The history of all clubs is a history of those who failed to make the grade

Many of these commentaries from recent years highlight the signing or sale of players by Arsenal who didn’t really make it in the team, either because of a lack of form, or injury, or simply not being able to settle in London.   Such transfers can be easily criticised with comments about the amount of time and money wasted on such players, and with the implication that Arsenal is the only team that has such a failure rate.

And yet if one looks at any club the list of players who are signed and engender a lot of hope in supporters turn out never to develop to the right standard or to be so hampered by injury that they can never be givcen a chance.

In the latter camp is Yaya Sanogo, who played at every level for France from under 16 to under 21 but got just 11 games for Arsenal, along with a series of unsuccessful loan spells.  However as our anniversaries show, he did finally settle with a club – Toulouse – and has played 48 times for them across the last two seasons.

Here are the anniversaries.

17 July 1897: Roger Ord joined from Hebburn Argyle.  During his time at Arsenal he kept 29 clean sheets out of his 99 games, a ratio of 3.41 percent which makes him the 16th highest on the Arsenal clean sheets list.

17 July 1888: Harry Logan born.  He signed for Arsenal in 1910 and played 11 times for the club, but was only on the winning team once.

17 July 1903: Samson Haden born near Barnsley.  He started his working life as a miner before playing for Castleford Town in March 1922, and was brought to Arsenal by Leslie Knighton. He was  the player who crossed for Buchan’s first goal for Arsenal.

17 July 1922: With the Prime Minister himself implicated, a Parliamentary Committee was set up to investigate the awarding of honours for cash. On the same day County Hall on the bank of the Thames was opened as the new HQ of the London County Council. 

17 July 1940 Joe Baker.  He went through several junior Scottish clubs before playing for Hibernian and was their top scorer for four years getting 102 goals in just 117 league games.  The Hibs board apparently refused to up his weekly wage from £12 to £17 and so sold him to Torino for £75k.

17 July 1965: Dan Lewis died aged 62.  He was transferred from Arsenal to Gillingham in May 1931 having played 169 games for Arsenal in a career in which he was constantly in and out of the side.  He played only six times for Gillingham
and retired from professional football soon after.

17 July 1977: Fulham, the club Sir Henry Norris helped take into the Southern League, and then the Football League, were banned from the transfer market due to a reported £700,000 debt.

17 July 1991: Team Malarvik 1 Arsenal 4.  Campbell, Smith, Groves (plus og).  This was one of eight pre-season friendlies played between this day and 7 August.  Team Malarvik played in Stockholm. I’m not sure they are still in existence.

17 July 2002: Stevenage Borough 1 Arsenal 6.  Interestingly, by 2015 Stevenage FC as they became known, had Teddy Sheringham as team manager and Dave
Beasant as goalkeeping coach.

17 July 2004: Barnet 1 Arsenal 10.   Reyes got three, Van Persie one, Bergkamp two.  Jeffers got a second half hat-trick. Quincy Owusu-Abeyie got the other one on 70 minutes.  This match took place in the midst of the “49”. Arsenal were undefeated in their eight pre-season games.  See also here for more details.

17 July 2008: Gilberto sold to Panathinaikos.  He played 76 games for them before moving on to Grêmio who he played for in 2011/12.  He was last heard of as technical director of Panathinaikos in 2016.

17 July 2010: Barnet 0 Arsenal 4 (Arshavin, Simpson 2, Nasri).  At this time pre-season took on a regular format: the Barnet game, a training camp in Austria and then the Emirates cup.

17 July 2013: Vietnam 1 Arsenal 7.  (Giroud (3), Oxlade Chamberlain, Akpom, Miquel.)  The second of seven pre-season games, following one in Indonesia, and followed by a match in Japan.

17 July 2014: Arsenal announced the signing of Mathieu Debuchy from Newcastle for around £12m.  His first season was very disrupted by two separate long term
injuries and he missed a chance to play in the Cup Final.

17 July 2015: Yaya Sanogo loaned to Ajax.  After only three games he moved on in February 2016 to the youth team before moving to Charlton on loan where he started to get a decent number of games.  He joined Toulouse in 2017 and has been a regular in their team since then.

17 July 2017: Arsenal beat Bayern Munich 3-1 in a pre-season friendly.

Leave a Reply

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