The greatest football upsets of all time…

It is commonplace to have people enjoying the defeat of the odds-on favourite in any sort of sporting event, with the underdog rising up to take the prize, whatever the prize is.    Although it will have been before your time, Arsenal were involved in one such affair and England have been as well.   

If you know your Arsenal history, you will know the tale of 14 January 1933 in which Arsenal lost to Walsall of the third division (north).  Arsenal had made it to the cup final the previous year, although they lost that one, 2-1 to Newcastle United.  But what added to the occasion was that a couple of years before that, Arsenal had won the Cup, beating Huddersfield Town (then a powerhouse of English football) 2-0.

It was Chapman’s last FA Cup match as he died later that year, and that perhaps explains why little is made by those reporting the historic event of the fact that immediately after that notorious Walsall defeat, Chapman shipped out a number of reserve players who were picked for that game, and looked at through a historical lense that was rather unreasonable since clearly the problem was his disruption of the total team.   The plan was to show that Arsenal’s reserves were better than a third division team, but they were not.   Thus it can be argued that it was Chapman’s fault (at least to some extent) that Arsenal lost, not the fault of the players he sacked.

In fact, to appreciate that full picture, we need to realise that from 1930/1 to 1934/5 Arsenal won the League four times and came second once.   However, they didn’t win the FA Cup at all until 1935/6, a season in which the club came sixth in the league.   Winning the league and cup at once appeared to be too much even for Chapman’s Arsenal.

So in fact, Arsenal in 1932/3 Arsenal were league winners and certainly did have suitable players to take on Walsall, but what happened was that Chapman’s weakened team appeared to have no tactical readiness for the way the opposition would play, not sufficient experience of playing as a unit to overcome a side playing the game of its life.

But although that defeat is easy to explain as a mistake on the manager’s part – (a notion that has subsequently been written out of the story by historians who prefer the fairy-tale elements) it served as a starting point for the anti-Arsenal approach of the media that has been revealed by the media so often in subsequent years.  Indeed, that negativity has also been seen as the media picked up on the story that somehow Arsenal had bribed their way into the First Division upon its expansion in 1919.   Arsenal, of course, responded to that story when it first emerged by demanding evidence be published or the accusations withdrawn, and there was no evidence, so the media went quiet.

But England has had their own run of disasters, such as a 1-0 defeat to the United States in the World Cup in 1950.  However, a lot of background can be garnered by noting that prior to 1950 England itself refused to play in the World Cup on the grounds that their players were so far ahead of the rest of the world technically, it would be embarrassing.  And embarrassing it was, although not the way the FA imagined it might be.

In effect, the FA wanted to protect the sanctity of the Home Nations games at the end of each season involving England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and so England had not graced the WC with their presence before 1950. 

But worse, for England, they put out a full-strength team including Billy Wright, Tom Finney, Mortensen, and Alf Ramsey (then playing as a defender).  The USA were not playing regular matches at the time, and so put out an amateur XI, although their first-choice players didn’t all make it as their employers wouldn’t give them time off.   

England protested after the USA’s first goal was scored by Joe Gaetjens, who was a Haitian, not an American.  There were also serious complaints about the referee and his apparent bias in allowing the USA team to tackle as if the game were rugby not football – but these details are also now ignored, and we are simply left with the result.  However, both sides went out in the group stage, and the game passed into history – although it is still talked about as if there was nothing other than the rseult, along with North Korea 1-0 Italy, which happened in the World Cup finals held in England in 1966.