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 his memories of watching us from the stands as a schoolboy in the 1940s.
Charlie Buchan in the mid-1920s was on £100 a goal, but Cliff Bastin, alias 'Boy' Bastin, was destined to score many more than 100 goals and he kept the record until lan Wright at long last overtook it nearly half-a-dozen decades later. To surely be overtaken by the still more prolific Thierry Henry. But both these last two players were centre forwards, a position Bastin never filled. Indeed perhaps his most remarkable scoring achievement was to get no fewer than 33 goals from outside left in the 1932/33 season, the first of an Arsenal hat-trick in the Championship.
The irony of it being that Cliff always considered himself, in essence, an inside-left. That was the position he filled when Herbert Chapman, with great difficulty, persuaded him as a 17-year-old to leave Exeter City for Highbury. Then he persuaded him to play on the left wing as partner to the supreme playmaker, Alex James. At 19, he had won every available honour in the game, establishing himself as one of Europe's outstanding players. Hugo Meisl, father of the Austrian Wunderteam, said that if only he could have Bastin, his team would win the 1934 World Cup.
It should be remembered that when Bastin played, effectively from 1929 to 1939, though he played for the Gunners - an Air Raid Warden - in the Second World War, many of the tournaments we now take for granted did not exist then. No European Cups, no Football League Cups. Obviously there would have been many more were it not for the six years limiting him and the English game at large to 'unofficial' regional football. A period in which he largely played at inside-left, though sometimes at wing-half. His pace may have diminished with the years; his shot didn't.
Two centre-forwards who arrived at Highbury before Bastin both got more than 100 goals. Jimmy Brain was one more shrewd capture by Leslie Knighton, the manager who preceded Chapman. A Bristolian once with Cardiff City, Brain had been scoring freely for the non-league Ton Pentre club, and scouts, in ludicrous disguises, were hanging about the little town for some while, wary of local fans who had no wish to see Brain go.
Eventually Knighton had his way and in 1924 Brain arrived at Highbury to make an early debut against no less a team than the bitter rivals of the time, Spurs. "Get that ball," advised the long-serving coach Punch McEwan, "and go through with it!" To which Brain replied that there wouldn't be much point in going through without it.
In the event, deployed at inside right, he got the only goal of the game. He would go on in some eight years to score 139 goals in 232 games, 125 of those coming in the First Division. He was in the Gunners side which lost the 1927 FA Cup final to his first club, Cardiff City.
Jack Lambert was the centre forward Chapman kept trying to replace, yet Bastin rated him higher than his eventual successor, Ted Drake. A Yorkshireman, large, brave and direct, he came to Highbury from Doncaster Rovers in 1924, and like Brain made his debut at inside right but like him, settled down at centre-forward.
He scored the Gunners' second goal against Huddersfield Town in the 1930 FA Cup final - his fourth year at Highbury - and overtook Brain's fine 1925/36 record of 34 league goals in 1930/31: scoring a remarkable 38 goals in only 34 games. Yet still Chapman kept buying other centre forwards to displace him. His overall record would be 249 goals in 326 games for all clubs.
David Jack, that peerless inside-right of the glorious swerve, scorer of the first Wembley Cup final goal for Bolton Wanderers in 1923, came to Arsenal for what was then a huge £10,000 plus fee in 1929. One of the major stars of his day, he figured for the Gunners in the 1930 and 1932 cup finals, scoring 104 times in 208 games.
Dreadnought Drake was the centre-forward Chapman would have wanted; he arrived, ironically, just after the manager's death in 1934, from Southampton. Utterly fearless, frequently injured, he'd score 42 goals in his first full season, when the championship was retained in 1934/35. A season in which alongside six other Arsenal players he helped England win the so-called 'Battle of Highbury' against Italy.
In December 1935, he remarkably scored all seven goals for Arsenal away to Aston Villa and hit the bar into the bargain. Altogether, he scored 139 goals in 184 games, including the one which beat Sheffield United in the FA Cup final of 1936. Later, of course, he managed Chelsea to their first ever Championship, in season 1954/55.
The electrically fast Joe Hulme figured on the right wing from 1926, when he joined the Gunners from Blackburn Rovers for £3,500, till 1938 when he left for Huddersfield Town; and played in his fifth cup final. Scorer of 125 goals in 374 games, he also played cricket successfully for Middlesex.
Reg Lewis (1935-1953) was another whose career was blighted by the war; during which he scored 100 goals in three seasons including four at Wembley against Charlton Athletic in the League South Cup Final of 1943. He would be back at Wembley, though at inside left, not centre forward, fully seven years later, to get both Arsenal's goals in the FA Cup final against Liverpool.
Only once did he play for England; a charity match versus Scotland at Manchester in 1946, after getting seven goals in the Arsenal trial game, when Highbury reopened. A complete, accomplished centre forward, his record was 118 goals in 176 games.
Doug Lishman, a well-built inside left, was bought from Walsall in 1948 and in his eight years scored 137 goals in 244 games. The one which alas got away was in the 1952 FA Cup final, when minutes from time his powerful header from Freddie Cox's corner struck the Newcastle United bar.
David Herd; son of a famous Scotland international inside-right, Alex, with whom he played side by side for Stockport County, left there for the Gunners for £10,000 in 1954; a bargain. Initially himself an inside-right, he became a powerful and penetrative centre-forward, dangerous with both head and foot. 1956/57 saw him gain a regular role; the following season he'd score 24 goals in 39 games. Would go on to play, like his father, for Scotland. Arsenal record: 107 goals in 180 games.
Joe Baker, a tough, incisive little centre forward, Scottish as they come, who found himself playing for England because, freakishly, he happened to be born in Liverpool. Emerging with Hibernian, he joined the Gunners in 1962 after a torrid season alongside Denis Law with Italy's Torino. Just reached the 100 goals in 156 games in four years.
John Radford - 14 productive years at Highbury, between 1962 and 1976, beginning as an outside right in the Joe Hulme and Alf Kirchen tradition, fast and strong, but mutating into a notable centre forward, above all when he formed a prolific spearhead with another big man in left-footed Ray Kennedy.
A Yorkshireman, he was an essential member of the League and Cup 'double' winning team of season 1970/71, figured with Kennedy in the FA Cup final versus Liverpool, won just two caps for England, at a three-year interval. 149 goals in 481 games.
Frank Stapleton joined Arsenal, like Liam Brady and David O'Leary, as an Irish teenager. One of the outstanding centre forwards of his era, both strong and adroit, a fine header of a ball, a forceful shot, adept in holding the ball up and feeding his colleagues. Replacing him when he eventually joined Manchester United was hard indeed.
At Highbury between 1972 and 1981, he got 108 goals in 300 games. He led Arsenal's attack in the three successive FA Cup finals of 1978, 1979, scoring Arsenal's second goal in the win over Manchester United, and 1980. Many times capped by the Republic of Ireland.
Alan Smith came from Leicester City in 1987 to spend eight distinguished years at Highbury. Two of his most notable goals: against Liverpool at Anfield, the first in a 2-o win that clinched the championship: crowning a superb individual performance. The second: when the Gunners won the European Cup Winners' Cup Final against Parma in Copenhagen in 1994, when his cleverly taken goal proved the winner.
The 1988/89 season saw him score 24 goals in 36 games, finishing as top scorer in the league. Equally effective as a goal getter or target man, lan Wright's arrival as chief striker made Smith, a natural centre forward, more of a purveyor. Altogether he scored 115 goals in 347 games.
Dennis Bergkamp, one of the outstanding attackers of his era, was endowed with masterly technique, constructive flair, and incisive opportunism. Bergkamp came to Highbury after a depressing spell in Milan with Inter, who tried to turn him into an out-and-out striker, rather than a player who operates most happily behind the front line, making and scoring goals. Two of the many he has got remain in the mind; a remarkable piece of virtuosity in the 1998 World Cup in France against Argentina, when out on the right he glided past his man and instantly shot past the 'keeper.
For Arsenal, an almost unimaginable goal at Newcastle when he expertly guided the ball past his close marker, went round him the other side... and scored. Who knows how much better the Gunners might have fared in Europe had Dennis, after a bomb hoax during the 1994 World Cup in the USA, refused to fly. He played a crucial part in the Gunners' many successes in cup and league under Arsène Wenger; they would hardly have been possible without him.
lan Wright, when George Graham brought him to Arsenal from Crystal Palace, it seemed that there might be an embarrassment of riches in attack, while clearly the style would have to change. Wright, with his tremendous pace, his dashing opportunism, was a spearhead rather than a target man who ideally wanted the ball played in front of him. His career was unusual; not until his early 20s did he leave non-league football, with Greenwich Borough, to play for Palace.
He made a sensational appearance as a substitute for Palace against Manchester United in the FA Cup final of 1990, scoring twice to force a 3-3 draw. Joining the Gunners in 1991, he was instantly effective, scoring 24 goals in 30 games. The chorus from the stands of 'lan Wright-Wright-Wright!' testified to his huge popularity. Overhauling Cliff Bastin, he scored 185 goals in 288 games.
Thierry Henry would be the first to admit how much his career has owed to Wenger, who nurtured him as a promising outside right at Monaco, brought him to Highbury for a substantial fee in 1999 after an unhappy season with Juventus, and turned him into the phenomenal centre forward he is today, a compound of pace, finesse and flair, not least when he moves to the left flank to conjure his way past baffled defenders.
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