Once upon a time an Arsenal manager ditched some older players from his squad. He then failed to replace them with expensive new signings but instead promoted youths to take their place. He ran with just the three centre backs for an entire season and gave a regular place to youngsters including a couple of teenagers who'd hardly played any first team football previously.

This may all seem very familiar but it is not a new concept at The Arsenal.

Even in its day it was an unusual and perhaps a cheapskate way to transform a side, but between the start of the 1969-70 season and the start of the 1970-71 Arsenal ditched a number of older established first teamers and introduced some home-grown youngsters to replace them. In the previous season Ian Ure, for whom we'd once paid a world record fee for a centre half, was sold off to Manchester United and replaced by the Welshman John 'Garth' Roberts whom we purchased from lowly Northampton. But the 1969-70 season also saw the departures of Terry Neill, at one time our youngest ever captain, sold to Hull after 275 games for Arsenal. Winger and ex-Tott Jimmy Robertson was sold on to Ipswich after just a couple of seasons at Highbury having been theoretically replaced by Peter Marinello. The enthusiastic but ineffective Bobby Gould was sold to Wolves and David Court, possibly one of our most over-rated players ever to make 200+ appearances, was sold to Luton.

The only additions to our regular squad, if you were to consider them to be additions, had been the four home-grown youngsters who made their league debuts in the 1969-70 season. Namely Eddie Kelly, Pat Rice, Charlie George and Ray Kennedy. These four were the youngest of the ten home-grown players in the side. Yes that's right, ten of the entire sixteen players used in 1970-71 came through our junior ranks. That equates to a massive 62% of the squad used. This then gave us a squad that included one ex-amateur player, namely Bob Wilson, and just five other players we'd actually purchased including the aforementioned John Roberts. The other imports being George Graham from Chelsea, Bob McNab from Huddersfield, Peter Marinello from Hibernian & Frank McLintock who'd arrived from Leicester in the 1964-5 season for a then massive £80,000.

Bertie Mee (as manager) and Don Howe (coach) thus pruned our squad but replaced the older established players not with sensational expensive buys but with home-grown youths. What a bizarre thing to do eh? Going with an essentially unchanged squad must have taken quite some nerve and trusting the youngsters to do the business even more so.

Given that only one substitute per game was permitted back then it's quite difficult to see retrospectively how only 16 players covered all the games for the entire 64 matches crammed into that particular season. More so given that they often played three games in a week with an unchanged team. So perhaps the real moral of this story is that modern day footballers are all a bunch of overpaid wimps requiring back-up such as seven substitutes. There is no possibility of our current batch of pampered prima donnas playing a full 90 minutes complete with injuries. And certainly no chance of any of them playing over 60 matches in a season as Wilson, Rice, McNab, Armstrong and McLintock did back then. This despite earning something in excess of a billion pounds a day. Whereas our first double winning team were real men who even played in the League Cup, a then relatively serious competition, as well as Europe, the FA Cup and the league. All on not-a-lot a week, a dubious diet plus antiquated fashioned fitness and training routines.

Or just maybe the real moral of this story is that, as our fabulous squad showed in 1970-71 and others since, you'll never win the league without a seriously decent keeper and a quality defence who worked collectively as a well organised unit.