On Saturday Arsenal travel to Old Trafford looking for their first league win at Manchester United’s home in a decade. In recent years, even as all else crumbled around the ears of whoever United had in charge, one constant comfort blanket they have clung to is the visit of the Gunners.
In the early 1980s, though, roles were reversed. Those years represented a fairly grim time for Arsenal: they didn’t win a major trophy between 1979-1987, although they did get to the FA Cup final and the Cup Winners’ Cup final in 1980. Their league campaigns were similarly barren, achieving a few top-four finishes (today regarded as something like an achievement but back then nothing to jump up and down about), and they were rarely serious title contenders. The football wasn’t great either: after a particularly stodgy 0-0 draw with Nottingham Forest in 1983, the then manager, Terry Neill, commented that he could “only feel shame after a game like that”.
But one thing they were quite good at was keeping United at bay. Between 1977-1983 United managed only one league win over Arsenal, and while they did emphatically send their bogey side spinning from two cup competitions in 1982-83, First Division matters were stickier. They didn’t even score against them at Old Trafford in three successive seasons. Then came 1984.
Seventeen years without a league title sounds like a long time. But by comparison with the 26 that would eventually lapse before Manchester United were champions again in 1993, it was a relative blip. The years after Matt Busby’s side won the league in 1967 were, to say the least, up and down for United, taking in a European Cup win, a relegation, two FA Cups, two other finals and a couple of close calls in the league. They got through five post-Busby managers (including a brief return from the man himself) as they chased the title, but as the 1983-84 side approached the closing stretch, it looked as if the sixth, Ron Atkinson, had cracked it.
The game that took United to the top was against Arsenal, at Old Trafford. Recent history told that this is where their nascent title challenge would stumble, no matter how good things were looking. And they were looking good: United hadn’t lost since early December, were 15 games unbeaten and had only Liverpool keeping them from top spot. However, on the Friday evening Southampton beat Liverpool 2-0, opening the door for United, a door they didn’t quite so much bustle through as remove from its hinges.
Arnold Muhren gave United the lead with a penalty conceded by Tommy Caton, whose clumsiness would not end there that afternoon. Kenny Samson then deflected another Muhren effort home to make it two, before Caton was sent off for two bookable offences. “After being cautioned for scything [Norman] Whiteside from behind, he should have known better than to try it again,” wrote Patrick Barclay in the Guardian. From there the game was almost a foregone conclusion, and Arsenal’s manager, Don Howe, lamented: “We might as well have gone home,” after the sending-off. A couple more goals were added, via a thumping Frank Stapleton header and one from Bryan Robson, firing home following a balletic turn on the edge of the box.
“Arsenal were absolutely pathetic,” noted a watching former United manager, Tommy Docherty, before offering the withering dismissal that they were “like England in yellow shirts”. England, for context, had recently failed to qualify for Euro 84 and were about to thoroughly underwhelm in the final Home Championships. Atkinson, with the certainty of a manager who knew his team were flying, deliciously mused: “We have been playing well for months and they were unfortunate to run into us in this kind of form.” The home crowd floated home, happy in the knowledge that, with 10 games remaining, United were a point ahead of Liverpool and the title was theirs for the taking.
Or something like that. Robson was playing like a god, and his high point would come a few days later in the Cup Winners’ Cup, when he almost single-handedly beat a Barcelona team that featured Bernd Schuster and Diego Maradona, in what is regarded as one of the greatest nights in Old Trafford’s history. “The immense joy from that victory surpassed anything I have ever experienced in the game,” said Bobby Charlton. That performance convinced a group of Italian clubs, already hovering, to bid for Robson, but United demanded a world record fee from Juventus, Sampdoria or Milan and the deal was scuppered.
However, they were about to lose Robson without the comfort of £3m in the bank: a couple of weeks later Robson pulled a hamstring in training and missed six games, which included the Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final against Juve. United won only one of those matches, and only two of their last 10 in the league. “Serious championship aspirants do not concede the sort of goals that defeated United at West Bromwich,” wrote David Lacey about the game after the Arsenal triumph, a 2-0 defeat at The Hawthorns. Further losses came at Notts County, Ipswich and Nottingham Forest, and United eventually finished fourth, six points back from Liverpool. “United may have to come to terms with another season of missed opportunities,” wrote Lacey as the games ticked by, a sort of journalistic version of a parental “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed”.
Robson’s absence wasn’t the only reason for their failure, but it wasn’t far off. “We weren’t a one-man team, definitely not,” said Atkinson in Manchester United: The Biography, “but I’d go so far as to say if he’d stayed fit, we’d have won the league a couple of times.” “In this game you can never be a one-man team,” Robson told Andy Mitten in his book We’re The Famous Man United: Old Trafford In The Eighties. “You need good team-mates around you and I usually had them.” Not that season, though. Robson was back for the last four games, which could still have seen them overhaul Liverpool, but United didn’t win any of those either, the damage already done, as much psychologically as to their points tally. To add a further kick in the teeth, the final-day defeat by Forest began with a goal from Garry Birtles, the man purchased by United for £1.25m in 1980, only to be sold back for £300,000, two years and only 12 goals later.
Oddly enough, Arsenal’s form after the 4-0 game, the one that was supposed to finish them off and send United to the title, was excellent. They lost only one of their last 10, and finished a couple of places behind United, their own aspirations long-since torpedoed by 10 defeats before Christmas. All United had to comfort themselves was finally beating a niggling rival. And so to Saturday.
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