Considered the father of football journalism in England, Brian Glanville was a regular fixture in press boxes up and down the country since the late 1940s, until he passed away aged 93 last week.
He wrote with distinction for the Sunday Times and World Soccer magazine, and also contributed to the Arsenal Magazine back in the 2005/06 season - the club he supported. In tribute, we are reproducing articles from that time highlighting his exceptional knowledge and writing style - this piece recalls some of the strangest moments in Highbury's history.
It was an undoubted fiasco. The penalty that never was you might reasonably call it. The Gunners were one goal to the good against Manchester City on October 22, 2005, from a penalty belted home uncontroversially by Robert Pires. On 72 minutes, Arsenal were awarded another spot-kick. Again Pires shaped to take it. But there was a hidden agenda.
The one he and his compatriot Thierry Henry had worked out in training. Whereby the plan was for Pires to roll the ball forward, Henry following up to belt it into the net. After all it had been done before. Johan Cruyff in his halcyon days used to do it with Ajax. But it didn't work.
For reasons obscure, Pires barely made contact with the ball, which rolled forward just a few inches. When Pires shaped to make further contact - which would in any case have been illegal - Mike Riley, the referee, believed he had indeed touched it twice and awarded a consequent free-kick to City. So the Gunners won the game 1-0.
Have stranger things happened at Highbury? Well all sorts of strange things unquestionably have. Way back in December 1955, eight days before Christmas, Arsenal were playing Blackpool in the League and their red-headed left-back, Denis Evans, had performed well against the ageless and incomparable Stanley Matthews.
It was nearing full time when Evans, with the ball in his possession, thought he heard the referee's whistle. Alas for him and the Gunners, it wasn't. It came from the crowd. But thinking it signified the end of the game, with Arsenal 4-1 ahead, he turned round and, in his exuberance, banged the ball past Con Sullivan into his own net. At which the referee pointed to the centre spot for a Blackpool goal.
On September 16, 1972, Jimmy Hill, once a familiar, bearded figure when Fulham came to play at Highbury, as he was their inside right, made a somewhat less predictable appearance there. The Gunners were playing Liverpool, the referee, injured, had been obliged to give way to his linesman; when what should happen but the linesman should succumb as well, leaving the refereeing trio a linesman short.
Could the game go on? It could. After a hiatus, out of the crowd, attired in a fetching sky blue tracksuit, flag in hand, loped Jimmy Hill. A qualified referee, among his many other attainments, he was quite entitled to perform. And perform he did, to choruses from the amused North Bank of, "He's here, he's there, he's every ****ing where, Jimmy Hill, Jimmy Hill!"
I had the good fortune to ghostwrite two autobiographies for Arsenal players of very different periods; but one thing which they had in common was that, when the young footballers first arrived at Highbury, they'd find it hard to penetrate the Marble Halls.
More precisely, when Cliff Bastin came up from Exeter in 1929, it would be another three years before that marble would be in evidence, though it was when Jack Kelsey came in 1949. Herbert Chapman, then Arsenal's commanding manager, had had huge difficulty persuading the 17-year-old Bastin to come to Arsenal at all. In the event he got there a week after pre-season training had begun, went into digs on the Sunday, turned up at the main entrance on Monday.
Beginning to walk through, he was intercepted by the commissionaire, who asked him what he wanted. Somewhat surprised, Cliff answered: "To join the rest of the Arsenal players." The commissionaire patted him consolingly on the back and began to manoeuvre him back towards the entrance. "Well, sonny," he said, "you're a bit young at the moment, but never mind! One day, you may be good enough to play for Arsenal!" With much difficulty, Bastin persuaded him to enquire within, eventually emerging with Joe Shaw, then assistant manager, once a resilient right-back. Shaw identified him and brought him inside. The commissionaire, Bastin recalled, "looked painfully surprised."
Jack Kelsey's experience was somewhat more traumatic. He had been signed in 1949 after taking part in a trial at Highbury, retired to Wales, then duly went back to London, reporting at Highbury at 10 o'clock in the morning. Len Taylor, the amiable commissionaire, didn't attempt to turn him away; he promptly went off to tell Jack Crayston, former right-half, by then the assistant manager, of Jack's arrival. Kelsey sat down in the foyer to wait... and wait…. and wait: staring hopelessly at the famous bust of Chapman in the marble hall.
Scat consolation. Three whole hours went by. "Maybe they've forgotten you," suggested Taylor. At three o'clock, Len Taylor asked Jack, "Have you had anything to eat?" He hadn't. Taylor suggested that Jack go down to the end of Avenell Road to eat at a cafe, but Jack, afraid that Crayston would at last send for him when he was away, at first demurred. The kindly Taylor assured him that he would keep guard, so off Jack went to the cafe for what he subsequently described as "one of the most miserable, bolted meals of my life." He was eventually called into Crayston's office at five o'clock in the afternoon.
That was a bad enough beginning, but still worse was to come when he made his league debut. It was in February 1951 and the opponents at Highbury were Charlton Athletic. Alas for Kelsey and the Gunners, the centre-forward was none other than Swedish international striker, Hans Jeppson, playing briefly as an amateur en route to making his fortune in Italy, the man who had terrorised the Italy defence in Sao Paolo in the 1950 World Cup. Jeppson was irresistible and scored three of Charlton's goals in a devastating 5-2 win. After which Tom Whittaker presented Jeppson with the match ball.
Poor Kelsey's torment was not yet over. The following week up the road at the old Finsbury Park Empire, Old Mother Riley, alias Arthur Lucan, was topping the bill. At a certain point, a figure lurched onto the stage with a dead white face and tattered clothes. "Who are you?" asked Old Mother Riley. "I'm so and so," came the reply, to which Old Mother Riley responded: "I thought you were Arsenal's new goalkeeper." Arsenal protested and the item was dropped.
Whittaker, however, picked Kelsey for the next game, against Manchester United, coming up with the old chestnut he had used five years before when George Swindin, returning to the Arsenal goal, had been beaten six times at West Ham in an FA Cup first leg (they had them that season) tie. "Kelsey," said Tom, "is like a pilot who has crashed on his first flight. He must be sent up again so that he regains his confidence." Kelsey did so in spades, becoming, as we know, one of the finest keepers in the 1958 World Cup finals in Sweden, playing superbly for Wales.
Highbury was always quite a place for practical jokes. Between the wars, when the Gunners were training for a cup tie in Brighton, the players followed by a car load of reporters, whimsically went several times round a roundabout, then blocked the car, pulled out the occupants and drove away in their vehicle with Frank Moss, another famous goalkeeper, at the wheel.
In Kelsey's day, the joker-in-chief was Arthur Shaw, a tall, accomplished wing-half who often played for the first team without ever quite nailing down a regular place. He was a bosom pal of the incomparable little inside right Jimmy Logie; they were often at the greyhounds together. Though Shaw himself was the victim that day against Charlton when, preparing to head away a cross, a Charlton player standing beside him shouted, "leave it," which Shaw duly did, believing the call came from a colleague. The opponent scored. The goal stood. It was that kind of day.
One of Shaw's jokes was played on Ernie Collett, many years an Arsenal left-half, especially in the Second World War, by then a trainer-coach, Shaw [above] exploited the fact that there was a small office with three phones lying between the treatment room and the dressing rooms. One day, Shaw picked up the phone and rang one of the others, meanwhile talking to Collett; who picked up the other phone.
Shaw brusquely demanded, "Is Billy Milne [the trainer] there?" Collett said he wasn't. "Bert Owen, then?" He wasn't there either, Collett replied. "Where are they all?" demanded Arthur. "What's wrong with the place? Are they on strike or something?"
Collett asked who this was. "This is Sir Bracewell Smith [the Chairman's] secretary," Shaw replied. "Who are you?"
"I'm Collett, Sir."
"I want to know who you are, not what you've got. What are you?"
"I'm the A team trainer, sir."
"Then you're just the man I'm looking for. Get your bags packed, come over here and give me a rub down."
"But there are two trainers missing, Sir," protested Collett.
"I'm Sir Bracewell's secretary," insisted Arthur. "Do as I say. Pack your bags and come over." Poor Collett, torn between what seemed to be his conflicting duties, was so flustered that Shaw, still standing by him, put him out of his misery.
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