So here we are on the first day of a new season and we are hosting Leicester City on a Friday night. Golly, hasn't football changed? Forty plus years ago who'd a thought we would have seen Leicester crowned champions, play in the European Cup and Arsenal fans celebrate a victory over them like it was we who were champions.
Leicester do appear once or twice in the annals of 'memorable if not not classic' games over the years. First and foremost they were our first opponents at Highbury more than a century ago. And let us not forget there was the day we beat Leicester at the old Highbury in the last game of the season to be crowned champions ourselves at the end of our unbeaten season
Yep, things change and how Leicester are perceived but for me a game with Leicester City always brings to mind an old chant you used to hear on the North Bank and at away games.
We will follow the Arsenal
Over land and sea (and Leicester)
We will follow the Arsenal
On to victory
(All together now)
Supporters at other clubs used to sing something similar but I don't recall whether they added the Leicester bit to their version. But we did. Why would that be?
Some people have suggested it may have been because the M1 motorway would have signposts which would give distances and say things like The North followed by Leicester but I'm not convinced football fans even noticed road signs on the way to and from games. No, what football fans remember are games and places visited and for some reason we used to visit Leicester quite a lot.
Take, for example the 1974/75 season. In that season, best forgotten really, we played the Foxes home and away in the league as you would expect. We started the season playing them away and we started well, Brian Kidd netting on his debut for the club to give us a 1-0 win. We also drew them in the League Cup being held to a 1-1 draw at Highbury before going to Filbert Street and getting beat 2-1.
A couple of weeks before Christmas and we met them at Highbury for our second league meeting and with both teams in the bottom five of the table it was the Foxes who had the most to cheer heading back up the M1 with a point from a 0-0 draw.
While we may have been pants in the league we were struggling but winning in the FA Cup. We were held 1-1 at home by York City in the third round but a Brian Kidd hat trick in the replay saw us earn a trip to Coventry as a reward. We drew, of course, brought them down to Highbury and thrashed them 3-0 (in that season 3-0 was a thrashing).
Our reward for beating Coventry? Leicester at home. The first game was a repeat of our league encounter at Highbury back in December, a 0-0 draw, so we were back up to the East Midlands for a replay. That ended blank after 90 minutes, we went to extra time and ended up drawing 1-1. Back in those days there were no penalty shoot outs, we had a second replay and teams would toss a coin for the venue. We lost and had to return to Filbert Street five days later to try again. This time we won thanks to a John Radford screamer meaning for this particular season we would not be returning to Leicester.
Division One 17/08 - Leicester City (A) 0-1 Brian Kidd
League Cup 10/09 - Leicester City (H) 1-1 Brian Kidd
League Cup 18/09 - Leicester City (A) 1-0 Liam Brady
Division One 14/12 - Leicester City (H) 0-0
FA Cup 15/02 - Leicester City (H) 0-0
FA Cup 19/02 - Leicester City (A) 1-1 John Radford
FA Cup 24/02 - Leicester City (A) 0-1 John Radford
We weren't finished with trips to Leicester though. In 1978/79 we were involved in an FA Cup marathon with Sheffield Wednesday which saw us play at Highbury, Hillsborough, Filbert Street, Filbert Street and Filbert Street. By then the chant was a staple on our terraces and perhaps it had started life with some terrace wit adding Leicester to the original as a recognition of those tiring treks north up the M1.
Its worth bearing in mind the organic development of a chant like this when you hear of clubs trying to force feed supporters a song or an anthem like the Arsenal did with The Wonder of You. Terrace culture isn't developed in a board room with a bunch of suits looking at flow charts, drinking from expensive bottles of water. It comes from the terraces but in this modern era clubs are scared of fans. Clubs are reluctant to even use the word fan, they want to turn us into consumers and control the whole matchday experience and they may be earning bucket loads of cash from Sky but at the end of the day football without the fans is nothing and the sooner the corporates realise this the better the matchday experience will be for the players on the field, the fans in the stands and yes, even the viewers on TV.
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