Unforgettable Moments: Two Historic Matches in Premier League History

There are several reasons for this. Firstly, it attracts many of the world’s best players, secondly, the grounds are almost uniformly superb and thirdly it’s the one league that has truly global appeal.
It's also a league that has, over three decades, shown itself as a hotbed of drama, intrigue and surprises that build on the game’s longstanding heritage in the country. This season is shaping up to be one of the most exciting for a long time. Liverpool, Manchester City and Arsenal can’t be split in the race for the title according to the Premier League odds.
To get a glimpse of this one only has to take a snapshot of the 12,000 or so matches that have been played to date with these two examples, both featuring Manchester United.
For fans, one of the most appealing aspects of following their team is when an encounter with a long-term rival arrives. There are many of these in the Premier League including the obvious like Liverpool and Everton. But there are also more unexpected ones like Manchester United and Arsenal – unexpected because there’s no obvious historical or geographical link between the two.
Instead, it all stemmed from the extreme animosity felt between the two managers, United’s famously fiery Alex Ferguson and the more sanguine and laid-back Arsene Wenger of the Highbury team.
United had long been used to being the dominant force in the league, not to mention offering some of the lowest Premier League odds of winning whenever they took to the pitch.
Wenger had arrived at Arsenal in 1996 with the brief to transform a floundering but once great club. By 1998 he had helped them to snatch the championship from a Manchester United who had already been making room for it in the trophy cabinet.
Ferguson, used to being top dog, stepped up a feud that had already been brewing and each season it became more and more intense.
Flames were fanned by the personalities of various players at the time with United’s Roy Keane and Arsenal’s Patrick Viera often going head to head and perhaps the most extreme example of this came when the two teams met at Highbury early in the 1999-2000 season.
It was a tense, bad-tempered game which was made worse by the fact that Keane’s scored the two goals that won the match for United. Over the season they were then able to draw further and further ahead of the London club, eventually winning the championship by a wide margin of 18 points.
It was a rivalry that fizzled out with the departure of Ferguson in 2013, but it had already been effectively put to bed with Manchester United’s 8-2 humiliation of a reeling Arsenal in 2011.
1st May 2016. Manchester United 1 Leicester City 1
Everyone loves an underdog story. And the game has never seen a bigger one than when the team starting the season at Premier League odds of 5,000-1 went on to win it in fine style.
For many years Leicester had been one of the many also-rans of football, never quite hitting the heights. But, just as Wenger had transformed the fortunes of Arsenal, new manager Claudio Ranieri arrived in 2015 with the same aim.
Many were baffled by the appointment. Under his leadership the Greek national team had managed to lose to the Faroe Islands. His reputation as a nice guy was also said to be a weakness that would fail to transform the club that fans call The Foxes.
In the previous season they had lost a total of 19 matches, narrowly avoiding demotion, a fate that were many predicting that they would struggle prevent under the new manager.
How wrong they turned out to be. Over the 2015-16 season the final reckoning for the team was: Won 23, Lost 3, Drew 12. This left them a clear ten points ahead of the second-placed team, Arsenal.
Ironically, it wasn’t a win that really secured the title for the team. In the run-in to the end of the season it was 1-1 draw with Manchester United that put them within two points of clinching it with two games remaining. This was despite playing in the fortress Old Trafford and conceding the first goal within eight minutes of the kick-off.
But when captain Wes Morgan equalized in the 17th minute the team showed their trademark resilience for the remaining 73 minutes, all but securing the title. With a further 3-1 victory against Everton and a 1-1 draw with Chelsea the championship was theirs, and the Premier League odds had been defied.
No doubt we have many more surprises of this magnitude to look forward to in the future. Even this year’s title race looks to be a very close-run thing between Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool with the first one to falter likely to miss out. So the drama really does never end.