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Tottenham 2020-21: To Dare Is To Park

DeepEastTexas

By DeepEastTexas
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midtown
midtown

Because it's Spurs related. Look what arrived today. My daughter is a huge Alex fan.      

Captain Ron
Captain Ron
Captain Ron
Captain Ron

When this shit is all done, I'm going to London to watch some soccer. Who's with me?

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Captain Ron

Captain Ron 12870

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4uripxefnm361.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=e62b54b4e83dc233b8efa40ee72685736b72d6d9

Great shirt.

The story (you ALL should read it to know just why you should hate Arsenal, not that you don't already hate them)

Spoiler

Explained: How an Edwardian Abramovich saved Arsenal and took Tottenham’s place

GettyImages-3402090-e1567001968423-1024x683.jpg
Spurs goalkeeper Ted Ditchburn makes a dramatic save against
Arsenal at White Hart Lane in 1950 – Keystone/Getty Images

By Jack Pitt-Brooke Aug 28, 2019

It is 100 years and five months since the Tottenham Weekly Herald complained of the “irreparable mischief” that had been done to Spurs by Arsenal’s election to the First Division ahead of them.

And they were right: that arrangement never has been reversed, and Arsenal have been in the top flight ever since. The north London rivalry, which will be played out again at the Emirates Stadium this Sunday, owes its framing, its dynamic, its very existence to the events of the 1910s. First, the decision to relocate Arsenal from Woolwich to Highbury, then, the election of Arsenal into the top flight at Spurs’ expense after World War I.

It all came down to one man. Sir Henry Norris, self-made construction baron, politician, freemason, was an Edwardian Abramovich, a man who transformed the landscape of English football almost unlike anyone else. Jack Walker made Blackburn Rovers good for a short period but Norris set up Arsenal to be London’s dominant club throughout the 20th century. “Without Sir Henry Norris, Highbury Stadium would never have been constructed, and Arsenal Football Club would not be the world famous name they are today,” writes Jon Spurling in his authoritative book Highbury: The Story of Arsenal in N5.

Even with a century of hindsight, it is difficult to overstate the importance of Norris and the scale of his ambition. Not only did he effectively invent Arsenal and the north London derby but he was more responsible for the growth of professional football in the capital than anyone else.

The state of Arsenal before Norris arrived was totally unrecognisable from what it became. At the start of the 20th century, Woolwich Arsenal was a small club. They joined the Football League in 1893, the first southern club to do so, but they never made much of an impression and did not get promoted into the top flight until 1904. There was nothing they could do to change the reality of the Edwardian game, which is that its centre of gravity was in the Midlands and the north.

When the Football League was founded in 1888, its two southern-most members were Aston Villa and West Bromwich Albion. The headquarters of the league were in Preston. “That professional football was essentially a northern creation is without dispute,” writes Matthew Taylor in The Leaguers. London was the capital but in a football sense it was a provincial outpost. It felt as if elite professional football was something that happened somewhere else.

Stuck out in Plumstead, Woolwich Arsenal were on the fringe of the fringe. They averaged crowds of 10,000 at Manor Grounds, far less than Tottenham got at White Hart Lane, which was opened in 1899 and re-developed in 1909, up to a capacity of 50,000. Spurs won the FA Cup in 1901, the first southern winners in the Football League era. Even Chelsea, not founded until 1905, soon had bigger crowds. Woolwich Arsenal were going nowhere and in March 1910, after drawing only 4,000 fans for a game against Manchester United, they were put into voluntary liquidation.

Enter Sir Henry Norris.

The history of English football is dotted with men like Norris, men who had made plenty of money and who then used football to transform that money into something else: glory, prestige, a different type of fame.

Norris, like Walker or Roman Abramovich long after him, was a self-made magnate, a man who became rich through the force of his own will. He left school at 14, went into construction, and worked his way up. His firm Allen and Norris was responsible for building most of Fulham and Wandsworth in the late Victorian era and by 1903, he was a director of Fulham. Under his control, Fulham leaped out of the Southern League and into the Football League.

Two things about Norris stand out. One is how well-connected he was – he was the Conservative MP for Fulham, a colonel in the Army and a senior Freemason, eventually the Grand Deacon of the Grand Lodge of England. The other is his ambition, his willingness to redraw the English football map as he wanted it. And so when Arsenal went into liquidation in 1910, he spotted an opportunity and took over the club. He tried to amalgamate them with Fulham but was barred from doing so, and promptly he came up with something else.

Norris wanted to move the club. He knew that inner London was a better place to be than the Kent suburbs. And, with Woolwich Arsenal finishing bottom of the First Division in 1912-13, what did they have to lose? So he bought some land 14 miles away, near Gillespie Road tube station, from the Church of England. It certainly helped that Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was a close friend, and signed the deed.

Woolwich fans were furious. Their club was being ripped away from them and there was nothing they could do to stop it. Norris was portrayed by a cartoon in the Woolwich Gazette as kidnapping Kent’s only son. “Mr Norris has decided that financial gain is more important than protecting our local club,” said one letter to the Kentish Gazette. “He is making a mistake. You cannot ‘franchise’ a football club. Woolwich Arsenal must stay near Woolwich. People like him have no place in Association football.”

Except, of course they did, just as they always have done. English football has always opened its arms to rich men to do more or less what they want with football clubs. This was as true in the early 20th century as in the early 21st.

Tottenham had never been rivals with Woolwich Arsenal before this — why would they be? — but they immediately recognised this move as a threat to their north London dominance. Tottenham, along with Clapton Orient, pressed the Football League Management Committee to block the move. But the committee admitted they had “no right to interfere”. The Tottenham Herald published adverts pleading with fans “not to go and support Norris’ Woolwich interlopers. They have no right to be here.”

In this resentment, a rivalry was born. Norris had the money and connections to build the stadium at Highbury, to chase off dissenters, to make the club he had only just taken over the undisputed team of central London. All of the support, the investment, and the prestige that would bring flowed to Arsenal – not to anyone else.

And yet this literal land-grab was just the start. The second part, the moment that crystallised the relationship between Tottenham and Arsenal, the dynamic of hierarchy and class, came in 1919. English football had been suspended during the First World War and the Football League was deciding how to organise itself for the 1919-20 season, and who would fill the final two spots in the expanded 22-team First Division.

In the last full season of league football, 1914-15, Tottenham had finished at the bottom of the First Division. Arsenal, still struggling with the debt from the move, came fifth in the second tier. The new ground had not transformed them yet. So who would get the extra two places in the top flight?

You might think that Arsenal had no real claim but they unleashed a publicity and lobbying campaign ahead of the vote on March 10, 1919. Their metropolitan location was central to their argument. Norris argued that Highbury warranted top-flight football, as did Arsenal’s “long service” to the Football League. The reliably pro-Arsenal Athletic News wrote that “for the sake of the game, London, unlike any other city, ought to have the opportunity of seeing the best teams. Does anyone think that New York or Boston would ever be deprived of class baseball?”.

The Football League agreed. Arsenal won 18 votes, Tottenham won only eight, and Norris’s side were back in the top flight. Spurs were not. The ‘Spectator’ column in the Tottenham Weekly Herald wrote that “the League had committed an act of gross injustice without parallel in the history of the game and utterly unworthy of the name of sport”. There was bitterness towards Arsenal too: “I cannot wish them well, nor can any other writer who has the interests of the game at heart. Irreparable mischief has been done.”

Ever since, there has been speculation about how exactly Arsenal won the vote. Norris has been accused of everything, from enlisting the support of Liverpool chairman and League president John McKenna to bribery of Football League rivals, and often presumed guilty. This has become the conventional wisdom, and even Martin Tyler and Phil Soar’s Official Centenary History of Arsenal called the election “the single most outrageous enterprise…in the history of English football.”

In recent years, a new historiography has emerged and there are plenty of defences of Norris and the decision to be found online. Arsenal historian Andy Kelly has written at length about this issue on his website The Arsenal History, spelling out how no evidence of bribery has ever come to light, despite ample opportunity. But, in a sense, the legality and morality of this are besides the point. It was politics and power, and Norris was better at it than anyone else.

These two moments – the Highbury move and the election to the top flight – have to be taken together. Without the move, the election would never have happened. A provincial club in Woolwich would have had no real claim to top-flight football but the move, and the new status it gave Arsenal, set the stage for their voted promotion. With the revenue from being in the top flight, they could start to pay off their debts.

Like that, the north London rivalry was born. Tottenham would never forgive Arsenal for taking their fans and their top-flight spot too. When Spurs came to Highbury in January 1920, they played in front of a crowd of more than 60,000 people, a thumping vindication of Norris’ decision to move. When the teams met in September 1922 at White Hart Lane, there were clashes between players and fans, described by one newspaper as “the most disgusting scenes” the reporter had ever seen.

The rest, to use the cliche, is history. Arsenal, ahead of Tottenham, could take advantage of the trends of the future. The growth of the tube. Middle class interest in football. An expanding mass media. London’s economic dominance over the north. So it was Arsenal who appointed Herbert Chapman in 1925. Arsenal who signed the first ever £10,000 player, David Jack, in 1928. Arsenal who became London’s first Football League champion in 1931, and then the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth, dominating English football in the 1930s, the first real dynasty of the English game.

“Arsenal was the glamour team of the 1930s — the model of a successful football club,” writes Ross McKibbin in Classes and Cultures, his history of the inter-war years. “And its success and style of management did much to attract the metropolitan middle classes and, via them, the middle classes more generally to the sport.”

Norris was banned from football for financial irregularities in 1927, four years before Arsenal’s first league title. But it barely mattered. His legacy was assured, and is still with us now.

 

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Captain Ron

Captain Ron 12870

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So one of the articles on The Athletic I was reading was "The evolution of the modern North London Derby". It really focused on the Premier League time of this rivalry (which hasn't been good for Tottenham). The headline picture had the following picture as part of it, which I have seen a lot, but didn't recall the story behind.

https://playingfor90.com/wp-content/uploads/getty-images/2016/04/1067606890.jpeg

It was from the 2 Dec 2018 PL away game between Spurs and Arsenal. This was Winks yelling at Xhaka for drawing a late foul. Great picture.

Spurs would lose 4-2.

But that would also be the last time Spurs lost to Arsenal. They haven't lost to them in over 2 years. After that:

18-19 Season
League Cup Away (2 weeks later) - Win 0-2
PL Home game - 1-1 Draw

19-20 Season
PL Away - 2-2 Draw
PL Home  - 2-1 Win

We know about the 2-0 Win yesterday, so 3-2-0, not bad at all over that stretch.

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Captain Ron

Captain Ron 12870

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Oct 18 - Tottenham 3, West Ham 3

Since then:
Oct 26 - Burnley 0, Tottenham 1
Nov 1 - Tottenham 2, Brighton 1
Nov 8 - West Brom 0, Tottenham 1
Nov 21 - Tottenham 2, Man City 0
Nov 29 - Chelsea 0, Tottenham 0
Dec 6 - Tottenham 2, Arsenal 0

5 Clean sheets in 6 games and the 1 goal was this goal: https://streamable.com/iuro03 which most everyone agrees should have been waved off due to a penalty by March

BTW - that's 3 clean sheets against the "top six" at the end there. Not to knock the guy, but going backwards from when Poch was fired, you need to go back to Feb 2018 to hit 3 clean sheets against the "big six" (25 matches against the Big 6, from February 2018 to October 2020).

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Captain Ron

Captain Ron 12870

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Maybe Spurs are ok with Palace having the ball, but unlike last week, Spurs are playing a team that clearly has a gameplan and know how to move the ball offensively and break down players in the final third.

I think Spurs would do very well to get another goal or they are going to find this game tied soon.

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