As we head into pre-season with transfers beginning to happen and tensions (along with hopes) rising, I thought is was time to bring you the second part of the Opening Day Trilogy – The Bad! For each of these three memories that we’d all rather forget I have dug back into the archives and found three terrible starts to terrible League seasons. These games were the portents of the things to come. Three awful seasons that should go to remind us that we’ve never had it so good!
Saturday August 21st 1976 – Arsenal 0 Bristol City 1
The mid seventies were a truly dire time for The Arsenal, we had gone from the glory of the double to literally fighting relegation, if you don’t remember or don’t believe me, look it up – we were shocking. At first appearences, the finishing position of 8th in 76/77 was a distinct improvement of the two previous finishes of 16th and 17th, but in reality we weren’t much better and the six or seven points difference was only established in the final weeks. To quote the great Edmund Blackadder “it started badly, got worse in the middle and the less said about the end, the better”. So sit back and watch three painful minutes where we are playing at home to a newly promoted team playing in the top flight for the first time in 65 years.
Saturday August 14th 1993 – Arsenal 0 Coventry City 3
The opening day of the inaugural Premier League season provided a very ugly defeat for Arsenal (more of that in part three) and fans could be forgiven for think that things couldn’t get any worse, but boy were they wrong. Having won the Cup double at Wembley the previous season, most fans could had the belief hat they were going to get the new season off to flying start. But we were not counting on a first (and I think only) top flight hat-trick for ‘The Mighty Quinn’. Mick Quinn was towards the tail end of mostly journey man career that had started at Fourth Division Wigan Athletic in 1979, but on that hoy sunny August afternoon, he was a man on fire. A first half penalty followed by two wonderful second have strikes gave ‘Cov’ a surprise opening day three points. That day was the height of Quinn’s career and although an England call up was mooted, he was never given an International cap and having had short spells on loan at Plymouth and Watford, he retire in 1996 after playing just nine games for Greek side POAK.
Friday August 13th 2021 – Brentford 2 Arsenal 0
Another opening day debacle against another team returning for there first top flight match in about 65 years, this was a Friday 13th that will haunt many a Gooner for many a year to come. It was actually going to get worse as we proceeded to lose our next two games as well and after the first three games of what was touted as Arteta’s breakout season, we stood at the foot of the table with zero points, zero goals scored and nine goals conceded, we were quite literally the laughing stock of the League. As to the game itself, it later emerged that the absence of a number of first teamers was down to COVID, not Mikel’s tactical genius, and although starting with Martinelli and Balogan up front seemed ok, it was not the case. We were abject from the first whistle to the last and any excuses that we tried to give were simply drowned out by the unfettered abuse/banter coming from all four corners of the Capital and beyond.
Image courtesy of Reuters