Tottenham v Arsenal: how has it gone in the past

By Bulldog Drummond.

Tucked away in an article in the Guardian today about how wonderful life is becoming for Tottenham, is the fact that upon completion of their stadium Tottenham “will have banks debts of £400m to repay over a five-year period and they have pledged to find the rest of the required £850m themselves.”

The numbers, which are utterly extraordinary, have no explanation, and maybe there is one around that I have not seen, but what makes it all the more strange is that the headline reads “New era edges closer as Spurs seek to draw a line under austerity years”.

If they do it I will love to find out how.  Over £100m repayment a year including interest, for five years.  £850m not borrowed from the banks.   Quite a target, and yes, if they can do that, it will be a case of hats off to them, providing we can see how.   Obviously the rise in income from the TV companies is helping, but still, it is quite an extraordinary aim and risk.

But on to the football.   We have won 81 games against Tottenham and lost 62.  51 have been draws.  (These figures include matches from the era when Tottenham were playing in the Southern League, and so Arsenal and Tottenham only met in the United League, the Southern Combination and the London League, all of which involved the first teams.)

We have had a few long runs against them, but not as many as you might expect, largely because of Tottenham’s propensity for spending time in the second division.

Incidentally if anyone still thinks that something odd was done in 1919 with our election to the first division and Tottenham’s relegation to the second, there is now the biggest ever analysis of what actually happened, including references to all the contemporary reports of the matters, available for all to read.

There is a lot of it, because there are a lot of rumours and inventions surrounding the matter but I’ll give the links to the articles at the end.

We have had a run of six successive wins against Tottenham in 1987 to 1989 and then the period from 19 March 2000 to 9 January 2008 of not losing to them at all