AISA Arsenal History Society: preserving Arsenal's heritage
In August 1914, with war looming, Arsenal started preparations for their second season at Highbury, and for their second season in the second division since the relegation at the end of their time in Plumstead in 1913. Although I don’t have a record of the match, we can be fairly sure that Arsenal would …
Read More “Tottenham 1 Arsenal 5. What a way to start the season”
Boogaloo – Arsenal 1-1 I have been sent the following piece and translated it using Google – so some of the translation may be highly inaccurate. Indeed some of it turned out to be impossible to use. But to see the original, click on the score line above. Željezničar plays in Sarajevo; I imagine Boogaloo is …
Arsenal 1-2 Leeds 21 August 2001 This was our first home game of the season and the second game of the 3rd Double Season. In the first game on 18 August 2001, we’d beaten Middlesbrough away 0-4 but this brough us down to earth. Leeds were managed by David O’Leary and he was keen to …
Read More “We’re heading for the double but start with a home defeat. 21/8/01”
On 27 June 2002 Arsenal played Rapid Vienna in a pre-season friendly in Eisenstadt. The match then was abandoned because of crowd trouble. Our team for the occasion was Taylor Luzhny Cygan Upson Tavlaridis Parlour Toure Edu Bentley Aliadiere Henry David Seaman, Ashley Cole, Sol Campbell and Martin Keown were given the night off. Arsenal …
Read More “When a pre-season turns nasty, but we open in the league with a win”
By Tony Attwood It is as if it were yesterday. 15 August 2003 Preseason had been mixed. We’d lost to Peterborough and drawn with Barnet but recovered somewhat to make a decent fist of the rest of the pre-season games. We’d lost the charity shield in Cardiff, but Lehmann had made his first appearance …
Read More “Do you remember how we started the Unbeaten Season on 15 August?”
As usual there is a full list of anniversaries on the home page of both this site and Untold Arsenal. But I would like to highlight just three of them… 14 August 1963: Bob Wilson’s first game 14 August 1996. The first Wenger signings, Remi Garde (free) and Patrick Vieira (£3.5m) joined Arsenal. 14 August 2005: Start of the final season …
Read More “Three momentous Arsenal anniversaries on 14 August”
By Tony Attwood It is conventional to think of Sir Henry Norris as a crook and a scoundrel. Indeed I get the impression that even Arsenal FC see him as their biggest embarrassment, In many articles hee I have tried to argue the opposite – that in saving Arsenal in 1910 Henry Norris took enormous …
The origin of the phrase ‘Back to square one’ is one of those that often leads people to quote the notion that it came from football. It didn’t – as I can show below. But the phrase does, in a quirky way, have a very strong link with Arsenal, with the fight between Arsenal and …
Read More “When Arsenal banned radio broadcasts of games and “Back to Square Two””
Vincent Lee Bartram was born on 7 August 1968 in Birmingham and started as a footballer with Wolverhampton Wanderers at a time when they were in the fourth division. After a series of loans with Blackpool, Cheltenham, and WBA he moved to Bournemouth in 1991, playing over 100 games for them under the management of Harry …
James “Jimmy” Blair was born in Dumfries in 1885, and plauyed for Dumfries Volunteer, 5th Kings Own Highlanders, and Kilmarnock before coming to Woolwich Arsenal for the 1905/6 season in May 1905. He was obviously seen as a transfer of some significance as he was in the line up for the opening game of the …
By Tony Attwood “You never know where you will turn up in football. You have to deal with the cards dealt. You keep going to the death.” Francis Jeffers. Born in Liverpool, on 25 January 1981, Francis Jeffers began his footballing at Everton, coming on as a sub on 26 December 1997 in the game …
Read More “The 2003 Community Shield, Francis Jeffers and his 12 clubs”
By Tony Attwood Frank Boulton is one of those players whose football life seems difficult to track exactly. Indeed as I search for details of his personal life I find contradictions in report, for he was born in either Chipping Sodbury or Yate, depending on the source you read. But we do have a definitive …
Read More “Frank Boulton: details are sketchy but he was a league winner”
By Tony Attwood The Arsenal player James Howie Ramsay has proved to be a surprisingly hard player to track, and most of the normal sources seem to have little or nothing about him. We know that he joined Arsenal from Kilmarnock (with whom he had won the Scottish cup) in February 1924 for £1775 – …
By Tony Attwood If you are a member of the Arsenal Independent Supporters Association (AISA) you’ll know what happens around this time of year. You get a little package through the door. If you are not a member of AISA, let me tell you what it is, in the hope that you might consider joining …
Read More “Arsenal After Chapman: a new publication from AISA”
2013/14 saw Arsenal lead the league table for more time than any other club. 128 days in all. Which says a lot about the club. But through most of the season the normal calls by the tiny minority for Wenger to go continued, with the mantra, willingly taken up throughout the media, that …
Liverpool 3-6 Arsenal 9 January, 2007 It is interesting that once the AAA were unable to hit Wenger with the “x years since a trophy” and decry the mere fact of finishing in the top four year after year, no matter how much money other teams brought in from oil and state ownership, they took …
Stephen James “Steve” Walford is one of that handful of players who turned out for both Arsenal and Tottenham. He was born 5 January 1958 in Highgate and started out with Tottenham in 1974 but he only played twice for them before Terry Neill, who of course himself at been at Tottenham, signed him for …
Read More “Steve Walford – played for both Tottenham and Arsenal, but where are you now?”
We’re now in the process of doing major overhauls and checking of the 5000+ entries that make up the Arsenal Anniversary Files. So although some new stories appear each week, much of the work is of the background variety in providing links, checking sources and so on. Quite regularly now whole sections of the Anniversary …
Read More “The Arsenal Anniversary Files: what’s happening now.”
14 October 1997: Jason Crowe who played 3 times for England’s under 20s, came on as a sub for Arsenal in a League Cup match against Birmingham City on 14 October 1997, as did the other subject of this article: Jehad Abdussalam Muntasser. Both young men had very short Arsenal careers, but both interesting lives in …
Read More “Two players with the shortest of appearances for Arsenal, linked on a single day.”
By Tony Attwood Ask any serious Arsenal supporter how many times Arsenal have done the double, and your will almost certainly be told three. Because we think of The Double as being victory in the FA Cup and the League Championship in the same season. And yes we have won three of those doubles. But …
By Tony Attwood The view of Lt Col Sir Henry Norris that many people have had over the years has been thoroughly negative, influenced by the fact that he was guilty of a technical breaking of the financial rules of football at the time. From that story a whole imaginary life story emerged, including one …
Arsenal’s season 1992/3 is one that, if remembered at all, is remembered for a unique double achieved by George Graham: the FA Cup and the League Cup. I was there, and I followed the club that season, and of course celebrated the fact that we were the first club to win the cup double. But …
16 November 2002: On this most memorable of memorable days Arsenal beat Tottenham 3-0 to go back to top of the league. Not only that the match included the Premiership Goal of the Season by Henry. He took the ball from inside his own half, beat most of the Tottenham defence, scored and ran all …
Read More “Can it ever get better than this? Arsenal v Tottenham.”
18 August 2001: Sol Campbell plays his first league game for Arsenal. Middlesbrough 0 Arsenal 4. Henry said after the game, “I saw something today I never saw last season – we played as a team. It’s the most important thing in football.” Yes, this was the start of the third FA Cup / League …
Read More “Starting the third Double, but we soon came down to earth.”
By Tony Attwood Throughout much of 2013/14, the year in which Arsenal won the FA Cup, there was muttering from those opposed to Wenger, that we needed to score more goals and for this we needed a new centre forward. As the Daily Mirror said in the summer of 2014: After FA Cup success, Arsene …
