100 seasons in the top divsion part 2. 1990/91: the tale of Smith and Wright

Recent posts

• 1989/90: After winning the league, and the move to all-seater stadia
• 100 seasons in the top division: 1988/89 part two – winning the league
• Arsenal: 100 Seasons in the Top Division: 1988/89 – part one

Details of the full series appear on our home page.

By Tony Attwood

As we saw in the last commentary, 1989/90: After winning the league, thoughts during that season were as much on making Highbury an all-seater stadium, and the possibility of moving to a brand new stadium thereafter (which actually happened in 2006), as they wee on the football.

1989/90 saw Arsenal come fourth in the league, 17 points behind the Champions Liverpool, and indeed even one point and one place behind Tottenham.  Seven teams scored more goals than Arsenal in 1989/90, including even Nottingham Forest, who ended up ninth.

But what had saved Arsenal from further humiliation (in terms of slipping further down the league after the title win the previous year) was their defence.  The club conceded 38 goals in 38 games – and only one team did better, the champions Liverpool, who conceded 37.

But that didn’t really hide the fact that scoring was what mattered, nor the fact that the club’s top scorer was Alan Smith, who scored just ten league goals in the campaign.  Second was the young Paul Merson with seven.

What was particularly dispiriting was that Arsenal had, of course, won the league the season before (1988/9).  Comparing the two seasons, it was clear that the defence was still solid (just two more goals conceded in the league in 1989/90 than in the title-winning season before).   But the goals scored had dropped by 19, primarily because of a collapse in the goal-scoring ability of the aforementioned Alan Smith.

In the league games, his scoring had collapsed from 23 down to ten, even though in both seasons he had played in virtually every league game.  Quite clearly, something needed to be done on the goal-scoring front.   For it was either that Smith wasn’t converting chances, or that the forwards around him were not creating the opportunities for him to score.

And so, that “something” was indeed done.  Arsenal scored 20 more goals than the previous season, and additionally conceded 20 fewer goals than in 1989/90!   As a result, Arsenal returned to the top of the league for the 1990/91 season, giving the club its second title in three years.  And given that the gap from the previous title (1971) to the next had been 18 years, a gap of just one season between one title and the next seemed perfectly acceptable.   

Indeed it was even more acceptable, given that Arsenal were deducted two points for what the media were encouraged to call “a brawl” (but which was generally called “a spot of argy-bargy” when other clubs did much the same) in the match with Mancehsetr United on 20 October 1990.  Arsenal won 1-0.

In hindsight, exactly what happened across these three seasons (the two title-winning campaigns, and the fourth-place finish in between) can be seen in terms of the final tables for these three seasons – Alan Smith played about the same number of games, but his goal scoring dropped by 50%.

 

Season	Pos	P	W	D	L	F	A	Pts	Top Scorer
1988–89	1st	38	22	10	6	73	36	76	Alan Smith (25)
1989–90	4th	38	18	8	12	54	38	62	Alan Smith (13)
1990–91	1st	38	24	13	1	74	18	83[r]	Alan Smith (27)

 

However, Arsenal not only won that game against ManU, but also were unbeaten for the first 17 league and League Cup games of the season.  The run finished on 28 November 1990 when Arsenal played Manchester United at home in the League Cup.  3-0 down at halftime, they lost 2-6.

This match became notorious as a “brawl”, although in reality, there was as much engagement of players trying to separate their colleagues as there was any sense of outright fighting.  Watching it, it seemed more as if the referee realised he hadn’t been doing a very good job in the game and so over-reacted.

It’s true that Winterburn made a bad tackle on Irwin, but it was McClair and Irwin who retaliated against Winterburn and Limpar, while Ince then pushed Limpar so hard he ended up injured from a collision with the advertising hoarding at the edge of the pitch.   A quick red card at that point for Ince could have sorted the matter, but it didn’t happen, and the players clearly had had enough of some incompetent officiating.

In a totally ludicrous response to what was a situation that lasted under half a minute, the referee decided to book the entire ManU team, and all the Arsenal team except for Seaman, even though it was evident to everyone in the ground that the majority of the players were trying to pull their colleagues away from the melee.

In a response that we possibly would not see these days, the media praised Tony Adams (booked of course, with the rest of the team) for acting as a captain and trying to calm matters down.   But it became known as the “Arsenal Brawl”, but as later comments by many of them showed, they knew as well as everyone else, except the reporters that it was the referee who lost control.

The following season, Smith won his first Golden Boot with 23 goals from 36 League games, the most important being the first goal in Arsenal’s 2-0 victory at Anfield on 26 May 1989, which saw them lift that season’s league championship. But overall, 1989-90 was a disappointing season both for the club and for Alan Smith in terms of goal scoring. He only scored 13 goals in all competitions, but came back the next season as Arsenal won the league in 1990/91, when he got the Golden Boot once again.  And indeed, we should remember that the League deducted two points from Arsenal in that title-winning season for the “brawl” against Man U.

But we are left with a dilemma – why would the player who so readily scored more goals than anyone else in both the 1988/9 season and the 1990/91 season score just ten goals in 37 league games in 1989/90?

The fact is that in Arsenal’s two title-winning seasons in these three years, the team scored 73 and 74 goals respectively.  But in the intervening 1989/90 season, Arsenal scored just 54 goals.  And Smith wasn’t scoring because he simply wasn’t getting the ball.

Indeed, part of the issue was the manager’s attempt to change the defence – sometimes playing a classic back four, sometimes a sweeper.  But although we can see that as the reason Arsenal had a poor 1989/90, the final decision on how to play the defence was a triumph.

For if we look at the two title-winning seasons and the 1989/90 season in between, we can see exactly what happened, as the table above shows.  However, Smith did have a final calling card to leave: the goal he scored in the 1994 European Cup Winners’ Cup final.

But we might also note that a knee injury stopped him playing at 32, in 1995, and it is possible that but for that, he might have had yet more triumphs to his name.  However, he did get his second league winners’ medal as the 1990/91 end-of-season table shows.

 

	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
1	Arsenal	38	24	13	1	74	18	+56	83
2	Liverpool	38	23	7	8	77	40	+37	76
3	Crystal Palace	38	20	9	9	50	41	+9	69

 

Alan Smith’s two seasons of triumph won Arsenal the league but thereafter he faded away, working more as a way of diverting the attention of the opposition centre backs rather than as the actual goal scorer.

In 1991/2 the final season of the First Division, he scored 17 goals in 47 games – not at all a bad tally, but not at the previous level.  And indeed now in the Arsenal team was a certain Ian Wright who scored 26 goals.

In 1992/3 it was six goals in 45 for Smith as Wright got 30.  But Arsenal sank to 10th in the league.  In 1993/4 it was seven in 41 for Smith, as Wright got the seemingly impossible total of 35 goals and the club headed back up the table, finishing fourth in the league while winning the Cup Winers Cup.  The old master had fully stepped aside to make way for another young maestro.