Today I'm going back 33 years to 13th August 1988 and the four team pre-season friendly tournament played at Wembley. On the Saturday of the two day event we got a double header: Arsenal versus Tottenham followed by AC Milan against Bayern Munich.
This format of four team tournament became known as the Makita Tournament in subsequent seasons and was played for seven consecutive pre-seasons at various English stadiums. Arsenal must have enjoyed the format because they won the tournament three times as did Sampdoria.
Arsenal, managed by George Graham were building towards the League title which they won in both 1989 and 1991 and had a quality squad which didn't contain a single Frenchman! Jupp Heynckes' Bayern Munich squad contained Klaus Augenthaler, Stefan Reuter and Olaf Thon and they were destined to win that season's Bundesliga. AC Milan, managed by Arrigo Sacchi had a side packed with household names (no, not Daz and Omo) including Paolo Maldini, Frank Rijkaard, Franco Baresi, Roberto Donadoni, Carlo Ancelotti (yes, that one!), Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Alessandro Costacurta and they would go on to win the European Cup both that season and the following one. By comparison, Terry Venables Spurs side were probably the lightweights of the four squads but they did have Chris Waddle and Paul Gascoigne.
AS I've mentioned previously, I don't like Friendlies much but this particular set of games at least had the flavour of being competitive and were held at the old twin towers version of Wembley back in the days when the opportunity of playing there was still a rare honour for a player. My main criticism of this particular competition was that the winners of the first two games did not meet on the second day, so there was no real winner of the tournament. On the first day Arsenal hammered Spurs 4-0 with goals from Paul Merson in the 32nd minute, Brian Marwood 74 and 81 and Alan Smith 88 and this was followed by AC Milan beating Bayern Munich 1-0 (Antonio Virdis after 32 minutes). However, instead of Arsenal meeting AC Milan on the second day, they played and beat Bayern Munich 3-0 whilst AC Milan also won against Spurs by 2-1. Arsenal were deemed to be the overall winners by virtue of their goal difference but it would have been nice to see if they could have beaten AC Milan.
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