Robert Exley
Arsenal are the third-most successful club in English Football history with many great triumphs throughout their illustrious 126-year history. What, though, of the moments where the club could have added to their list of honours, but fell just short? Well, this is a series of articles dedicated to those very moments.
The very first instance came back in 1925/26, where forty years after their foundation, thirty five years after turning professional, thirty three years after joining the Football League and thirteen years on from moving to Highbury, Arsenal finally found themselves somewhere near the summit of English Football. Prior to this point, Arsenal’s previous glory had been as the amateur outfit ‘Royal Arsenal’ who had proclaimed themselves as the ‘Champions of the South’ in the early 1890s, winning the London Charity Cup and Kent Senior Cup in 1890 and the London Senior Cup in 1891. Since joining the Football League in 1893, making a predominantly Northern and Midlands League a national league in the process, their highest league-finish prior to 1925 had been as Woolwich Arsenal, finishing sixth in the old First Division in 1908/09. Their best achievements in the FA Cup had been reaching back-to-back Semi Finals in 1906 and 1907.
Before Herbert Chapman’s arrival at Arsenal in the close season of 1925, the preceding two seasons under Leslie Knighton were spent hovering just above the relegation zone – finishing 19th in 1923/24 and 20th in 1924/25. On his arrival, Herbert made two significant additions. He immediately signed Woolwich Arsenal old boy Charlie Buchan from Sunderland for £1,000 plus £100 for every goal scored that season. Also, former Arsenal player Tom Whittaker, who returned from a tour of Australia with a career-ending broken leg, had been offered the position of trainer by Chapman. The season, however, started badly, losing 0-1 to Tottenham at home. After an inconsistent opening eight games, the turning point for the season had been a 0-7 away defeat to Newcastle in early October. This poor early season form was put down to Arsenal’s difficulty in adapting to a change in the offside law that season, where an opposing player now needed only two players between him and the goal, as opposed to three as it had been prior.
After the St. James’s Park debacle, Buchan had confronted Chapman at the Royal Station Hotel in Newcastle, threatening to refuse to board the train back to London, immediate retirement from the game and a return to the sports shop he had been running in Sunderland – where Chapman had called into personally to secure his signature just a few months before. He accused this Arsenal side of being a team without a plan and thus without a chance of winning anything. Buchan had been arguing the case with Chapman from the beginning of the season that the change in the offside rule meant the centre-half had to take on a more defensive role than prior, pointing out the noticeable effect of the Newcastle centre-half, Charlie Spencer, who had stayed very deep, offering little in attack, and had repeatedly broken up Arsenal attacks almost before they had even begun, thus allowing Newcastle to dominate possession and territory and subsequently rout Arsenal by seven goals.
Charlie’s idea was that the centre-halves would withdraw entirely from the attack, as well as utilising an inside-forward to drop back behind the other four attackers, thus advocating the soon-to-be-famous ‘W-M’ formation that would serve Arsenal so well into the following decade. His idea had been dismissed previously by Chapman, as well as by other players, though, in light of the St James’s Park trouncing, Chapman decided to give his idea serious consideration. The new formation was utilised against West Ham 48 hours later and contributed to a 4-0 win. As Charlie Buchan said of Chapman, ‘one of the secrets of his greatness is that he would always listen to other people and take advantage of their ideas if he thought they would improve the team in any way’.
In describing the effect of the new formation in his autobiography, Buchan states that ‘the novelty of Arsenal’s new methods took the other league clubs by surprise. We began to win games with such regularity that, by the turn of the year, we were top of the league and - it seemed - heading for our first Championship success’. However, Arsenal’s first title challenge was derailed by what Buchan describes as ‘serious injuries that I consider lost us our chance of honours’. Arsenal’s first title-challenge was to finally end at Buchan’s old ground, Roker Park, in a 1-2 defeat against Sunderland. Arsenal’s keeper Dan Lewis, who a season later would be famed for his error which handed the cup to Cardiff in Arsenal’s first ever final, was sent off for an altercation with a Sunderland forward. Long before the days of the substitute goalkeeper (or even any substitutes for that matter), outfield player Joe Hulme had become a makeshift and, as it turned out, less than adequate replacement between the sticks.
Under the two-points-for-a-win system, Arsenal finished five points off Herbert Chapman’s former side, Huddersfield Town, who completed the first-ever hat-trick of league titles, although to date they have never won a major honour since. It had at this point been the highest finishing position and points total for a side south of Birmingham, though, that season, Arsenal never really posed a serious challenge to Herbert’s old side. It also, in the short term at least, failed to materialise as the start of something glorious, rather akin to Alex Ferguson achieving a runner’s-up position in his first full season at Old Trafford in 1987/88, followed by a succession of mid-table finishes before establishing a run of trophy wins the following decade.
Arsenal did reach the FA Cup Final in 1926/27, as well as reaching the Semi-Final the following year, but in the League what followed was a lot more low-key – 11th in 1926/27, 10th in 1927/28, 9th in 1928/29 and 14th in 1929/30. In 1930 they finally won a trophy, this time at the expense of Herbert Chapman’s old side, followed by their first League title the following year, which finally cemented Chapman’s legacy, as well as a further title in 1933 before his untimely death on 6th January 1934. Despite Chapman’s early demise. however, Arsenal were to become the most successful side the professional game in England had seen by this point and to remain at the top of the English game for nearly another two decades.
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