arsenal

April 1918: the third wartime league ends; Ireland rebels against conscription.

A full index of the various series of articles on this site appears on the home page.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *