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 1921.
Here are the stories from this day in history…
5 December 1885 Millwall beat Eastern Wanderers 3-1 at Glengall Road. This game in itself takes on a significance here because it gives us a record of Eastern Wanderers, Arsenal’s first opponents, playing in this era – and of matches on the Isle of Dogs where the first Arsenal game (as Dial Square) took place, and thus helps validate the otherwise sketchy references to Arsenal’s first game taking place on that site.
5 December 1886: A likely date either for the setting up of Dial Square FC or a practice match ahead of the first game.
5 December 1904: Woolwich Arsenal 26 Parisian XI 1; one of Arsenal’s biggest wins. It is reported that the French team were a man short and used an Arsenal reserve to make up the numbers.
5 December 1921: The FA cited opinions about football’s unsuitability for females and called on clubs belonging to the associations “to refuse the use of their grounds for such matches”. The ban destroyed women’s football and was not lifted until 1971. Even to this day, the FA has (perhaps typically) never apologised.
5 December 1959: Lee Chapman born. He started out with Stoke with whom he played 99 league games and scored 34 goals, but he was never able to rediscover that form at Arsenal.
5 December 1960: Arsenal lost 1-3 to Chelsea in the London Challenge Cup final. The competition had started out as a tournament for the first half of the season but had moved to an April or May final in the 1930s. This was the first season he returned to a winter final.
5 December 1967.Pat Rice’s first start for Arsenal in the League Cup against Burnley. Arsenal won 2-1 with goals from Radford and Neil. Rice had already been listed as the substitute a couple of times, but had not been called upon.
5 December 1970: Man City 0 Arsenal 2. Armstrong and Radford scored in League match 20 of the first Double season.
5 December 1981: Début for Stewart Robson in West Ham 1 Arsenal 2, having been a youth and reserve player since 1978. He went on to make 150 league appearances but later became a highly eccentric anti-Wenger commentator
5 December 1981: Last game for Pat Jennings, the first man to play over 1000 senior games. Arsenal beat WHU 2-1 with Hollins and Whyte scoring. It was the 5th of 6 consecutive wins, but the 6th game was not played until January 20 because of bad weather.
5 December 2009: After a 0-3 home defeat to Chelsea Arsenal beat Stoke 2-0 to start a month of five wins and 1 draw. It was Arsène Wenger’s 500th game in charge.
Yesterday’s anniversaries: The Arsenal man who by the age of 19 had won the League, FA Cup and been capped for England
The latest post from our series on Henry Norris at the Arsenal
The 1917/18 season; Arsenal’s players and the final league table
Special feature:
Highbury: from start to end with previously unseen pictures of the end of the stadium.
What’s on the Arsenal History Society site
An index to the various series that contain over 1,700 articles on this site concerning the history of Arsenal appears on our home page.