The Battle of the Buffet: Manchester United v Arsenal, 20 years on

A PIZZA THE ACTION

Step into the passenger seat of Football Daily’s DeLorean, pull shut the gullwing door and watch as we go from nought to 88 in as long as it takes to generate the 1.21 gigawatts required for our trusty flux capacitor to send us hurtling through the mists of time on a journey to exactly 20 years ago on 24 October 2004. The very fiercest of rivals whose contempt for each other could not have been more mutual, Manchester United had just beaten Arsenal at Old Trafford, ending a record run of 49 matches unbeaten for Arsène Wenger’s side in the Premier League. Ruud van Nistelrooy’s cathartic, hotly disputed penalty and a goal for birthday boy Wayne Rooney, 19, had secured the points in a bruising encounter that, were it played today, would almost certainly prompt the kind of highly strung and overwrought football fanboys you find on social media abominations to swoon like Victorian ladies while vigorously clutching their pearls.

Famously displeased by the sight of northern-based footballing ruffians daring to tackle his far more sophisticated players as they attempted to walk the ball from one end of the pitch to the other and into the opposition net, Wenger was given plenty to think about that afternoon. Enraged by the sight of Rio Ferdinand avoiding an early red card despite hacking down Freddie Ljungberg when he was clean through, the Arsenal manager could scarcely contain his fury as Robert Pires and the late José Antonio Reyes were booted up and down the pitch with more frequency and vigour than the actual match ball. Elsewhere, a brutal studs-up Van Nistelrooy challenge on Ashley Cole went unseen by Mike Riley, the match referee.

It should be noted United didn’t have it all their own way, with Arsenal perpetrating 24 fouls against various United players, each of them meticulously logged by Sir Alex Ferguson in a “dossier” the club would subsequently submit to the FA. And they’re only the ones that were punished. Thierry Henry was also accused of deliberately trying to knack United left-back Gabriel Heinze while the Argentinian was lying helpless on the floor, while Arsenal defender Edu tackled Paul Scholes with a challenge Ferg would later describe as “a potential leg-breaker”. Of course, what happened on the pitch wasn’t the half of it. Because the real fun and games didn’t start until the final whistle was blown and the players of both sides had left the field and were on their way back to their respective dressing rooms.

To cut a long story short: there was a massive stramash involving the players, managers and backroom staff of both teams in a very narrow stretch of tunnel between the home and away dressing rooms. And during scenes that resembled a cross between a saloon brawl in the Wild West and a cartoon dust-up in which numerous feet, fists and swearwords can be seen emerging from a cloud of dust, somebody chucked a pizza from the Arsenal dressing room and scored a direct hit into Ferg’s famously empurpled coupon, prompting further scenes of pandemonium. When a very fragile peace eventually broke out, officials from both clubs attempted a cover-up, in a bid to avoid FA sanctions for their bottleneck brawl and to spare Ferg’s blushes.

Needless to say, this attempted omertà ended in complete failure and in the days, weeks, months and years since, increasingly detailed information about the stramash has been fed to the general public in a manner not dissimilar to a coagulated gloop of melted cheese suffused with pepperoni sausage, jalapeños and olives slowly dripping from the face of an apoplectic Scottish senior citizen on to his blazer, pristine white shirt and red club tie. While both teams eventually escaped punishment due to a lack of evidence and all involved sensibly adopting the Wengerian approach of not having seen the incident, the identity of the mystery pizza-chucker remained a mystery, even if one name kept popping into the frame.

It would take another 18 years for Arsenal’s Cesc Fàbregas, who was a mere whelp of 17 at the time, to confirm that it had indeed been him who’d frisbee-ed the savoury projectile across the corridor, although he claimed he hadn’t been aiming for anyone in particular and hitting Ferg had just been a bonus. Well, sort of. “I was just very small, very tiny, and I didn’t know what to do,” he told The Athletic (£). “I wanted to bring something to the table to defend my teammates and that’s what I did. I didn’t aim at anyone. You know when you throw something into a crowd just to see if you hit someone? And then I hit the big guy, Sir Alex, unfortunately.” And so the famous legend of the Battle of the Buffet was born.

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