[Lord Snooty]

December 5:

The year is 1925, Huddersfield Town have won the league twice in a row and are well in contention to make it three in a row. Cecil Potter is now the manager following the shock resignation of Herbert Chapman in the summer and it was on this date that Chapman made his first return to Leeds Road, bringing his Arsenal team to play the mighty blue n whites.

Attendances were still up and down despite the glorious happenings on the pitch. Only 7,285 turned up for the midweek draw with Liverpool, but today, Chapman's Gunners attracted three times that amount with 22,115 in the ground. Was it because of the returning hero or was it just because it was on a Saturday afternoon rather that a Wednesday afternoon? I don't know, still waiting for somebody to explain the strange variations in crowd numbers. Of course, that attendance would treble again for the FA Cup quarter final match in 1932.

Anyway, the match ended in a 2-2 draw, moving Town up to 4th in the league table, with goals from Alex Jackson, Chapman's last signing for us and George Brown, one of his first.

Moving on 73 years to 1998 and we have another of the great Town managers in charge, Peter Jackson. This is the season that followed the Great Escape season and after being top of the 2nd tier table 12 months on from Jacko's appointment, things had slipped slightly. We had dropped down to 7th last week with a humiliating 7-1 loss at Barnsley, but on this date we returned to form, giving Crystal Palace a damn jolly good spanking. No, not the 7-1 win. That was in the next season.

This was just a 4-0 win, with a hat trick from the brilliant Marcus Stewart. Delroy Facey added the fourth in the last minute. The win moved us back up into the top 6, but by the end of the season we'd settled for mid table mediocrity.

Oh how we would love some mid table mediocrity now.