His transfer from Crystal Palace in August 1980 may have been convoluted, but throughout his eight-year Arsenal career, left-back Kenny Sansom was never anything other than a top-class operator.
That summer, we paid £1.25 million to Queens Park Rangers for their 19-year-old striker Clive Allen, who had scored 34 goals in 55 games for the Hoops. It was the first time seven figures had been shelled out to buy a teenager, and having smashed our previous transfer record of £440,000 for Brian Talbot to get the young hotshot, the hype was huge.
But after three pre-season outings and 62 days at the club, we opted to swap Allen and reserve goalkeeper Paul Barron for Sansom and £400,000 two days before the First Division season kicked off.
It was a bizarre transfer saga, and Sansom recalled: “I heard later that QPR chairman Jim Gregory didn’t want to sell Clive directly to Palace, so it ended up as a bit of a merry-go-round. But I never thought of myself as a makeweight because I ended up where I wanted to go.”
Standing at only 5’6” and already established as an England international, the stocky Sansom was blisteringly quick over short distances and had a prodigious leap on him when challenging for headers against taller opponents. In a side struggling for consistency after the departures of Liam Brady and Frank Stapleton, he was a calming presence on the pitch for emerging youngsters in the team.
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Famously, he’d deploy self-deprecating humour (“Don’t pass it to me son,” he’d tell Adams) and did impressions of comedian Norman Wisdom and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em character Frank Spencer to ease the nerves of those around, but his greatest asset was his reading of the game. Rather than leap or slide into the tackle, he preferred to jockey his opponent away from the danger area, an art which he deployed to great effect for England throughout his 86 appearances for the national team.
Sansom made his debut in our opening game of the season against West Bromwich Albion and remained an ever-present, winning the Arsenal Player of the Season award at the end of his first season. As for Allen, he suffered relegation with Palace at the end of his one season at the club, but rebuilt his reputation back at QPR before enjoying further success at Tottenham Hotspur.
After George Graham, a former teammate of Sansom’s at Selhurst Park, arrived at Highbury as manager in the 1986 close season, he made it clear that he would stamp his authority across the club. “In the first training session, I made the mistake of calling him ‘George,’ and he responded: ‘It’s ‘boss’ or ‘Mr Graham,’ Kenny.’ George showed all of us early on that he took no prisoners.”
Changes were afoot, but Sansom had the honour of lifting the first trophy of the Graham era – the League Cup at Wembley in 1987. Sansom reckoned that the famous semi-final replay victory over Tottenham at White Hart Lane was “the night upon which Arsenal awoke, with so many young players like Tony (Adams) and Rocky (David Rocastle) on show.”
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In the final, we defeated Liverpool 2-1, and Sansom clearly remembered “the lovely blue sky above Wembley and the beautiful noise when the referee blew his whistle to end the match. I think that sowed the seeds for what happened at Anfield in May 1989.”
By then, Sansom, who lost his place in the team to Nigel Winterburn, had departed to play for Newcastle United. But for those supporters who watched many of his 394 Gunners matches during the mid 1980s, Kenny Sansom will always be remembered as one of the best and most influential defenders the club has had.m a
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