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Here are the anniversaries for this day
23 October 1893: Woolwich Arsenal beat Roston Bourke’s XI 4-3. It was one of many friendlies played in the season, made particularly intriguing by the fact that Roston Bourke was a leading referee who also had his own team. Joseph Cooper: the most mysterious of all the mysterious Arsenal players made his debut.
23 October 1893: Stanley Briggs a centre half, born in Stamford Hill, north London was signed by Arsenal on 23 October 1893 as an amateur from Tottenham where he had been playing since 1892.
23 October 1896: Daniel Burgess born. He was signed from Goldenhill Wanderers and made his league debut on 1 September 1919 in a league match against Liverpool as an inside forward having started out with Port Vale, In 1922 he moved on to West Ham for the 1922/3 season, followed by Aberdare Athletic (1923), QPR and Sittingbourne.
23 October 1909: Woolwich Arsenal 1 Everton 0. After one win and one draw in the first nine, Arsenal secured their second victory, scoring their 10th goal but having conceded 34.
23 October 1915: Arsenal beat Croydon Common away 4-1. The Common were a Southern League club prior to the war, but they were in financial trouble at the time, and were the one club from the League that failed to reappear in the League when the war was over, Arsenal then picking up several of their released players.
23 October 1922: Arsenal v Tottenham following the battle of WHL three weeks before, in the London FA Challenge Cup. It was rough and tumble on the pitch but there are no reports of problems among the crowd of 11,000. Arsenal won 3-2.
23 October 1926: Arsenal were solidly mid-table and hopes of building on last year’s achievements were fading fast. So it was a surprise to the 27,846 who watched Arsenal v Sheffield Wednesday to see Arsenal win 6-2. Haden got two, and then Brain got four in the second half. It lifted Arsenal up to 10th.
23 October 1933: Peter Dougall was offered a trial at Arsenal before signing as a professional on 23 October. He made his first team debut on 10 February 1934 and went on to play eight times this season.
23 October 1935: Arsenal lost a Charity Shield match for the first time ever in a 1-0 home defeat to Sheffield Wednesday in front of 30,000.
23 October 1937: With Crayston injured Bastin dropped back into the right half position, as on occasion he had done before. Davidson took over at inside left in a 1-1 draw with Stoke. But what astonished people was the champions Man City being beaten 0-4 by Middlesbrough, thus taking them down to 13th. And far worse was to come as this was the season the champions of the previous campaign were relegated.
23 October 1943: Arsenal beat Watford 4-2 in the 9th match of the wartime league season. It was only Arsenal’s second win of the season, but it marked the return to form of Reg Lewis. He got a hat-trick in this match and including this game totted up 13 goals in six consecutive games.
23 October 1948: Bryn Jones scored on his 17th and last appearance for Wales. His transfer had been the British record, but he never lived up to the high standards expected of him. See also here
23 October 1957: Graham Rix born. He joined Arsenal in 1974 while Bertie Mee was manager, and turned pro in 1975. His first ever match for Arsenal was against Leicester on 2 April 1977. In 2018 Rix was accused by multiple Chelsea trainees of racism and physical assault.
23 October 1969: Estudiantes de la Plata beat AC Milan in the second leg of the intercontinental cup final. After the Nestor Combin of Milan was stretchered off having been hit in the face by Alberto Suarez of Estudiantes, Combin (an Argentine citizen) was arrested by attendant police for “avoiding military service”. After the match the Argentine president watching the match ordered the arrest of three other players, who then served a month in jail.
23 October 1976: Leicester 4 Arsenal 1 with 19,351 in the crowd. Stapleton got the goal playing alongside Ball, Brady, Macdonald, Stapleton, Armstrong. After, the Daily Mirror said Macdonald had “been threatened with the axe.” But Arsenal had just conceded nine in two games, and even a fully functional Macdonald could hardly be have expected to get ten.
23 October 1994: Freddie Ljungberg made his debut for Halmstads. He played 79 games for the team before moving to Arsenal in 1998.
23 October 1999: “With 15 minutes left they trailed 2-0 to a Chelsea team who hadn’t conceded at home all season. Arsène Wenger feared for his season, and what happened next aged him 10 years.” (Report on Kanu subsequently scoring 3 in the Observer, 24 Oct)
23 October 1999: Stuart Taylor who had joined Arsenal in 1997 as a youth player finished his first loan spell at Bristol Rovers. He graduated to being third choice keeper, and eventually won a league winners’ medal.
23 October 2007: Arsenal beat Slavia Prague 7-0 in Champs League. Eboue and Walcott each got two.
23 October 2007: Jens Lehmann made an infamous speech in which he spoke of “my dear manager” and detailed the “humiliation” he felt of being dropped. Mr Wenger said later that, “Jens always thought he was right about everything”.
23 October 2010: Mark Randall loaned to Rotherham. It was his third and final loan from Arsenal before he moved to Chesterfield in 2011. In 2019 he was playing for Larne in Northern Ireland
23 October 2011: Arsenal beat Stoke City 3-1 with two from Van Persie who came on as a substitute for the scorer of the first goal: Gervinho. It showed that Arsenal were slowly recovering from the 8-2 defeat by Manchester United and was part of a run of eight wins and a draw in nine consecutive games.
The Arsenal History Society is part of the Arsenal Independent Supporters Association – a body which gives positive support to the club, and has regular meetings with directors and senior officials of the club to represent the views of its members to the club. You can read more about AISA on its website.
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100 Years in the First Division: the absolute complete story of Arsenal’s promotion in 1919.
