The closing of the Woolwich Arsenal ground for two games following crowd incidents, doesn’t sound too horrific, although the initial punishment was for the rest of the season. It was an unprecedented punishment, and no explanation was given as to why this punishment was dished out, other than a lot of comment about it being time to teach these rioting supporters a lesson. It was one of the first examples of Arsenal being made an example of.
Here are the anniversaries…
26 January 1889: St Luke’s 5 Arsenal 0 – a reminder that Royal Arsenal were strong but certainly not invincible in the early days.
26 January 1891: Royal Arsenal 0 Everton 5. After three games in which Arsenal scored a total of 16 goals the club (which was playing its final season as amateurs) was brought down to earth by first division Everton.
26 January 1895: Crowd incidents in the Woolwich Arsenal v Burton game led to the ground being closed by the FA for two games. The original sentence proposed was that the ground would be closed for the rest of the 1894/95 season. However, on appeal a “compromise” of 6 weeks suspension was agreed upon by the FA. See also here.
26 January 1918: Tottenham 0 Fulham 1 at Highbury (as Tottenham’s ground was closed for the duration). Sir Henry Norris attended with his daughter who took her dog into the directors’ box. The dog then escaped and then ran on the pitch and play was stopped while it was rounded up. However this story also turns up in another match so may not be true.
26 January 1925: WHU 1 Arsenal 0 (at Stamford Bridge). The second replay of the FA Cup match that was the scene of the Arsenal drugs scandal. Curiously the only source for the story is the man who dished out the drugs to the team: the Arsenal manager who claimed he didn’t know the man who offered him the pills!
26 January 1926: John Logie Baird demonstrated a mechanical television system in London – the first faltering steps towards TV.
26 January 1946: Leicester 4 Arsenal 5 in Football League South. The last of six consecutive victories in the war time league in which Arsenal scored 20 games. Arsenal then failed to win any of the next five games in the league.
26 January 1957: Ex player Freddie Cox DFC started his most famous FA Cup run as a manager of Bournemouth, beating Wolverhampton Wanderers and Tottenham Hotspur before narrowly losing to Man U.
26 January 1969: James Ramsey died. He went to Arsenal from Kilmarnock in 1924, and returned there in 1926, leaving Arsenal after 75 games.
26 January 1971: The journey to the Double was held up by a waterlogged pitch for the 4th round cup replay at Portsmouth.
26 January 1980: Arsenal beat Brighton And Hove Albion 2-0 in the cup with 43,202 in attendance. After some poor performances Brady and Rix were back to their best and Arsenal could have reached double figures, except the Brighton keeper had the game of his life.
26 January 1985: York 1 Arsenal 0 (FA Cup). Having taken two attempts to beat Hereford, Arsenal went down to York in front of a packed house of 10,840
26 January 2005: Jackie Henderson died in Poole, Dorset. He played for Scotland and was a great favourite at Portsmouth, but couldn’t pull Arsenal through on his own.
26 January 2013: Brighton 2 Arsenal 3 (FAC 4). It was part of Giroud scoring five goals in three games. This came in the midst of some high scoring matches including a 7-3 win over Newcastle, a 5-2 win away to Reading and a 5-1 win over WHU.
The January 1918 match where Sir Henry Norris’s daughter took her dog to the game and it ran on the pitch struck a chord. In 1970 Brentford goalkeeper Chic Brodie, was felled by a Jack Russell at a game at Colchester. As the game was shown on the ‘Big Match,’ there was much merriment about it at school the next day. What isn’t so widely known, is that it ended Brodie’s football career. When asked about it he said “it might have been a small dog, but it was a solid one.”