Twenty years ago, Arsenal travelled to Liverpool - six weeks after Hillsborough - for a title decider that few thought they could win. Ninety impossibly dramatic minutes later, they had repaired the reputation of football

The 1988-89 season was the Football League’s centenary, but there was little to celebrate. The Hillsborough disaster, when 96 people were crushed to death on the stadium’s terraces during the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest on 15 April 1989, was the final act in a decade of misfortune for the English game. It was the last in a chain of calamities and woes that included Heysel, where 39 Juventus fans died and many hundreds more were injured during the Italian club’s 1985 European Cup final against Liverpool, and the Bradford fire, also in 1985, when a blaze that started during a third division match between Bradford City and Lincoln City devastated the home side’s 77-year-old wooden main stand and killed 56 people.

I was on the terraces on the afternoon of 15 April, on the North Bank at Highbury, and on the morning after Hillsborough, after I’d read the newspaper reports, studied the front-page photographs of those crushed against the fences - the sad, sickening, bloated faces of the dying - and watched and listened to the various news reports on TV and radio, I felt the need to speak to my father, who had introduced me to football many years before and who, in recent times, had inspired my reconnection with the game. The trouble was that I didn’t know how to reach him in Hong Kong, where he was on business. In the event, he called me; it was evening in Hong Kong and he wanted to know the mood in England. He and my mother had been at a dinner party in Kowloon, he said; the game had been on in another room. During the party, someone had gone to check the score, and there it was: the tragedy of Hillsborough unfolding on screen. Everyone left the table and gathered around the television. They watched the injured and dying being carried away on the advertising hoardings that were being used as emergency stretchers; watched people trying to scale the security fences to reach the safety of the pitch only to be beaten back by police who didn’t fully understand what was happening; watched the stunned, aghast faces of those people trapped behind the fences.

“How can the season continue after this?” I asked. “It obviously can’t,” my father said. “It’s over.”

“What?” I said, unsure if I’d heard him properly, since there was the inevitable, irritating delay on the line.

“It’s over,” he said again.

“What happened up there,” he continued, “could’ve happened to any of us, anywhere, at any time. The whole infrastructure of the game is corrupt.”

Then he said: “I’m finished with football.”

It was announced the next day that the season would be suspended to allow for a period of mourning and for the government and other authorities to prepare their appalled and urgent responses.

Six weeks later

At around nine o’clock on the morning of Friday 26 May 1989, the Arsenal players began gathering at their London Colney training ground, just off junction 22 of the M25 in the monotonous flatlands of this part of Hertfordshire. Arsenal had, nine days earlier, drawn at home to Wimbledon, a failure that was widely accepted to have led to their relinquishing a chance to win a title that not long before had seemed theirs to win as and when they chose. Since then, the Arsenal players had spent their time in an antechamber of uncertainty. For every club other than Arsenal and Liverpool, the season was over. The FA Cup final had been and gone, won the previous Saturday by Liverpool. Yet there was still one more game to play. Arsenal’s visit to Anfield was originally scheduled for Sunday 23 April but, after Hillsborough and the suspension of the season, was rescheduled most unusually for the evening of 26 May, which that year fell on a Friday. Arsenal were going into the last game three points behind Liverpool and with an inferior goal difference, having been top of the table for most of the second half of the season and overhauled by a resurgent Liverpool only at the last. To be champions, they had to win at Anfield by two goals against a team unbeaten since 2 January.

The Arsenal coach set off from London Colney just before 10am. The players, as they settled down in their usual groupings, observed how many more unfamiliar faces there were on the coach. It was as if as many of those connected to the club as possible had negotiated a ride north: fringe and injured players, boardroomers and their guests, backroom bureaucrats. “The coach was packed with players, directors and vice-presidents,” said Perry Groves, who was manager George Graham’s first signing in 1986 and one of two substitutes that night at Anfield. “We were all pretty jovial. It was almost like a day out, as no one was expecting us to win. There were plenty of cars with Arsenal scarves as we drove up the motorway and lots of the fans gave us the thumbs-up.”

The feeling among the players was that they had lost the title. At the turn of the year, Arsenal’s lead over Liverpool had been 15 points. Since then they’d faltered just as Liverpool began to improve, strengthened by the return of their goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar, who had missed much of the season because of illness. Since 2 January Liverpool had won 21 of their 24 games, scoring 60 and conceding 15. Arsenal had won just 10 of their previous 20 games, with four defeats. There was now a frenetic, jittery quality to their play, as long balls were hit more in hope than expectation and the defence became brittle.

Once settled at their hotel, the Atlantic Tower, the Arsenal players had lunch before being instructed to return to their rooms to rest. “I was sharing a room with David O’Leary,” Alan Smith, Arsenal’s central striker, told me. “We drew the curtains and had a good few hours’ sleep. I didn’t always sleep well on match day, but we both woke up that afternoon and said we’d slept well. It was the same when we went down to meet the others. Everyone said they’d slept well.” George Graham, Arsenal’s authoritarian manager, received his players at the five o’clock team meeting dressed in club blazer, white shirt, and a red and white tie. The players were served tea with toast and honey, and then Graham asked the waiters to clear the tables and close the door.

Graham confirmed what the team would be and that they would play with five at the back, with O’Leary as sweeper. This was his great gamble - to bolster the defence in a game he needed to win by two goals! Using a flip chart as an aid, he discussed tactics and explained who would be marking whom at set plays. He then told the players exactly what he expected of them: that they should “keep it tight”, frustrate Liverpool so as to subdue the crowd, and that, above all, they shouldn’t concede a goal. They shouldn’t worry or panic if the score was still 0-0 at half-time, he said. In the second half they should “open up a bit”, and seek to score an early goal. The greater pressure would then be on Liverpool: they had the title to lose; they would “fall apart under the pressure”.

Nobody expected Arsenal to win.

Arsenal emerge up the steps from the narrow tunnel wearing their away kit of yellow shirts with navy-blue short sleeves, and tight blue shorts; it’s a wonder that they’re not blown back or frozen by the force of the high-decibel roar into which they run, by the tremendous, reverberating power of it. Each player wears a white memorial armband; white, rather than the more conventional black as worn by the Liverpool players, because black would not have shown up against their dark shirt sleeves. Liverpool wear their traditional all-red kit, and on this warm evening, so late in the season, so early in the summer, they too are in short-sleeves. The Arsenal players are holding bouquets of flowers. After lining up briefly inside the centre circle to wave to and applaud the crowd, they spin off in different directions, as if in choreographed formation, carrying the flowers to all parts of the ground, where they are then passed into the crowd. The home fans respond to this gesture with harmonious applause. The mood is one of tolerance and mutual respect; Hillsborough has cooled the fans’ hatreds without diminishing their ardour.

Liverpool and Arsenal, north and south: just for now, just before the game, there’s a sense of unity and reconciliation. “The flowers were a good idea,” says Theo Foley, Arsenal’s assistant manager and Graham’s confidant. “We walked out and were respectful - that was important.”

Liverpool are to kick off, attacking the Anfield Road End. Arsenal line up in a 5-4-1 formation: John Lukic; Lee Dixon, Tony Adams, David O’Leary, Steve Bould, Nigel Winterburn; David Rocastle, Kevin Richardson, Michael Thomas, Paul Merson; Alan Smith. Liverpool are 4-4-2: Bruce Grobbelaar; Steve Nicol, Alan Hansen, Gary Ablett, Steve Staunton; Ray Houghton, Ronnie Whelan, Steve McMahon, John Barnes; Ian Rush, John Aldridge.

In this last minute before the match begins, the players are in formation, with Barnes and Rocastle facing each other, separated only by the chalky thickness of the halfway line. They embrace and shake hands, these two black athletes who through their excellence and example have done so much to alter terrace attitudes to racial difference. The whistle blows; the match begins.

In this early phase of the game, Arsenal’s tackling has a premeditated ferocity. It’s easy now to forget how subtle changes in the laws, such as the banning of the tackle from behind or the preventing of goalkeepers from picking up back-passes, have since refined the game, quickened it, made it more fluid. Graham’s Arsenal were adept at using the tackle from behind not only to thwart but also to intimidate. Bould, who is lean with dark-brown receding hair swept back from a high forehead, is the master cruncher, eager to let both Rush and Aldridge know from the beginning that he’s insistently there, right behind them, always behind them. So the game is being interrupted by ankle-wounding tackles and free kicks; neither side is able to build momentum or establish a coherent pattern of play.

The first chance of the match falls to Arsenal, when, improbably, Bould arrives from deep to head a cross towards goal; the ball beats Grobbelaar, only to be headed up and over the bar by a retreating defender. Arsenal may be playing Graham’s version of the sweeper system, with three central defenders, but their game tonight has fluidity and no little surprise: the full-backs as well as Bould keep pushing up whenever they can, but never carelessly. Above all, you must be patient, Graham had said.

The game is opening up, with Merson now on a wounded rhino’s run down the left; there’s something gloriously uninhibited in the way he runs, in his uncomplicated method, the way he charges head-down, broad shoulders lowered, with a surging, loping stride, his long, layered, bleached, unkempt hair flowing raggedly behind.

Merson is still running and, with Thomas arriving late from midfield, he sends over a cross, but it’s headed out. Thomas’s long run from deep has been in vain but he will keep on trying to make these late runs, keep on going, as if each failure is motivation enough to try again, to try better, even if it means failing again, failing better.

A former captain of England schoolboys, Michael Thomas first came into the side as a teenager under Graham at right-back, but, because of his stamina and physique, his excellent technique and desire to attack, it was soon apparent that he would be best positioned in central midfield. When I first saw him play I called him “the Brazilian”: he looked like a new kind of English footballer to me, a full-back with the muscularity and power of a defender but with the skill and speed of a forward. For Graham, Thomas can be too inconsistent, too much of the would-be Brazilian: one game imposing, the next wasteful and inefficient. His team-mates speak of how “laid-back” he is, of how easy the game can seem to him. Does he care enough? Graham has asked. Does he want it enough?

The referee blows for half-time.

Around the country, those watching on TV begin to stir as the commercial breaks come on. ITV will report that there was a national television audience of eight million at the start of the match but many hundreds of thousands more will switch on in the second half. Regular live League football is a recent introduction to British television - the first live League game for more than 20 years was broadcast in October 1983. Before that, the Football League refused to allow games to be shown live because it was believed it would adversely affect attendances. Throughout the 70s and 80s, only highlights were permitted to be shown on ITV and the BBC.

Earlier in the day it has been reported that the launch of BSkyB, the Rupert Murdoch satellite channel that will soon change for ever the way football is sold, marketed and watched in the country, has been delayed by technical problems. Within a few years, however, Sky will have won an auction for exclusive rights to the new Premier League in a deal worth £304m to the clubs, and fans who want to watch live football on television will be paying subscription fees for what was, in the 80s, free to view. It would be this match at Anfield that would convince many in and around the game of the huge untapped revenue-generating potential of live football on television.

Meanwhile, down in the dressing rooms, Graham and Liverpool’s manager, Kenny Dalglish, are addressing their players for the last time before sending them out. Graham is telling his players that before the game he kept reading that

Arsenal’s trip to Anfield would be a wasted journey. “Does this feel like a wasted journey?” he asks. He is extraordinarily calm. He does not raise his voice; there’s no shouting. He simply wants to reassure the players that everything is going to plan. Everything’s going to plan, he keeps saying. We’ve kept a clean sheet. Just start to get forward more now, he says, be more positive on the ball. The pressure is on them, he says. The pressure is on them. “He wasn’t swearing or shouting, nothing like that,” says Alan Smith. “He just wanted to get his message across very calmly, to make some small adjustments to the game plan and to make sure we didn’t start to panic because we hadn’t scored. He sent us back out on to the pitch feeling enormously confident.”

Liverpool start the half by seeking to establish sustained passing movements and to dictate play. During the break, Dalglish has urged them to do so, has implored them to assert their own game. But, no matter what they try in these early phases of the half, their attacks continue to break up against the hard, high wall of Arsenal’s three-man central defence. The Kop are chanting, “Champions, Champions”.

Six minutes into the half the referee blows for a foul on Rocastle - high feet against Whelan. Rocastle senses an opportunity; his eyes are ablaze, he punches his right fist into an open left palm, his teeth are gritted. It’s an indirect free-kick, to be taken from the right-hand side of the penalty box, about 30 yards out.

There is a long pause before Winterburn, with his left foot, curls the ball in precisely towards the far side of the box. Adams breaks between Nicol and Staunton but stumbles and goes down in front of the keeper, around about the penalty spot. Just behind him, Smith has found space and he’s there, alone, with his marker distracted by Adams, about six yards out; with the lightest of touches he glances the ball into the far right-hand corner of the net, with Grobbelaar beaten before he has had the chance even to dive. The Arsenal fans, clustered at the Anfield Road End, just to the right-hand side of the goal, are celebrating; a few of them spill from the terraces on to the cinder track that separates the pitch from the crowd. Just a few, but there’s a moment of mayhem as a lone copper, wearing a traditional British bobby’s helmet, scrambles to round them up. So animated are his movements that it’s as if he, too, is celebrating the goal.

The Liverpool players have reacted to the goal with indignance and incredulity; they descend upon the referee, enclosing him in a ring of fire. The most vehement protester is the captain, Whelan, who conceded the free-kick. Close behind him are Nicol, Ablett, Houghton, McMahon, Aldridge, Barnes: a terrifying army of disgusts. The referee, Dave Hutchinson, hurries over to his linesman and rests a reassuring hand on his left shoulder, addressing him as a policeman might an errant youth: Now, tell me calmly exactly what happened. The linesman has wiry, thinning hair and a neat moustache; his faced is harrowed by anxiety.

“The only way to deal with it was not to threaten to book them but to say, ‘Right, I’ll go and talk with my linesman,’” Hutchinson says now. “I went over to my linesman and said: ‘A couple of quickies. Did I have my hand up for the indirect free-kick?’ He said yes. ‘Was there a touch by Smithy in the middle?’ He said: ‘In my view, yes.’ I said: ‘Was there any possibility of offside?’ He said no. I said: ‘Foul?’ He said no. So I said: ‘Then it’s a goal.’” Then it’s a goal. Whelan has heard this before his players, certainly before the crowd know what’s been decided, and his face carries the pallid look of disappointment as he turns away. 1-0 to Arsenal.

Liverpool are becoming distracted. In the dug-out just below pitch-level, Dalglish, sitting with coaches Roy Evans and Ronnie Moran, looks on, troubled, as Grobbelaar rages at Ablett, at his own man, after confusion between them results in the goalkeeper dropping the ball. With his receding hair cropped razor-short, his thick, dark moustache and tufts of chest hair, Grobbelaar has the look of an angry Soho leather-boy.

Liverpool must reassert their control, keep the ball, start passing out of defence - but Arsenal will not allow them to settle. They push up, compress, hustle, press. The balls they hit into the box in open play are often random and improvised, but they are also persistent.

We are entering the 87th minute. Youth team coach Pat Rice and Theo Foley are standing up in the Arsenal dug-out, urging their team forward - and forward they go, with Adams supplementing the attack whenever he can. Barnes and Aldridge are on the counter-attack now, exchanging neat passes, making up ground, with Richardson in pursuit. It’s then that Richardson goes down, exhausted, cramp-stricken. The game is stopped as he receives treatment. We’re so close to the end. The crowd knows this - the Liverpool supporters have been whistling incessantly for many minutes, imploring the referee to blow for time. McMahon knows this - he raises his right index finger, but as a warning rather than in complacent celebration. He paces the pitch, his finger still raised, the muscular thickness of his pale thighs exaggerated by his tight red shorts. He spits repeatedly, thin jet streams of anxiety. His blue eyes burn. It’s obvious what he’s telling his team-mates: that there’s one minute to go. You can see him saying this, again and again: one minute, only one minute.

“I was just trying to get the team to concentrate, to concentrate hard, and then we’d have another double,” McMahon says. “Even today people come up to me and mention that one-minute-to-go moment. I try to laugh it off, but it still hurts. The whole evening had such a weird atmosphere - because of Hillsborough, because we’d already played the Cup final, because we didn’t have to win the game to be champions.”

The clock is running down - beyond 90 minutes now.

Game on: Adams has the ball and, against his natural style, seeks to carry it with him out of defence and into midfield. He is swiftly dispossessed by Barnes, who, with Adams scampering back after him, dribbles towards the Arsenal box, rather than heading towards the corner flag, where he would have had the chance to hold up play, to run down the clock. There’s something aimless about Barnes’s run, an absence of conviction, like much of his play tonight, and the ball is taken away from him by a recovered Richardson, who slips it neatly to his goalkeeper. From the touchline Theo Foley is screaming at Lukic, urging him to release it. He wants the goalkeeper to kick it long, to punt it up high into the night sky and deep into the Liverpool half. He’s cursing Lukic. Why now the delay, when there’s so little fucking time. For fuck’s sake hit it, fucking hit it. “I was calling him every name under the son,” Foley says. “I couldn’t believe he wanted to throw it out to Dixon.”

Just hit it, man. Even if he can hear Foley raging at him from the touchline, Lukic knows what he must not do - and that’s punt it speculatively upfield. Instead, he throws the ball out to his right-back, Dixon.

Dixon plays the ball long, accurately, and it’s collected by Smith. “I didn’t really want the ball,” Dixon says. “I was running up the pitch, and the next minute the ball comes whizzing out to me. I’m thinking, ‘Why has he done that?’ My first instinct was just to whack it as far as I could up the pitch. But when I looked up Alan Smith had pulled into the hole, and I thought, ‘Well, we can’t score from there but there’s nobody else up front,’ so I had to hit the ball into him.”

Smith receives the pass and, with his usual unostentatious economy of movement, turns to play the ball through to Thomas, rushing forward from midfield, as he has, tirelessly and without reward, throughout the match. “At Anfield there was no clock,” says Smith. “You had no idea of the time, except the whistles of the crowd and George waving us forward. We knew it was getting close. I gathered the ball well from Dixon - it was one of those nights when all my touches came off. I didn’t want to hold it up, so turned at the same time and helped it on to Michael, who was coming through. I jogged after him, and watched what happened next.”

Unmarked and sprinting deep into Liverpool territory, Thomas miscontrols Smith’s pass; the ball spins away, bounces against Nicol before, improbably, falling for Thomas. “How do you explain that?” says Nicol. “The ball is played up, Thomas is running through on it, he miscontrols it, it bounces straight off me and back to him. You try to coach that. When the ball bounced off me it could have gone anywhere, but it just fell perfectly for him. How do you explain that? You can’t, except to say that things happen.”

Sensing danger, Grobbelaar moves towards Thomas just as he reaches the edge of the penalty box. Red-shirted Liverpool defenders are pursuing Thomas. As many as 42,000 spectators are watching inside the ground suspended at a point of heightened crisis. It’s all happening so fast, yet there’s also something curiously hallucinatory about what’s unfolding, as if time itself is being slowed.

Here he comes, Thomas, free, lost to the moment, as he would later describe it. He must know that the defenders are closing on him, must feel the hot rush and strain of their exertion. He has the ball and is moving towards the penalty spot. The goalkeeper is coming towards him. Thomas has the ball. He is waiting for the goalkeeper to commit, just waiting; his momentum carries him forward as he lifts the ball with his right boot up and over Grobbelaar and - look, watch it now, follow it as it goes up and over the goalkeeper and continues on its way into the net. 2-0.

Thomas continues running - how can he stop? - and does a somersault in wild celebration, and begins to writhe and thrash around on the ground, like a huge marlin hooked on a flyline.

Looking down from the directors’ box, Liverpool’s chief executive, Peter Robinson, is in the process of making a phone call. “Barclays, the League sponsors, had provided champagne for the winners,” he says. “The champagne was being chilled in the kitchen of the Main Stand, two floors up from the dressing room. Barclays had stipulated that they wanted the champagne to be in the winners’ dressing-room at the final whistle. When Arsenal scored I rang the kitchen to find out what was happening to the champagne. I panicked when I was told it was already on its way to our dressing room. ‘For God’s sake, get it back,’ I said. ‘Arsenal have just scored again.’ We managed to intercept the champagne and redirect it to the Arsenal dressing room.”

At the final whistle, no one attempts to invade the pitch, nor are the Liverpool fans leaving the ground. They are staying on in their tens of thousands to applaud the new champions. There is no booing. There is only resounding applause. “I looked out and saw the whole crowd clapping,” says Robinson. “I think the Arsenal players and their fans were stunned by that.”

“The goal which won the League championship for Arsenal last season,” wrote David Lacey in the Guardian at the start of the following season, “with the final shot of the first division programme, did more than provide a unique moment in a sport which was beginning to think it had seen everything. The speed and audacity of a movement that took the Kop’s breath away and left Kenny Dalglish standing open-mouthed in disbelief by the Liverpool bench epitomised the healthier qualities of English football as the game approaches the 90s.”

It was August, only a few months after the end of the season, and Arsenal’s title-clinching winner was already being referred to as that goal.

It was already legendary.

For me, there was something cathartic about the whole evening. After all the grief, rage, anger and suffering that had preceded it, here was a game that brought palpable release for nearly all football fans who watched it, with the obvious exception of those who supported Liverpool - and perhaps even for some of them there was release, too - at the fact of the match having taken place, of the season having been completed rather than abandoned. If the home fans had reacted differently to defeat, if they had rioted or raged, or even skulked off in fury at the end of the game instead of staying on to applaud, no one would now remember that night at Anfield as the point at which the fortunes of English football seemed to turn. The fans did not riot. They stayed on to witness Arsenal being presented with the championship trophy, to witness a conquering army sinking the flag of victory into the Anfield turf at the worst possible moment for the home team. The Liverpool fans applauded. It was as if they understood that we were at the start of something new; that there would be no returning to the ways of old. Six weeks after Hillsborough, those fans demonstrated that they understood the real meaning of sporting glory.

The interim report into the Hillsborough disaster by Chief Justice Taylor was published in August (the full report came out in 1990). Its recommendation for all-seater stadiums and its enlightened liberalism changed English football for ever - to the extent that, at a distance of 20 years, one can now speak of the game of football in England as it was before and after Hillsborough, in the same way as one speaks of cinema before and after the advent of sound, as the transition between two epochs, as a moment of profound and irreversible cultural shift. Also in 1989, on 5 February, Murdoch’s Sky Television held a press conference to launch its British service. It was obvious that we were ready for a new contract to be signed between football and society, and in the years ahead it would be Sky’s role to dictate many of the terms and clauses of that new contract, as football began its move from the margins to the centre of the culture.

The last season of the 80s began in August 1988, towards the end of the “Second Summer of Love”, and extended to the following summer. A more benign, less drunken and more druggy and laid-back form of fandom flowed out of the pay parties and nightclubs of the rave scene and on to the terraces, and this found fuller expression at the 1990 World Cup finals in Italy. Italia ‘90 is not remembered for the quality of its football but as a great tournament all the same because, against so many expectations, England excelled. Having reached the semi-finals, where they lost a penalty shoot-out to the eventual winners, Germany, they returned home not as world champions but still with honour. Because the England fans had, on the whole, behaved well in Italy, the ban on English clubs playing in Europe was soon lifted. This was a new start for the national game - it could even be called a renaissance - and it began at Anfield on the evening of 26 May 1989.

• This is an edited extract from Jason Cowley’s book The Last Game: Love, Death and Football, published on 6 April

No 14: Rafa Benítez

Back him He’s finally completed the project he has been working on for the past five years, the dream that has sustained him through all the bad times, that has instilled in him the authentic spirit of Istanbul. The waiting is over: he has signed a new contract.

Sack him Wouldn’t you have done, if you were Gillett and/or Hicks, and you had to put up with all that snippy self-righteous anger, and you were practically run out of town by emotional men in red scarves every time you came to England, and you were supposed to spend all your money on Gareth Barry when you already had Xabi Alonso and Javier Mascherano, and you never won anything, quite, because after five years you’d only got one striker and you couldn’t out-think Stoke?

Best of times 2005, Istanbul, the second half, when Steven Gerrard once again saved his jamón

Worst of times 2009, the dodgy dossier detailing Alex Ferguson’s dastardly doings. Never has a goatee looked more piqued.

Tactical genius Almost wrecking Robbie Keane’s career in order to finally outflank Rick Parry and gain the power to destroy the confidence of overpriced forwards for the next five years.

Do I not like that His annoyance that if he only had another £100m to spend he would win the Premier League every year, honest.

Words of wisdom Kafkaesque. “I don’t think it’s a mind game when you already have control over everything; it’s a mind game when you are on the same level as the other people and you can show you are cleverer than the others.”

View from the technical area “You’re probably as baffled as I am.” Robbie Keane

Hairdryer quotient Too worried about his own grievances to be too concerned what his players might be thinking. They don’t deserve him.

The result may have gone according to the form book, but the manner of Everton’s latest success, and Stoke’s continuing away-day futility, was far from predictable. Should Tony Pulis’s side return to the Championship at the end of the season after one brief and eventful fling in the big time, it will not be through any lack of effort, given the character ­displayed in their second-half fight-back here.

The outcome seemed settled by the interval after goals from Jo and Joleon Lescott had put David Moyes’s FA Cup semi-finalists on autopilot. But Ryan Shawcross’s early second-half goal transformed the game and ensured Everton would have to wait until Marouane ­Fellaini’s 90th-minute deflected goal before they could finally breathe easily.

For long periods of the second half, a repeat of the recent 2-2 draw at Aston Villa, when Stoke recovered from two goals down, had appeared well within their compass. But, ultimately, Stoke have just four points, and no victories, from 15 away games this season, the source of their potential demotion.

“Away from home we have started slowly on lots of occasions. I don’t know whether it’s a lack of belief in the team or going to new grounds,” said Pulis. “And winning away might be a block we have to get over.

“But our destiny is in our own hands, which is brilliant with nine games to go. People have been writing us off since the beginning of the season, but we have nine to go, five at our place, which gives us a fantastic chance of staying up.”

There had not been the slightest hint of second-half drama as Everton coasted ahead. In the 18th minute, a long ball ­forward found Jo, who exchanged passes with Fellaini and took the return ball in his stride before burying a shot under Thomas Sorensen’s dive.

Six minutes later, the keeper was again at fault as a cross from the impressive Leon Osman found the head of Tim Cahill, whose effort was parried by Sorensen. Unfortunately for the keeper, the loose ball fell directly into the path of Lescott, who had the simplest of tasks in forcing the rebound over the goal-line.

Yet the game was turned on its head immediately after the restart, Cahill’s departure with a calf injury significant, and the visitors reduced the deficit after 52 minutes when Liam Lawrence’s accurate corner found Shawcross, who glanced his header beyond Tim Howard and into the far corner.

“Tim was a miss,” Moyes said of the enforced substitution. “And maybe a bit of complacency crept in. That can happen. But Stoke are the type of team who can score quickly out of nothing. They got better and we had to hang in there.”

Stoke’s goal was the signal for a completely unexpected Everton panic, with Ricardo Fuller heading just wide and Shawcross almost converting another dangerous corner from Lawrence, while Salif Diao and Glenn Whelan also ­threatened with long-range attempts.

With Stoke pressing, Everton might have added a cushion four minutes from time, but Sorensen made a double save from Osman and Steven Pienaar to keep the game in the balance until Fellaini controlled Leighton Baines’s long pass and shot home the third with the aid of a deflection in stoppage time.

Wigan Athletic have won a lot of praise but precious few points in a testing two months, but they came to the Stadium of Light with the confident air of a club who suspect they are over the worst. Their first win in nine, thoroughly deserved, puts relegation firmly back on the Sunderland agenda.

Heavy January trading was bound to bring disruption for Wigan, especially when followed by a daunting run of fixtures including trips to Manchester United, Aston Villa and Chelsea. But on this evidence their self-belief has not diminished and first-half goals from two new signings, Ben Watson and Charles N’Zogbia, either side of Grant Leadbitter’s equaliser, showed that their European ambitions cannot be discounted.

Steve Bruce’s stock can only rise if Wigan manage to summon a second wind. “We have played some big teams and we have been unfortunate, but you can’t go six or seven weeks without getting a victory,” he said. “To finish in the top 10 after all our changes would be exceptional.” Watson, an England U21 international playing his second match since joining from Crystal Palace, put them ahead in the 12th minute with a crisp, low shot from just inside the area.

Initially, Sunderland showed few signs of relegation nerves themselves. Chris Kirkland was at his best to save twice from Andy Reid and then Steed Malbranque on the follow-up. Then a run from Kenwyne Jones, whose solo forays constituted Sunderland’s chief danger, ended with another Kirkland stop. They equalised in the 41st minute, courtesy of Leadbitter’s low shot from the edge of the area. But Wigan had shown their ability to forage through Sunderland’s midfield, first through N’Zogbia and then Antonio Valencia. N’Zogbia ran into a cul-de-sac on the first occasion, but got it right at the second attempt, outstripping the Sunderland defence before shooting past Marton Fulop.

Wigan sat back in a dull second half. Sunderland had the ball in the net twice, but Mike Dean was right to rule out both for offside. Titus Bramble and Emmerson Boyce had a stroll at the centre of the Wigan defence as Sunderland’s belief dwindled and plastic bags swirled around in an increasingly disorderly wind. There were shouts of “rubbish” at the whistle and they didn’t come from campaigners for a litter-free Britain.

Ricky Sbragia, Sunderland’s manager, agreed. “I thought we started OK, but it’s the worst we’ve played since I’ve been in charge,” he said.

Blackburn Roversdid something extremely foolish. Sam Allardyce, who wrote the instruction manual on how to frustrate Arsenal for goodness sake, must have been steaming as he watched his team surrender, and duly get cuffed by Arsène Wenger’s revitalised team.

A flurry of goals – and there should have been many more – pushed Arsenal back into the top four for the first time since the Christmas decorations were up. The pressure now switches to Aston Villa, while Arsenal relish the feelgood factor. That was epitomised not only by Andrei Arshavin scoring a pearl of a first goal in English football, but also by the fact Emmanuel Eboué possessed the swagger to insist he should be the man to score from the penalty spot. Arsenal’s inhibitions are evaporating fast.

For that Wenger felt their Champions League triumph in Rome was a turning point. “It lifted the spirits,” he said. “We are playing with freedom again. We cannot drop off now even one or two per cent in any game, but I feel in the dressing room the team is really up for it.”

What a difference an early strike makes. Inside three minutes they cured their nil-nilitis with a home league goal to break a 276-minute barren spell. Nicklas Bendtner carved the opening, twirling into space and threading a pass for Theo Walcott to cross for Arshavin. The little Russian’s shot, which was heading wide until it ricocheted off André Ooijer, ensured he celebrated with a blush.

Not so Arsenal’s second, though, which showcased the diamonds in Arshavin’s boots. He gathered Denilson’s excellent pass, sidestepped Danny Simpson as if he was a training ground cone, and lifted his shot over Paul Robinson from a wafer-thin angle. It was impressive as he had to have four stitches in his foot at half-time and needed to change into bigger boots. Although Blackburn demonstrated some niggly habits – with El Hadji Diouf the chief culprit for a reckless kick at Manuel Almunia’s ankle – Morten Gamst Pedersen mustered a couple of counter punches that might have hurt their hosts before half-time. But Allardyce wrote this one off as “a very bad day” and bemoaned the injury list, which increased as Gaël Givet and Stephen Warnock limped off.

Arsenal created plenty. Samir Nasri belted a free-kick against the crossbar and was a general nuisance. The strategy of having three nimble ball players switching positions around target-man Bendtner was promising.

The 21-year-old was a real handful but miscued when he could have scored a hat-trick. But he only need look at Eboué, described by the PA announcer as “the Arsenal goal machine”, for inspiration. The Ivorian has turned around his reputation, and scored twice – one a tap in and then a cracking penalty – to make it three from the last two home games.

It took Arsenal eight Premier League matches before this one to score four goals. Wenger is convinced their drought is now over. Arsenal at last look like they mean business.

Fulham were handed their first away win of the season, and with it almost certain Premier League survival, by a Bolton performance of sufficient defensive ineptitude to suggest the ­Trotters themselves may yet be dragged back into the relegation mix.

A John Pantsil shot over the bar was the only attempt on goal in the opening 20 minutes, and the half-hour was approaching when the crowd were jerked out of their stupor by the sight of Bolton missing three straightforward chances.

Johan Elmander’s gentle free-kick should have been an easy gather for Mark Schwarzer in the Fulham goal, but the Australian succeeded only in pushing the ball straight back out to the feet of Gary Cahill. Somehow the ­Bolton ­centre-half miskicked not once but twice, but even then the ball sat up perfectly for Gavin McCann. From six yards McCann sliced his volley wide.

Fulham were not to be outdone in ­generosity, though. Bobby Zamora should have buried his shot when McCann failed to head away a Paul Konchesky cross, but his unconvincing effort was too close to Jussi Jaaskelainen.

In the circumstances a goal before half-time seemed an unlikely prospect, but so low was the general standard of play that a mistake was always possible. Sure enough, Andy O’Brien’s attempt to deal with Simon Davies’s through ball resulted in him simply steering the ball past the stranded Jaaskelainen, and Andy Johnson beat the centre-half to the loose ball to put Fulham ahead.

Remarkably, Bolton saved themselves from being booed off by levelling before the break. Kevin Davies chested the ball down to his namesake Mark before finding a yard of space on the right side of the Fulham area to pick up the return pass. Konchesky should have made the tackle, but Davies was allowed to drive his shot low past Schwarzer’s right hand.

Schwarzer was nearly beaten again at the start of the second half, just getting enough on Elmander’s hardly rasping volley to turn the ball around the post. At the other end the painfully laboured Zamora was too slow to see Johnson unmarked in the penalty area, leaving his pass so late that Mark Davies got back to intercept. But Fulham were back in the lead within minutes. The hapless O’Brien again failed to make a simple clearance, and although Andy Johnson stumbled, Danny Murphy went on to shoot against the bar and Simon Davies drove the rebound through the bodies in front of him and over the line.

The goal relaxed Fulham and they started to look something like the team who at times have played so well at home this season. It came as no surprise when McCann’s error paved the way for substitute Diomansy Kamara to make the game safe shortly before the whistle.

The Fulham manager Roy Hodgson insisted his team’s away record had always been more a question of circumstance than travel sickness. “It’s not been a mental block, it’s just been one of those things, because the only games we didn’t do ourselves justice in were at West Ham and Manchester United,” he said. “But it was such an important victory. The way our team has performed this season, it would be unbelievably harsh if we didn’t retain our Premier League status.”

With 37 points, another win will surely do the trick. Bolton might need two and on this evidence might not be entirely confident of getting them.

“You can’t defend like that at any level, let alone this one,” said the home side’s disappointed manager Gary Megson.

Down at the dirty end of the Premier League, emotions are at their rawest. Roundly abused for much of an ugly afternoon, Middlesbrough left the pitch like local heroes after a dramatic injury-time equaliser that, but for a save from David James, would have been converted into an improbable win. In controlled possession of the points for most of the game, Portsmouth crumpled to the turf, trying to comprehend how they had gifted redemption to their relegation zone companions.

Boro were down to 10 men and the dying minutes when they levelled, Marlon King lifting his shot above James after the keeper had saved the first effort on the line. Without it, Middlesbrough would have been four points from safety; with it, Stoke, Pompey and Newcastle, all on 29 points, remain in striking range.

The home fans had been on the backs of their players until King’s intervention, booing many of them and bizarrely expressing approval for Tuncay’s efforts by chanting, “We’ve only got one player”. The manager, Gareth Southgate, did not attempt to hide his upset. “Some of the chants were disrespectful,” he said. “You need everybody with you all the time. The crowd are right to laud Tuncay’s efforts but you win or lose as a team, and other lads may not have been able to have the eye-catching impact but they gave their lot. It’s going to be a collective effort: we will survive as a town and a club by everybody being together. We’re still fighting and that’s important.”

With an extra man in midfield, Portsmouth played more passes and created more chances. Robert Huth dived in to block one David Nugent strike; a second cannoned back off a post. When Emanuel Pogatetz sliced a routine clearance out for a corner, the visitors worked a clever goal. Jermaine Pennant passed short to Glen Johnson, who slalomed halfway across the area before squaring to Peter Crouch. Leaning into one of his angular half-volleys, the striker found the net.

Boro have struggled to recover deficits all season, yet they responded with threatening volleys from King and left-back Andrew Taylor, while Tuncay and Stewart Downing drew fine saves from James. Pompey retrenched with an extra defensive midfielder and, with 15 minutes to go, Boro’s task became harder still, when Martin Atkinson reduced them to 10 men. Over-hitting the ball into the penalty area, Matthew Bates spread-eagled himself under the challenge of Johnson, and the referee saw enough to merit a second yellow, for diving, that was accepted with little protest.

Portsmouth, though, have a habit of conceding late. The home side won a series of corners; James saved from Tony McMahon on the line, but the ball fell to King to turn in his first Boro goal. A minute later, James sprinted out to prevent Afonso Alves taking all three points. “Galling,” said Portsmouth caretaker manager Paul Hart. “It’s very, very disappointing, but if you’d asked me before the game if I’d take a point, I would have said yes.” Before the game, maybe. At the end of the season, maybe not.

Referees were under fire again at Wigan this week, but it’s a distraction from the real problem – an acceptance of thuggery

For every foreign idol who has risked his shins and ankles in the Premier League there is another who has said no to the karate culture that keeps our stretcher bearers on full alert.

There are myriad reasons why the world’s richest league has not enticed Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Paolo Maldini, Luís Figo, Raúl, Ronaldinho, Lionel Messi, Kaká or David Villa, but an aversion to the mother country’s relentless physicality must feature highly. English football remains a game of physical subjugation, with a thin layer of circus skill at the top. Imported maestros, such as Cristiano Ronaldo or Fernando Torres, must decide in the opening hours whether to iron-plate their legs or play a darker self-protecting game of theatricality when the studs come ramming in.

Arsène Wenger’s characterisation of how top players feel when they flee this island for other leagues points to a truth. “You have time to control the ball, to pass, to look around, to say hello to someone in the stands,” the Arsenal manager claimed, deploying familiar comic licence in a week when a 26-year-old referee (Stuart Attwell) was demonised for an admittedly dismal refereeing performance in Wednesday’s Wigan-West Ham game: a match that reaffirmed our status as the European HQ of the leg-breaking leap.

Anyone who denies that we have an endemic problem with high, wide and late potentially limb-snapping “challenges” should be excluded right away from the debate, because plainly they have no idea what they are looking at when Newcastle’s Kevin Nolan stamps on the outstretched shin of Everton’s Victor Anichebe, or Wigan’s Lee Cattermole tries to separate Scott Parker’s legs from his waist.

A rock-bottom moment, the catharsis point, was meant to be the mangling of Eduardo’s leg by Martin Taylor in the early stages of last season’s Birmingham-Arsenal game. While surgeons attended to the young striker’s shattered limb, a consensus seemed to develop that Taylor’s take‑down was certainly reckless, whether malicious or not, and that too often Premier League players were being sent on to the pitch like pit bulls freed from a cage in a round-ball remake of Rollerball.

Unchecked machismo is the British disease, and it explains in part why England have not reached the final of a major tournament since 1966. From the grassroots up to the middle echelons of the top division, our game enshrines power, aggression, combine harvester tackling and lung-busting endeavour over passing, control and ball retention.

Imported players adapt or die. They assert themselves physically or they grow into drama queens. Cristiano Ronaldo has done both. The question, though, after another month of kung-fu capers, is whether we want to carry on like this or shift the arc light from an over-promoted ref whose confusion was exploited by two sets of players to a system of punishments that will save every hospital from having to open an Eduardo ward for Premier League admissions.

As usual, our lighthouse eye falls on the perpetrators and the match officials, without then swinging away to look at the manager and whether he is condoning or encouraging the running jumps we have seen so often again this year.

Wenger thinks we should say to these bandits: “Bye-bye, go home, what are you doing on a football pitch?” But then some of his Arsenal players have their own history of violence, which prompts one to ask whether the Football Association needs to keep a running total of straight red card offences and fine managers at the end of the campaign if they consistently neglect to control their players.

More obviously, those arguing for an automatic review of all violent assaults that have led to a dismissal – and five- or even 10-match bans for the worst offenders – offer the greatest hope of a cure. A club with a big squad can comfortably absorb a three-match holiday for one of their more agricultural tacklers if the gain is the elimination of the opposition’s most gifted player.

There is a deep collective cowardice at play in English football’s lenience towards villainous tackling, which continues precisely because it can.

The mind spins back to the most abhorrent show of thuggery in the Premier League’s whole self-regarding history: Ben Thatcher’s sprint to the touchline and elbow to the skull of Portsmouth’s Pedro Mendes, who was knocked unconscious and crashed into an advertising board. This astonishing assault, which should have brought the police straight on to the pitch with handcuffs, compelled the FA to ignore its own regulations and charge the Manchester City full-back with serious foul play, which earned him an eight‑match ban.

A precedent for intolerance is already there, then, if the authorities care to extend it to ankle-snapping or knee-shredding lunges, but we are more likely to stumble on, with ambulance crews at the ready, and the morning-after jury grumbling: “How bad was that referee?”

Chambers offers unconvincing confession

Dwain Chambers comes clean about running dirty. In his autobiography the busted sprinter invites us to agree that consuming 300 performance-enhancing concoctions in 12 months was a “mistake” rather than a deliberate strategy that came to light only when and because he was caught.

Days before the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, I interviewed Chambers and asked him why he had moved to California. “To find out what makes the Americans tick,” he replied, while his charm-less manager, John Regis policed my line of questioning.

I was sure Chambers was a cheat. His body was an anabolic wallchart. He now alleges in his book that he told Regis over the phone about the drugs programme Victor Conte had mapped out for him. “Be careful. Be very careful,” was the response, he claims, from Regis, who refutes this and has denied any knowledge of Chambers’s drug-taking.

Regis colour-commentated for the BBC on his client’s steroid-induced breakdown in the Commonwealth 100m. How cosy all that was. Chambers wrote a book for one reason only: because he is pot-less. It always puts me in mind of that line from Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales: “Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.”

Sports personality of the year

All the reports said Cheryl Cole was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief, but her other motive must have been to get as far away as possible from her husband, arrested for being drunk and disorderly outside a west London bar on Wednesday night.

While Mrs Cole was trying to drum up money for the BBC charity, her husband was blowing £160,000 on swear words. That fine – two week’s wages at Chelsea – hardly endears us to tin-rattling multi-millionaire climbers. Cashley Cole, though, is entirely faithful to his de-sensitised nature, and we all admire consistency.

Five reasons to go to Cheltenham Festival this week

1 Master Minded, in Wednesday’s two-mile Champion Chase, and Kauto Star, in Friday’s Gold Cup, are the two great dream carriers in a sport that reveres its equine darlings far more than Flat racing’s stallion factory ever has.

2 JP McManus, the betting ring’s “Sundance Kid”, has seven ante-post favourites, so expect tall tales of tsunami plunges and bookies cowering in their cashmere coats.

3 A golden age of National Hunt riding sets Tony “AP” McCoy against Ruby Walsh, Robert “Choc” Thornton, Paul Carberry, Richard Johnson and Sam Thomas, as three whip-wielding members of the McNamara clan – Robbie, Andrew and John Thomas – ride out across Cheltenham’s gruelling undulations.

4 Smaller crowds, probably, and so more room in which to inhale spring’s coming air, with Cleeve Hill as the backdrop, and all the classes crammed together, some only in search of £10 winning bets, others pursuing immortality.

5 The sublime piety that comes from studying a race at breakfast, picking out an animal and watching it burst through the tunnel of noise with its nose in front up Cheltenham’s unforgiving hill. A rare but eternal pleasure.

The relegation battle may be consuming, but that doesn’t mean the Premier League can congratulate itself

If everything goes to expectation this week, all four Premier League representatives will again advance to the last eight of the Champions League, Michel Platini will have something darkly uncomplimentary to say about English funding, Richard Scudamore will revive his interest in taking games around the globe, and everyone will agree that football in this country is the envy of the world.

So why are people here complaining this season’s title race is the most boring for years? Over already, it is being suggested. A one-horse event. Less compelling even than Scotland’s, so that far from being the most exciting in the world, the Premier League is not even the best in Britain.

The answer to that question is twofold. Liverpool have slipped away disappointingly at the top of the table, leaving Manchester United out on their own and Chelsea are most likely to finish runners-up. Again. At the same time, Aston Villa’s buoyancy has diminished, so that while Martin O’Neill is still talking a good game, it is possible to envisage an unusually dreary Arsenal side taking fourth place after all. Which means that nothing will have changed. The Premier League is as predictable as ever, despite illusory signs of competitiveness before Christmas. Same champions. Same top four. Same old, same old. If Rafa Benítez is wondering why people are starting to turn against him, even though he has restored Liverpool’s reputation as one of the best teams in Europe, the answer is simple. The whole country outside Old Trafford has been waiting for somebody, anybody, to knock Sir Alex Ferguson off his perch, and it appears no one is capable. Benítez has had his chance and blown it. Never mind talking about improvement, wait till United “improve” for next season by buying Karim Benzema or David Villa.

Before anyone writes in to complain that the media’s obsession with the Premier League is now shrinking to just the top four positions, let me acknowledge at once that this season could have one of the most intriguing relegation battles for years, and no one in the present bottom 13 can afford to take anything for granted. For a while it appeared Hull and Stoke were sinking after good starts and that all three promoted teams might go back down. That could still happen, although Wednesday’s results proved there is life and unpredictability in every contest yet, with the possible exception of those featuring a West Brom team struggling to score enough to stay up.

Yet defending the Premier League by highlighting the teams in trouble proves the point. There isn’t anything nearly as absorbing going on in the top third of the table. United are too good for everyone else. Liverpool cannot make enough money to match them and Chelsea no longer have the explosive combination of pragmatic team builder and spendthrift owner that briefly caused them problems. Arsenal will almost certainly come back stronger in future seasons, though even with their new ground and London location they are not in United’s financial league.

The only club that might be – at least until Roman Abramovich tires of frugality – is Manchester City, and as long as he only has City to worry about, Ferguson will feel confident about carrying on into his 70s. The Eastlands “project” will not feature in next season’s Champions League, and judging by progress this season may not be significantly closer to cracking the top four this time next year. The self-proclaimed richest club on the planet, with Robinho and Wayne Bridge already on board and plans for everyone from Lionel Messi to John Terry to be targeted in the summer, are currently behind West Ham and level on points with Wigan.

It says much about the nature of competition in the Premier League when the only people able to surprise the pensionable Ferguson are foreign billionaires with money to burn. In almost every other respect the United manager’s job is easier now than it was when he turned up in England in 1986 with Liverpool dominant and half his own team down the pub. The expansion of Old Trafford and constant Champions League income have seen to that, though it could also be said that in 1986 the English league was an autonomous competition, played for its own sake and capable of being won by both Liverpool and Everton, as well as Arsenal and Aston Villa, in the same decade.

It is more of a feeder league now, as indeed is the Champions League itself. It feeds everyone who can get to the trough. For while a great deal of glory and not a little money still accompany the title of European champions, the fact is that accountants are happy just to take part. The amount a club earn by winning the final is estimated at between £80m and £100m, though only one team each season hit the jackpot. Reaching this stage of the competition – that is, qualifying for the knockout stage – is worth around £35-40m, and 16 teams do that. Half will go out this week, some big names among them, almost as down on their luck as Sir Fred Goodwin. And, unlike the former RBS chief, they will all be back next year for more.

Becks and Cole need to go on wife swap

Just before Ashley Cole’s latest misdemeanour, I read somewhere that his missus, the lovely Cheryl, had replaced Victoria Beckham as the nation’s favourite glamourpuss.

Hang on a minute, I thought, that’s not quite right. It was Victoria’s husband who used to be the nation’s favourite glamourpuss. Even at her peak, Posh was never more than a two-dimensional object of mild curiosity, the attraction not being immediately obvious, and she continues to be about as popular with the nation as Yoko Ono in 1969.

Yet the Coles do resemble the Beckhams, the dynamics of the relationships are almost exactly the same. It’s just a case of role (and gender) reversal. Cheryl Cole is deservedly the nation’s new favourite; she is as good at what she does and as winsome when doing it as David Beckham. Which just leaves Ashley – what on earth does she see in him? – to be the new Posh.

For clubs and fans, Deadline Day is the most frenetic date in the football calendar. Tom Lamont goes behind the scenes as Arshavin arrives, Robbie returns, and Santa Cruz stays put

2 February, 10.53am
It is snowing, which seems fitting, as today is Christmas Day at Sky Sports News. A channel watched religiously in football clubs, newspaper offices, and the homes of obsessive sport fans - and disregarded as one of those fringe channels in the upper hundreds by almost everyone else - SSN assumes a special importance when the football transfer window closes twice a year. By tradition, these are days of last-minute bumper deals, unexpected gazumpings, and wild, rampant speculation, for all of which this channel becomes a funnel. And the freak snowfall has cheered the team, based in Isleworth in west London, for another reason. “It’s a day of mass, industrialised truancy!” booms presenter Jim White (he always booms), patrolling the studio before his afternoon shift begins. “Everyone will be at home watching!”

12.30pm
“Stand by for the Arshavin report,” says a producer in the gallery, a dark, hot box packed with dozens of monitors and staffed by people who all talk without pause. “Let’s get an ‘Exclusive’ graphic up if we can!” Because the news that Andrei Arshavin is over in the UK, negotiating a transfer from Zenit St Petersburg to Arsenal, is an exclusive of sorts for the channel, following a bit of good fortune during the night. Sky’s golf team, stationed in Dubai for the Desert Classic and in the same hotel as the Zenit team, did a bit of eavesdropping and discovered the Russia striker was in London; Sky cameras were promptly whizzed down to a Hertfordshire hotel to record Arshavin loitering outside. “The Arsenal fans got there almost as quickly as our journalists,” says head of sports news Andy Cairns. “We should sign some of them up, they were there quicker than Setanta.” (Setanta Sports News serves as an obvious enemy, regularly and affectionately mocked. “We’ve been going a lot longer,” shrugs Cairns.) Back in the gallery, the director orders a switch to the Emirates Stadium, where reporter Bryan Swanson is out in the snow, waiting for news. He will be there a long time.

Taking clearer shape, in the studio-cum-newsroom that can be seen on TV over the shoulders of SSN’s presenters, is a story about Liverpool striker Robbie Keane, apparently on his way to London to meet Tottenham. “Does anyone know where Spurs have their medicals?” asks a reporter in the newsroom, and everyone picks up a phone, squeezing contacts for information. “Does Holly House definitely have an MRI scanner?” - “Hi Dad, just a quick one: what’s that private hospital you went to in Chigwell?…” “Hypothetically, where would you go if you were having a medical with Tottenham?”

This last one is reporter Andy Burton, talking to a mystery footballer. He has proudly shown me a list of telephone numbers on his mobile: 615 players, agents, club officials and managers, from Arsène Wenger to Zat Knight. As well as ferreting for information about Keane, he is digging into a possible deal between Inter Milan and Tottenham. This is a favour to two policemen who helped him out that morning. “They dug my car out of the snow,” says Burton. “Not a word. But just as I was driving away one shouted, ‘Is Jermaine Jenas staying at Spurs?’” There doesn’t seem much substance to the Jenas story - Burton will later scotch it on air - but he is getting text messages about a far bigger deal: the long-rumoured, big-money move of Roque Santa Cruz from Blackburn to Manchester City. It finally seems to be happening.

And so, amid the routine comings and goings of a closing transfer window - Wigan’s Henri Camara bought by Stoke City, Coventry’s Michael Mifsud loaned to Barnsley, Bristol City’s Dele Adebola will not move - the day’s main plots take shape. Robbie to Spurs, Roque to City, Andrei to Arsenal.

2pm
Andy Burton is on set, delivering an update on the latest rumblings. His nickname is Four Phones, dreamt up by executive producer Cairns because fewer devices would not be enough for the number of calls he makes. “He is 50-odd, he doesn’t get it,” says Burton. “He thinks the more phones you’ve got the busier you are.” In fact, Four Phones has one phone; the other presenters usually put theirs in front of him when he’s on air, while a special overhead camera gets footage of him fiddling with the handsets.

Transfer deadline day has made Burton a cult hero. During the rest of the year, he is a travelling reporter, with a patch that covers Liverpool’s Champions League games and Irish internationals. But twice a year he is transformed into the channel’s transfer-talk sage, because of the unusually large number of people in the closed-mouthed world of football who will speak to him.

A running joke involves players, watching at home, calling Burton while he is on air. It happens now. “Leroy Lita thinks he’s funny…” says Burton, his phone buzzing in the middle of a report. “Answer it!” shouts a producer. Seconds later, there’s another call. “Tell us who it is!” shouts the producer (it’s Micah Richards). There’s a third call, but the gallery are tired of the joke. “Leave it,” says the producer. “Keep it tight, boys.”

2.30pm
Sharply suited and airbrushed an alarming shade of orange, presenter Simon Thomas is doing some final research before taking over as an anchor. His 3-7pm shift will straddle the final two hours of the window, plus its untidy aftermath as rushed deals, many disrupted by the snow, are processed by the FA. He is worried the Arshavin move, a story the team are banking on, will run out of time before the 5pm deadline.

“It continually amazes me,” says Thomas, “how often clubs leave deals until the last minute.” Last January, more than a third of the Premier League’s deals were completed the day the window shut. Why so late? Burton believes it’s contingency, with teams playing so many games in January that they need to keep their options open for as long as possible in case of injuries. Pressed, he adds money as a factor. “Leave it until the last minute and you can back someone into a corner.”

Burton has to be careful not to become a part of the corner-backing, preferring to make the calls himself because “the ones that call me are the ones who want to engineer moves”. Instead, most of his tips come from “a couple of good, close footballer mates who will phone me and keep me in the loop”. What’s in it for them? They do it as a favour, he says, “because they like what we’re doing and I’ve built up a relationship. You might have an agent who needs to send a DVD to a club in Greece to get their player a move,” says Burton. “They ask me to get them his last 10 goals on DVD. So I do it for them and say, ‘You’d better pay me back on deadline day…’”

Sometimes information comes from stranger sources: cleaning ladies in airports, commuters on the Liverpool to London train. This was how the Keane story emerged. “We were told: ‘He’s on a train,’” says Cairns. “But it was from a good source. We’ve got good antennae for time-wasters.” “You have to assume that everything could be true until it’s proved otherwise,” says Brendan Henry, one of the newsroom chiefs. “What’s the harm in making one call to check it out?”

2.59pm
With two hours until the window shuts, Jim White and Simon Thomas are ready to take over on the front desk. Thomas gets a final orange top-up from the make-up assistant, while White exchanges a last bit of transfer banter with the production team (”Gary O’Neill? Cash plus player?”). Wearing jeans under his crisp, navy suit, he settles in at the desk, ready to babble non-stop about Charles N’Zogbia, Olivier Dacourt and obscure Argentinian striker Juan Carlos Menseguez for the next four hours. “Doors to manual!” bellows White. They go live.

3.50pm
The Santa Cruz deal is stuttering, and Burton can’t hide his disappointment. Minutes earlier, he had sidled over to show me a piece of paper on which he had scrawled “Santa Cruz, £20m, 90% certain”. But a text from a source suggests the move is now off. “None of this is bluffing, trying to look better than other channels,” Burton told me earlier. “If we make a mistake, and sometimes we do make a mistake, because we’re relying on trust, it’s an honest mistake.”

Around the studio, spirits have lowered. None of the big stories has come to the boil, and there is a fear that this will not be the epic window-closure the team wanted. “We could do with one of the big deals kicking in now,” says White.

The memory of last transfer-deadline day hangs over the team, discussed with the misty reverence of soldiers recalling a battle. Last September, in a dozen hours of pure footballing madness, Man City were bought out by Arab royalty, Dimitar Berbatov engaged in a bizarre public flirtation with Manchester United, and the British transfer record was smashed when Robinho was plucked from under Chelsea’s noses by newly wealthy City. “I had a call from someone who said Michael Owen was going to City,” remembers Burton. “I phoned one of the players that I’m friends with at Newcastle. He phoned the assistant manager, and came back to me, saying, ‘I don’t think Owen’s going to go… but I think Kevin Keegan has quit.’ Chaos.” Burton looks up wistfully. “It was the best day of my life, apart from when my son was born. Best day of my life.”

Today is not so special. He has just received a text message from the press officer at Fulham, revealing the exclusive news that Elliot “Junior” Omozusi has joined on loan. “Who the fuck cares!” he giggles, before going on air to “break” the story. Minutes later he gets another message from Fulham: “Sarky bastard!”

4.20pm
Action at last, as Spurs confirm the signing of Robbie Keane. “That’s what we wanted!” roars White. A director in the gallery promises, “Things will hot up now,” and things do. Making a quick call on his mobile during an advert break (all the presenters do this - a skilful use of three minutes that always looks as if it will backfire), White hears whispers that Portuguese winger Ricardo Quaresma, once Tottenham-bound, will be poached by Chelsea. Revitalised by the tip, the newsroom comes to life: reporters press their contacts; someone runs forward with a text from Tottenham; Burton fiddles with his one-phone. Ten minutes after the first hint, a second source is found. Burton runs to his seat on set - “Good, good, good, good” - and goes live with the story. “We’re hearing rumblings that Chelsea are in the hunt…”

4.45pm
Another advert break and another hurried call, as Jim White gets through to Blackburn chairman John Williams (”I really appreciate you telling me that, John. Can I quote you?”). He confirms that Santa Cruz’s move is off. After 11 years at Sky, White has a contacts book that makes Burton’s look like a scrawled-on napkin. “There aren’t many people Jim doesn’t have on his phone,” Thomas tells me. “If it ever gets lost, we’ll all be in trouble.” As the 5pm deadline approaches, White’s leg starts jiggling uncontrollably under the desk; he is now permanently shouting, even when speaking to colleagues feet away. “They tell us to rein it in!’ he says. “But when it goes mental, I have to unleash!”

5.17pm
The window has been shut for 17 minutes, closing in rather anti-climatic fashion: the day’s big deal, Arshavin’s move to Arsenal, is far from complete. But a reporter has spotted a story from a news agency in France, quoting a Zenit official that the deal is off. Everybody leaps up. “Can we report this?”; “One person’s saying it’s on, one person’s saying it’s off”; “Most. Convoluted. Transfer. Ever”; “We’ll have to whack a right good health warning on it”; “We can’t dismiss the source just because it’s French.” The news editor receives a mysterious call from a member of the public - someone voices suspicions of “a Setanta mole” - while another reporter says they’ve heard that the legal papers are already with the FA. Brian Swanson, who is moving into his 10th hour in the snow outside the Emirates, hasn’t heard anything new. “Arsenal have only had a whole fucking month to do this,” moans the news editor.

Rising from his chair with a sigh, all but hoisting up his trousers by the gunbelt, Burton unplugs his phone from its charger. “I’m going to do something I didn’t want to have to do,” he says, stepping into the corridor - and calling up A for Arsène Wenger.

7.01pm
Whooping, back-slaps, high fives. The scene is like that in a changing room after an FA Cup victory, with perhaps a touch of the triumphant Nasa control room at the end of Apollo 13. After almost two hours of floundering following the window closure, when nobody is sure what or how much to say about the Arshavin switch, a breakthrough. Wenger, who had been ignoring Burton’s calls for an hour, finally answered, and in a 40-second conversation confirmed that Arshavin would sign for Arsenal.

“I’m just glad there’s been a twist,” says White, his face still flushed from the final moments. “There was the usual claim and counterclaim, but it was terrific fun.” He and Thomas, after four hours in the hot seats, trot off to the toilet. “We’ve got iron bladders,” says Thomas. “And I’m wearing incontinence pants,” shouts White. Burton stands in a corner, enjoying his moment. “Apparently the rest of us had been working on the Arshavin story all day…” says the news editor, slapping him on the back. An outdoor reporter calls in from the snow: “You’re everywhere, you. Like chickenpox. Like syphilis.”

As the night shift arrive to take over, the day team begin to make their way home in the snow. Burton decides to hang around, to see the window closure through to midnight. There won’t be another transfer deadline day until Monday 31 August, and next week he’ll be back outside Anfield, getting ribbed by players who will repeatedly ask how many mobiles he’s carrying. “Good stuff, mate,” says a departing reporter, giving Burton a final high-five. “Until the next window…”

My transfer deadline day

Sam Allardyce (Blackburn Manager)

I was at the training ground in the morning with the players. Then I let them go and went to meet the chairman, John Williams. On deadline day you have to share information with each other, so that when anything happens you are ready to make a decision. You don’t want to be doing business this late, but we knew there would be offers for our players. So we sat down and decided: we’d make a stand and refuse all of them. Yes, we’d be near the phones, willing to speak, but we would resist all offers. Not only for Roque Santa Cruz, a well-publicised target, but at least three other attempted signings.

I was slightly concerned at certain times during the day, because offers come your way that seem far too big to resist - especially in Roque’s case. Lots of agents speak to Sky Sports News; we generally know where the leaks come from. Agents try to do the best for their clients and they use the media to panic managers and chairmen into making speculative deals, but that wouldn’t happen here. It is the last chance to sign some cover for your team; you are thinking: “Have we got enough players? Will someone get injured or get a long-term suspension?” These questions are what make people jump into the market. That’s why there’s so much price inflation on that day.

I left the club at around 4pm. I thought: “I’m going home, that’s it.” I was very relaxed. We were all glad when it was 3rd February.
Chris Brereton

Chris Nathaniel (Agent & business manager)

My day started at 7am and finished some time after midnight. I was juggling five or six clients who were potentially moving clubs and the day was extremely high-pressured. It’s almost like the stock exchange; phones going off all over the place, people shouting, everyone on red alert.

If a player is disenchanted at their club and wants to move, they are just desperate on deadline day - it’s their last hope of getting out of a bad situation. Some players will phone every second of the day, asking the same questions. One of my clients, Yssouf Koné, [pictured, of Romanian side CFR Cluj], was close to a move to a Premier League club, but he was very relaxed about it. We knew three or four teams were desperate for a striker, but Koné’s move was subject to a lot of deals for other players. I had to skate between clubs, while monitoring other deals. In case a deal was struck, we had a lawyer on stand-by to sort the work permit, and a private jet on stand-by in Romania too. That cost around £25,000.

It was very tough trying to balance everything but we had made sure we had all our ducks in a row, prior to the deal getting struck. I’d done all the pre-sale stuff in the weeks before, telling the managers: “He’s going to improve your club, he’s a good lad.” That’s the worry for managers in the January window - they could end up taking someone who sounds right, before finding out they’re not the sort of personality they want at their club.

Koné’s move didn’t happen. A big part of it is managing your player’s expectations. You need to be honest with them, not tell them they’re definitely moving when in fact a deal is a million miles from being struck. TLa

Charles N’Zobgia (Premier League player)

The deal that took me from Newcastle United to Wigan happened very quickly over the weekend. On transfer deadline day [Monday] I woke up in a hotel in Wigan, near the JJB Stadium, ready to complete the move. I was up early.

I travelled to the JJB with my agent. The medical test was first, and then the contract signing with the director happened at midday. The press were there to take pictures, but I didn’t get my first “Charles N’Zogbia” Wigan shirt until the next day. Me and my agent agreed to give some of the money from the deal to charity [a children's hospital in Wigan and a cancer hospice in the north-east that is treating N'Zogbia's first Newcastle manager, Bobby Robson].

After signing I met some of the players: Titus Bramble, whom I knew from Newcastle, Antoine Sibierski, Mido. You check each other out, you talk, shake hands. I couldn’t train with them that day because of the medical and signing the contract, but I knew my first session was the next morning, so I didn’t do anything special for the rest of the day. I chilled at the hotel and watched some television - ITV, nothing I remember. I flicked on to Sky Sports News and saw a bit about myself, but I don’t normally like to watch it. I remembered I had a DVD so I put it on - American Gangster with Denzel Washington.

I had dinner on my own at the restaurant in the hotel, just some pasta. I was in bed by nine o’clock, ready for training with my new team the next day.

I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to my friends in Newcastle that weekend because things went so quickly. But I went back a week later to pack up some stuff from my old house - I live in a place in Bolton now - and saw some of them to say goodbye.
TLa