The latest post from our series on Henry Norris at the Arsenal
Here are the anniversaries of today.
If you have been following this series for some time you’ll know that often we have 20 or 30 anniversaries on a particular day but now as we approach summer this number declines rapidly. While in recent times matches have been played into mid-May, in earlier years the League finished either by the end of April, or in the first week of May, so our number of events to records declines. Nevertheless we have found some.
12 May 1910: Woolwich Arsenal announced that talks with Fulham to rescue the club had come to nothing, and the directors of Woolwich Arsenal FC had opened discussions with Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea, to see if their boards wanted to buy all or part of the club.
12 May 1912: Arsenal were engaged in their first overseas tour since 1907 and on this day played Vicktoria 89 Tempelhof district of Berlin. The sides drew 2-2. Vicktoria survived until 2013 when it merged with Lichterfelder FC to form a new club, FC Viktoria 1889 Berlin.
12 May 1937: Arsenal had played in the Coronation Cup on 19 April, and there was great excitement on this day as not only was King George VI married to Queen Elizabeth, but the BBC made this the subject of its first ever outside broadcast.
12 May 1945: Alan Ball born. He played for Ashton, Blackpool and Everton before joining Arsenal as Mee sought to strengthen his Double winning team.
12 May 1978: Arsenal returned to Tottenham to round off the season with the John Pratt testimonial. Arsenal lost 5-3 with all three Arsenal goals coming from Fuccillo. McLintock also appeared for Arsenal.
12 May 1979 – Arsenal 3 Man United 2. Having been 2-0 up, Man U scored two late on, before Alan Sunderland scored the most dramatic of winners at the death. We win the cup against Man U. The game by game summary is here
12 May 2000: Having beaten Coventry 3-1 in the first leg of the FA Youth Cup final, Arsenal complete the job winning 2-0 at Highbury. Bothroyd and Sidwell scored, but not one of the players in either match went on to a first team career at Arsenal.
12 May 2001: Arsenal lost the cup final 2-1 to Liverpool at the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff. Ljungberg gave Arsenal the lead on 72 minutes: the first cup final goal scored outside England.
The current series: Covering all aspects off the life and work of the man who rescued Arsenal from extinction, secured the club’s future by moving it to Highbury, and then brought in Herbert Chapman as manager, our current series of articles is on Henry Norris at the Arsenal. The series is being worked on daily, and the articles thus far are here.
“Woolwich Arsenal, the club that changed football” and “Making the Arsenal” are both available on Kindle. Please see here for more details
The previous series
This site is based around series of articles on specific themes – and you can find links to many of these on this page and on the left column under the heading “Pages”.
Here are some of the more popular series that have been written recently or are actively being updated at the moment.
- Arsenal in the 30s
- Arsenal players in the 30s
- Arsenal in the summer – now over 50 articles.
- The First League Season, including a review of each player who played in that season
- Arsenal day by day – over 5000 anniversaries of the club
- Arsenal in the 70s
- Tom Whittaker, player, coach, manager
