Robert Exley
On May 8th, 1971 Arsenal Football Club had achieved what had been their greatest achievement to date. Throughout the 1960s, the side had been living in the shadow of the great sides of the 1930s, '40s and early '50s. Now they had achieved something even those sides hadn’t. That great side itself, however, were very nearly ‘nearly men’ themselves. The four preceding seasons had seen two League Cup Finals lost. In the first, they were effectively kicked off the park by Leeds; in the second, they had suffered a humiliating loss to third-tier Swindon. After a 1-3 first-leg Fairs Cup Final defeat in Brussels to Anderlecht, it looked like a hat-trick of failures could have been visited upon this Arsenal side. However, a heroic Highbury comeback finally turned the tide in their direction.
After their Wembley heroics of May 1971, how then did the side of 1971/72 look to top their achievement of just a few months earlier? In July, they had lost the tactical engine behind the Double side, First-Team Coach Don Howe, who was handed the vacant managerial position at West Brom. With him, he took virtually the entire Highbury back staff – trainer George Wright and Youth-Team coach Brian Woodhouse. The loss of Howe possibly accounted for the side’s inconsistent start. Despite opening with a comprehensive 3-0 victory over Chelsea, Arsenal lost eight of their first sixteen games, the lowest point being an 1-5 defeat away at Wolves in late November, as a consequence of which Arsenal had fallen to as low as 11th place and ten points off of the top of the table. Arsenal however responded with a 14-game unbeaten run, as well as the signing of Alan Ball from Everton around Christmas time. Ball made his home debut against his old club on New Years’ Day 1972
An impressive run of results, which included a 2-0 home victory over title challengers Derby County, saw Arsenal four points off the top of the table by the start of March, when they were to face league-leaders Manchester City at Maine Road. However, the unbeaten run had ended in a 2-0 defeat and a further two defeats away at Newcastle and Leeds United. On the other hand, the side had built up an impressive FA Cup run, again meeting Stoke City in the Semi-Final. After losing Bob Wilson for the rest of the season in the first match at Villa Park through a cartilage injury, John Radford deputised competently for Arsenal to hold out for a 1-1 draw. Ironically, it was Radford who was to settle the reply, scoring the second as Arsenal ran out 2-1 winners at Goodison Park.
Arsenal’s league form was also to recover in April, with the team winning five matches out of a seven-match unbeaten run, culminating in a 3-0 win over Man Utd. However, Arsenal were now lying in fifth place and, despite the games in hand over the sides above them that made winning the league a mathematical possibility, they no longer had their destiny in their own hands and were reliant on the collapse of those sides above them. In the end, Arsenal were to be involved in the quest for a League and FA Cup double, but it was to be that of their opponents in the Centenary FA Cup Final, Leeds United, rather than their own.
The 1972 final was a below-par performance for both sides, partly due to fixture backlog and both teams playing the Monday before the final, Leeds edging it with a goal by Alan Clarke ten minutes into the second half. The best chance of the game for Arsenal fell to Charlie George, who hit the bar from about twelve yards out.
Arsenal had two fixtures remaining after the FA Cup Final. The first and most significant was 48 hours on from Wembley, holding Liverpool to a 0-0 draw. On the same night, Leeds Utd ended up losing 2-1 to Wolves, meaning that the title went to a Derby County side who had completed their fixtures a week earlier. Arsenal had finished the season trophyless, though - through Leeds’ failure to secure the double - the prestige of their achievements a season earlier had remained intact. Had Leeds United matched Arsenal’s feat twelve months later, the currency of their achievements may well have been historically devalued.
Another Double was to follow for Arsenal twenty seven years on, beating historical Cup Final bogey team Newcastle United in the process. However by the end of the 20th century, winning the League and the FA Cup in the same season was not such a rare occurrence as it had been previously. In the final ten years of the century, it was a feat that was achieved more times than it had been for the previous ninety. The achievement of the ‘Double-Double’ however – that of winning the League and FA Cup in back-to-back seasons - still remains elusive to this very day, though Arsenal had a very good stab at it in 1998/99. They kicked off the season by beating Man Utd 3-0 in the Charity Shield. They were also unbeaten for their first six games in the League, although they drew four of their first five matches, a run that included a comprehensive 3-0 win over United around six weeks on from the previous victory.. The first defeat of the season came against Sheffield Wednesday, the same match where Paulo Di Canio lost his head and pushed referee Paul Alcock to the ground.
The turning point of the season for Arsenal, however, was to come in December against John Gregory’s Aston Villa, who were at this point leading the Premiership. Arsenal went into this game fourth in the table after four games without a win. A double strike for Bergkamp gave Arsenal a two-goal lead at half-time. In the second half, John Gregory switched to a 4-3-3 formation, and Villa pulled back to win 3-2 with goals from Julian Joachim and two from Dion Dublin. The side’s response to that defeat, however. was a nineteen-match unbeaten run, largely attributable to an aging but miserly defence who had conceded just 17 league goals all season, which was at that point the second-lowest-ever goals-against tally of all time. Arsenal were also boosted in attack by the signing of Nwankwo Kanu from Inter Milan in February. The Nigerian international caused a sensation on his debut against Sheffield United in the 5th Round of the FA Cup, by failing to allow the ball to return to the Blades after they had put it out of play after an injury to one of their players, resulting in him laying on Arsenal’s ‘winning’ goal for Marc Overmars in a match that was later voided and replayed at Arsenal’s insistence.
By the start of May, Arsenal had a three-point lead over Man Utd after five straight wins, scoring fifteen goals in the process, including a 3-1 win over Spurs at White Hart Lane, as well as taking Man Utd to a replay in the FA Cup Semi-Final. Two matches, however, were eventually to be the undoing of Arsenal in 1998/99, the first being the Villa Park Semi-Final replay. United took the lead with a 25 yard shot from David Beckham, but were pegged back by a Bergkamp equaliser on 69 minutes. Arsenal had an Anelka goal disallowed for offside followed by Roy Keane’s sending off for a foul on Marc Overmars. On 90 minutes, Phil Neville had brought down Ray Parlour inside the box, only for Bergkamp’s penalty to be saved by Schmeichel. It took a moment of magic to separate the two sides, which came from Ryan Giggs on 110 minutes, who finished off a mazy run which started mid-way in his own half before blasting the ball past Seaman, thus ending Arsenal’s staunch defence of the FA Cup. Man Utd also in turn went on to win the FA Cup itself against the 1998 runners-up, Newcastle United, 2-0.
The league challenge also went down to the wire, with United, Arsenal and Chelsea all within three points of each other by the time of the penultimate game away at Leeds. At the end of the first half, Martin Keown had brought down Alan Smith inside the box, though luckily Harry Kewell had failed to convert the penalty. Arsenal, however, fell to a Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink goal four minutes from time, meaning that Arsenal went into the final game of the season reliant on George Graham’s Tottenham side defeating Man Utd at Old Trafford. The title was finally lost with a fairly predictable 2-1 victory for United. Man Utd were also to add the Champions League to their collection on May 26th 1999, with two injury-time goals from Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer in a 2-1 win over Bayern Munich.
Man United, unlike Arsenal in 2004, have never been invincible. In 1998/99, however, they certainly were indestructible. In this season, Arsenal finished just one point behind the treble-winners in the League, and in almost any other season might well have won the title. Despite all their greatness and talent, in 1998/99 this Arsenal side won exactly the same amount of trophies as every Arsenal side has each season since 2005, which is probably one of the greatest injustices in football history. Were they the greatest side ever to finish a season completely trophyless? Certainly there is a case to answer on that one.
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