Invincibles versus the unbeatables

A former Preston cricketer, he offered the first glimpses of chalkboard coaching - moving chess pieces around a billiard table to illustrate tactics was his preferred method - raiding the foreign transfer market (well, buying Scottish stars who had a more scientific approach to the game) and offering illegal inducements to secure them.

Ruthless and authoritarian, nothing got in his way of promoting Preston's cause. He was happy to ignore the disapproval when he signed England's first black player, goalie Arthur Wharton but, in truth, he sounded as dodgy as Wenger is clean-cut. Six years after the Double season, he was sentenced to three years in prison for embezzling £5,000 from his textile employers. It was later discovered much of the money had gone on hospitality on club match days.

Style

All the swooning about the speed and poise of Arsenal's passing game this season was replicated in that first season of the Football League. "North End carried combination to a perfection never previously known. As a team, they were the greatest masters of the passing game that football has produced," cooed one commentator a decade after the Double.

They had a huge defender called Nick Ross who could kick the ball a mile and helped them play Wimbledon-style long-ball stuff if needed. Yet mostly they played to feet, with "a machine-like method of working the ball along the ground".

Star quality

A rough-and-ready bunch of workingclass Scots and Lancastrians were hardly going to be as smooth as Wenger's Gallic aristos, yet the Invincibles did more than anything to massively popularise the game in England, with attacking players Jimmy "the little demon" Ross, Johnny Goodall, Fred Dewhurst, Jack Gordon and Sam Thomson considered among the finest in the land.

A century before Mike Tyson strutted around with a tiger on the end of a lead, Goodall apparently used to take a pet fox for walkies. Now that's style, Thierry . . .

Steel

The resilience of Wenger's mob is now taken as read but during the 1880s the Invincibles had to overcome far more significant off-field dramas. Like a cholera epidemic, temporary expulsion from the league for not handing over gate receipts and temporary expulsion from the Cup for illegal payments to players.

The team even developed a bit of a 'no one likes us, we don't care' attitude when they started to get stick from rivals who found them unbearably cocky. Not surprising when their Wales international "prince of goalkeepers" James Trainer was in the habit of sheltering under an umbrella during one-sided rain-sodden matches.

In 1888, legend has it, the players asked to be photographed with the Cup while their kit was still clean only to be told by the FA, "Hadn't you better win it first?" Just as well. They lost 2-1 to West Brom.

Rewards

Henry and Co can expect to reap thousands in bonuses and endorsement opportunities but there is no record of the Invincibles landing a bean. Players on less than three quid a week all needed other jobs to make ends meet. One was a doctor, one a miner.

Centre-back David Russell was a kind of cross between Martin Keown and Bernard Manning, a manic figure who doubled as a musical hall comedian. He even missed the opening game of the Double-winning season because he was giving a concert at the seaside.

Ugliness

Wenger's crew got slaughtered earlier in the season for the ganging-up on Ruud van Nistelrooy at Old Trafford, yet it is reassuring to note that the class of 1889 were no angels either.

Russell, clearly the team's rebel in residence since he didn't bother growing a moustache, was so outraged at a bad tackle in one game that he ran almost the length of the pitch to kick his assailant in the middle of his back. There is no record of whether Sudell claimed not to see the incident.

Statistics

If the only fair comparison between teams of different eras is to study their level of dominance over contemporaries, then there is no contest. Not only did the Invincibles achieve the Double - winning the FA Cup without concession of a single goal - but their league record of just four draws in 22 games represented an 82 per cent win rate, compared with Arsenal's 68 per cent success rate, with 25 wins from 37 games.

Preston scored 74 goals that season - that's 3.4 per game - compared with Arsenal's 71 in 37, an average of 1.9.