Back in the 1980s, Arsenal’s stadium was immune from the tides of architectural revolution, its East Stand’s Grade II-listed Art Deco exterior a monument to enduring permanence. Highbury’s footballing residents weren’t so lucky.
Paul Merson remembers distinctly the day George Graham first swaggered into the club. Barcelona’s Terry Venables had turned them down. So had Alex Ferguson of Aberdeen, but third-choice Graham was, just like his compatriot, a no-nonsense headmaster keen to strike the fear of god into all of his pupils. Highbury’s hallowed marble halls, underscored by gold and mahogany, were welcoming a demolition man. No one was safe.
“We had good kids, good youngsters – but George Graham took a gamble,” reminisces Merson. “He came in from Millwall, got rid of top-drawer players Charlie Nicholas, Tony Woodcock, Graham Rix, Viv Anderson and Kenny Sansom. Then he signed Lee Dixon, Steve Bould from Stoke, Colchester’s Perry Groves and Wimbledon’s Nigel Winterburn.”
Merson is going back some 37 years here, to 1986. Now 55, the bespectacled Gunners legend is sat chatting to FFT in his garden, with just the rumble of distant traffic and occasional Heathrow departure overhead for company. Yet when he reflects on his first meeting with Graham, conflating the Scot’s arrival with his own fledgling career, he’s 18 again and buzzes with excitement.
“Looking back now, he wanted youngsters around who were going to listen to him,” says Merson. “He ruled with an iron rod. Everyone was petrified of him – he wanted people that were going to be scared, and the old guard weren’t going to be.”
The vindication in Graham’s methods was quite literally cinematic. The 1988-89 campaign culminated in Arsenal, who began the season as 16/1 title outsiders, overhauling Liverpool at Anfield in the dying embers of an epic.happen if he ever got too comfortable. He’d seen it first hand when Graham arrived.
