The Joy of Six: Arsenal v Chelsea
From an anti-football encounter in 1966 to high-scoring romps in the 1990s, here are six classic Arsenal v Chelsea games
1) Arsenal 1-1 Chelsea (December 1919)
Arsenal and Chelsea may not do each other many favours nowadays but that wasn’t always the case. After the first world war, football restarted in the summer of 1919, and, thanks to the Arsenal chairman and Tory grandee Sir Henry Norris, it was set to be a whole new ball game. With the top division expanding from 20 to 22 clubs after the big hiatus, it had been expected – as had happened in the league’s two previous expansions – that the two clubs in the previous season’s relegation places (1914-15 stragglers Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur) would be offered a reprieve, while the top two in the Second (Derby County and Preston North End) would go up as normal. Ah but.
Norris argued that Spurs should go down as expected but that Chelsea should stay up. His argument? Manchester United would have been in their relegation shoes instead, had they not beaten Liverpool in a 1915 match later proven to be fixed. Chelsea were reprieved and looked forward to a season in the top flight alongside newly promoted Derby and Preston. The league’s members would vote for the other team to join Chelsea in the top tier. And so it was that infamously – outrageously – Arsenal, fifth-placed in the Second Division in 1914-15, prevailed over Spurs, and Second Division high-flyers Wolves and Burnley, all of whom had ended the previous season above the Gunners in the league ladder.
Clever Henry! Norris had swung the vote by not pushing the morals of the 1915 fixing scandal so far as to demand United or Liverpool be punished for their players’ misdemeanours, winning the trust of many big clubs. Other chairmen were impressed with the MP’s contacts outside of the game, and his close relationship with the League (and Liverpool) chairman “Honest” John McKenna. Oh, and there were accusations of bribes having been flung around willy-nilly, but nothing was ever proved. When Spurs finally made it to the top flight, the fixture would soon kick off: the 1922 version saw two men dismissed – unusually for the time – while fans fought pitched battles in the streets outside Highbury. By comparison, the first game after the Norris affair between Arsenal and Chelsea, consolidating in the top division in December 1919, was a curiously pleasant affair. The spoils were shared in a suspiciously symmetrical match, Chelsea on top in the first half, their hosts in the second. Go figure.
2) Arsenal 2-4 Chelsea (March 1964)
Chelsea won their first and only pre-Mourinho championship in 1954-55 under the auspices of Ted Drake, but a series of mid-table finishes, and a slow start in 1961-62, saw the former Arsenal legend sacked and replaced by Tommy Docherty. The Doc’s first game in charge was a 4-0 tonking at Blackpool, and at the end of the season Chelsea were relegated. But they bounced straight back with a side built around Peter Bonetti, Ron Harris, Terry Venables, and their young captain Bobby Tambling.
Their first season back in the top flight was, for such a young team, a triumph. The standout result was a 4-2 win at Highbury, Tambling scoring all four goals on a mudbath, capitalising on three mistakes by Ian Ure, the other a delicious lob. Before the game, Arsenal – built around the attacking talents of George Eastham, Joe Baker and George Armstrong, had held faint hopes of sustaining a title challenge, but they’d been found out. The result seemed to set both teams down very different roads. Chelsea finished in fifth, three places ahead of out-of-puff Arsenal. Docherty’s side were instantly anointed as one of the teams of the decade. Tambling scored in their victorious League Cup final against Leicester in 1965, and the 1967 FA Cup final defeat to Spurs. And the club would round off the decade with their first FA Cup win in 1969-70. Arsenal meanwhile …
3) Chelsea 0-0 Arsenal (February 1966)
Since their elevation to the top flight in 1919, Arsenal surely haven’t endured a more humiliating season than the one they suffered in 1965-66. Losing 17 games along the way, they ended the season in 14th place, a mere four points ahead of relegated Northampton Town. Northampton Town. Further shamings included a 3-0 home thumping by Leeds United in front of 4,544 paying spectators, the lowest crowd since the war, and the fact that they spent the campaign running around in all-red shirts, having ditched their classic white sleeves in favour of modernity.
But perhaps the lowest point – if not statistically, then artistically – came after a goalless draw against Chelsea. For a club of Arsenal’s grandeur, steeped in classical values, taking an elegant kicking from one of the greatest sports journalists of all time ranks as low as it gets. “Chelsea are of 1966,” the Observer’s John Arlott began. Arsenal were “still struggling to move out of the 1950s … they callously garrotted the game for a point. Chelsea played through their hand of the spare man, the overlapping full-back, the through-running half-back, the withdrawn centre-forward, and the forward chip … time after time Chelsea slid the ball from defence to construction, only to end in a thicket of anti-football.” Ouch. And all juxtaposed with the dash of local rivals; that it had come to this for the famous Arsenal. But like a recovering alcoholic, at least they had bottomed out: the manager Billy Wright was sacked at the end of the campaign to be replaced by Bertie Mee, the white sleeves soon quietly reinstated.
4) Arsenal 5-2 Chelsea (April 1979)
During the 1970s, both teams flagged after spectacular starts to the decade. Arsenal won the league and Cup Double in 1971, only to drift. Chelsea followed up their 1970 FA Cup win with the Cup Winners’ Cup a year later – at which point they decided to expand Stamford Bridge with a massive East Stand. Up went the stand, and down went Chelsea, the new edifice swallowing up all of the club’s cash, the signing of new players suddenly a pipe dream. Eddie McCreadie, one of the stars of the 1960s, led Chelsea back up, with a team built around Butch “Let’s Not Forget Ray Was Known At This Time As Butch” Wilkins. But they were soon struggling again: boardroom rows meant McCreadie was replaced by another star of the previous decade, Ken Shellito, who in turn was soon supplanted by Danny Blanchflower.
The captain of Tottenham’s 1961 Double winners soon found out that “doing things in style” and the pursuit of “glory” is much easier at a club who have John White rather than Trevor Aylott on the books. In 1978-79, Chelsea won only five league games all season, the killer blow being landed with a spectacular flourish by Arsenal. David O’Leary, Frank Stapleton (2), Alan Sunderland and David Price sent Chelsea down – “in all but arithmetic fantasy,” reported the Guardian – with the bedraggled west Londoners’ only brief joy coming from terrace favourite Tommy Langley’s thriker. To compound Chelsea’s misery, Arsenal finished the season by lifting the FA Cup.
5) Arsenal 4-1 Chelsea (September 1990)
On the same weekend as this early-season result, reigning champions Liverpool walloped Manchester United 4-0 at Anfield, a Peter Beardsley hat-trick securing their fifth win in the first five league games. Arsenal’s equally impressive win over Chelsea went almost unnoticed by comparison, though it would have more resonance during the rest of the campaign.
It was a tight match, goalless until the 52nd minute, at which point Arsenal’s new signing turned the game on its head. Anders Limpar scored the first, and had a hand in another two of the three more goals Arsenal would score in a frantic 21-minute period. A Chelsea side boasting Tony Dorigo, Andy Townsend and Kerry Dixon had no answer. And neither, in the long run, did Liverpool, whose hat-trick hero Beardsley spent the rest of the season in and out of the team. Limpar, though, had announced himself on the big stage – and there would be no more influential player all season as Arsenal romped to the title.
6) Arsenal 0-5 Chelsea (November 1998)
In recent years, both clubs have had their fair share of spectacular away-days. Arsenal’s two 2-3 wins at Stamford Bridge towards the end of the 1990s take some beating: Nigel Winterburn’s blistering last-minute bolt from the blue in September 1997; Kanu’s outrageous shimmy and shake on the byline to complete a 15-minute comeback hat-trick in October 1999.
Chelsea fans meanwhile have recently enjoyed two emphatic results at the Emirates, taking four and three pieces of candy from Arsène’s babies respectively in their last two visits. And they may not like Wayne Bridge much now, but that palpably wasn’t the case when the defender raked in a late winner at Highbury in the 2003-04 Champions League quarter finals.
But sometimes when there’s a cigarette paper between all the results, the biggest just has to be the best. Chelsea’s 0-5 thumping of an Arsenal select XI in November 1998 wasn’t Arsenal’s heaviest home defeat – that was a 6-0 thrashing by Derby County in the first round of the 1899-1900 FA Cup – but nothing similar has been meted out in modern times. OK, so Arsenal had only put out the reserves plus a recovering Dennis Bergkamp, but let the result do the talking, and let Chelsea take the crown here; Arsenal can console themselves with what happened in the 2002 FA Cup final, after all.