Which are your favourite matches of all time?

can include your team or other teams

for me

AC Milan 3-3 Liverpool(cracking game of football)
Chelsea 4-4 Liverpool(very good end to end game)
Chelsea 4-3 Bolton(Chelsea were 4 nil up and we managed to score 3)
Man Utd 1-2 Bolton( i think it was our first season in the premier league too)
Bolton 1-0 Atletico Madrid ( great day plus only cost me a £1)
Bolton 2-1 Blackburn ( in the 2010/2011 and also 2011/2012 season , the first one because Holden scored 49 seconds after Diouf equalised for Blackburn and the second one because it was the first game after Fabrice Muamba suffered a cardic arrest so it was quite an emotional game)

For me;

Man Utd 1-6 Man City (just the statement game of that season)
Many of the games from Liverpool's 2005 Champions league run, unbelievable
Norwich 3-2 Derby (Simeon Jackson's 95th minute winner to all but send us up)
Spurs 1-2 Norwich (we won a game against a Champions League chasing side with Adam Drury, Elliot Ward, Bradley Johnson and Aaron Wilbraham starting. Digest that)
Arsenal 3-3 Norwich (one of the best games of football I've ever seen. The term end to end doesn't do this game justice)

Chelsea 2-1 Liverpool - final day of the 02/03 season. Zola's last competitive game. Gronkjaer scored what turned out to be the goal that saved the club from decline, and possible relegation by 06, clinched 4th and UCL football. That's what attracted Roman to the club. And the rest is history.
Arsenal 1-2 Chelsea - UCL quarter final 2nd leg 03/04. Bridge scored the winner with 2 minutes left and Arsenal needed to score two more.
Bolton 0-2 Chelsea - Lampard double to win the title 04/05.
Chelsea 3-0 Man United - 05/06 season. 35th game of the season for both teams. Chelsea needed a point to win the title and smashed them. Even Carvalho scored on a counter.
Chelsea 1-0 Portsmouth - FA Cup final 2010. Another Drogba goal at Wembley and our first ever double.
Bayern Munich 1-1 Chelsea - Erm...... that night in Munich

Chippenham Town 2-3 Bedford Town - 05/06 Southern Football League Premier Division playoff final. After losing there in the previous seasons semi we marched back down South and did them in their own back yard to clinch promotion to the Conference South. Which turned out to be possibly the worst thing that could've happened to the club.

united 4 city 3.. the owen last minute winner
united 2 bayern 1... shouldn't need explaining really
united 1 liverpool 0 - the fa cup final against our biggest rivals, cantonnaaa!!!!
liverpool 0 united 1 - o'shea last minute winner right in front of the kop, met o'shea on his stag do in ibiza few years after. obviously said this was his favorite moment

Brighton 2-1 Doncaster - Words can't describe that day, everything went to plan. Just the complete "I was there" moment. 

Brighton 4-3 Dagenham and Redbridge - Last week night game at Withdean. Amazing game, promotion and a pitch invasion.

Brighton 2-2 Man City (5-3 on pens) - A full strength Man City team back then, against a Brighton side horrific in league one, amazing that we matched them for 120 minutes and when Matt Richards tucked the winning spot away just mental, me and Kasper Schmichal crashed into each other!

Man City 3-2 QPR - Best ever moment in the Premiership. Just amazing. Can you imagine being a city fan! But in all seriousness, that is why we all love football and why it is easily the best sport in the world without question. 

Untied 2-1 Bayern - I was very young, but i still watch it on youtube. Doesn't need explaining.

West Ham 3-4 Tottenham - One of the best Sunday afternoon games i have ever watched, for some reason i just loved this game. Amazing game.

Man Utd 1-0 Barcelona, the Scholes piledriver and the brilliant rear guard effort, Parks running stats were off the charts

Man Utd 1-0 Liverpool, my favourite Cantona moment

Man Utd 2-1 Bayern Munich. 20Legend

Man Utd 2-1 Arsenal, the red card, the penalty save and then THAT goal

great shout on the fa semi v arsenal hammer, that would be in mine as well. had everything that game

Villa 6 Blackburn 4.
Was there. Running onto the pith at full time and jumping around like a kid who got what he wanted for xmas was great.

Villa 5 Blues 1
Great to give them a hammering.

Also our 2 Coca Cola cup wins in the 90's against Man Utd & Leeds.

Portsmouth 7 Reading 4, don't see to many of those.

games that not involved with my team as a neutral would have to be

2 x Liverpool 4 Newcastle 3 - while being anything but a liverpool fan, they did us a favour in the first one of these and both were great games

would also like to add uniteds 8-2 win over arsenal, and the 5-3 comeback against spurs to my original list

As a neutral, the Liverpool champions league final and the United champions league final, plus the united 4-3 over City.

Beating Spurs 3-0 was fun but games like Blackpool in the playoffs, a game with Wigan a few years back we had to win, the 2-1 10 men win over Millwall. West Ham Bradford was a cracker too

Oh, and the 1-0 over United at Old Trafford to stay up

Got to say C&R that games that don't involve either United or England are quickly forgotten, don't think i've watched any game this season that we've not played in.

going a bit old school and not much coverage but the stanley matthews cup final was a bit of a classic. i only know so much about it because i had to do a 5000 word essay on it in uni

Hammersmith harrier wrote:Got to say C&R that games that don't involve either United or England are quickly forgotten, don't think i've watched any game this season that we've not played in.

i struggled thinking of games not including us (Liverpool v Newcastle being the obvious example), its the nature of being a fan, the game with your own team means so much more and we have had a few classics over the years as well.

Liverpool 3-3 AC Milan
Liverpool 3-3 West Ham
England 3-2 Sweden

Arsenal 3 Utd 2 - 79 cup final
Brazil 2 Italy 3 - 82 world cup
Liverpool 4 Newcastle 3 - (both)
England 2 Argentina 2 - 98 world cup
Wimbledon 2 Wycombe 2 - 2001 fa cup
Germany 1 England 5
Liverpool 3 Milan 3
Liverpool 4 Arsenal 4 - 2009

England 4 Germany (W) 2, think it was mid 60's sometime...  
England 4 Holland 1 Euro 96
Port Vale 4 QPR 4 QPR 4 down after 65 and scored 3 in the last 10.
QPR 6 Crystal Palace 0 to stay up in the second tier on goals scored
Man U 1 QPR 4 New Years day 92, 3 up in 8 mins Denis Bailey hat-trick
Liverpool 3 Milan 3 biggest turnaround I've seen, Liverpool were battered, nowhere, also rans. Bang.

Portsmouth 5 vs Arsenal 2
The start of the love affair of a lifetime.

Wimbledon v Liverpool in the league cup in 1993. We won on a penalty shoot out. Great game.

AFC Wimbledon's first ever game. A 4-0 win over Sutton Utd. Special moment.

As a neutral, Liverpool 4-3 Newcastle. Collymore scoring the winner causing Kevin Keegan to drop his head in despair. Such a great end to end game of football and a good advert for the Premier League.

Also as a neutral, Doncaster 5-1 Southend. League 1 Play off semi final 2nd leg which sent Donny to the final against Leeds, which they went on to win at Wembley. Doncaster were outstanding that day, everything they did worked perfectly.

Probably the most remarkable match ever played in the history of English football.  I didn't see the game, but heard about it often as a boy from others who had been there.  In December 1956, at The Valley, Charlton Athletic played Huddersfield Town in an ordinary second division match.  

The Huddersfield manager had a decision to make about whether or not to play his new young striker, and chose against it, thinking he would be able to win the game without him.  With less than twenty minutes to go, that decision seemed to be vindicated.

Huddersfield led 5 - 1 and Charlton were reduced to 10 players (no subs in those days).  Suddenly, things went mad.

Charlton's right winger, Johnny Summers, moved infield to play as an extra striker and scored.  5 - 2.  He scored again.... and again.... and again.....  With seconds remaining, he scored his  fifth goal to put Charlton 6 - 5 up.  Incredible.  The game was into injury time as Huddersfield kicked off, went straight downfield and equalised.  6 - 6.

That surely had to be it, but no.  Charlton kicked off again and launched one final attack, where their South African born striker Stuart Leary hit the winning goal.  Final score, Charlton Athletic 7  Huddersfield Town 6.

Lots of things surrounded that match that day.  Summers five goals in 17 minutes for one.  Nobody has ever bettered that feat.  Huddersfield Town are the only team in English league history to score 6 goals in a match away from home and lose.

Two years later, Johnny Summers died from lung cancer.  The striker who wasn't chosen for that match was a young Denis Law.  If he had played, who knows what the score might have been..!!
 
The Huddersfield manager of that day said that he learned a lesson from that match.... that no game is ever lost and you must believe you can win, right to the final whistle, a message he drummed into his teams throughout the rest of his managerial career.  His name?  Bill Shankly.

Another one I can think of, was the fa cup tie? between Spurs and Man City.

Spurs were 3-0 up, only to see City come back to win 4-3, might have been 5-3.

Am sure someone will correct me.
Some comeback though.

westisbest wrote:Another one I can think of, was the fa cup tie? between Spurs and Man City.

Spurs were 3-0 up, only to see City come back to win 4-3, might have been 5-3.

Am sure someone will correct me.
Some comeback though.

4-3, great game. Also, Barton was sent off for City at half time.

Oldham 3 Sheff Weds 2. Oldham where 2 nil down at one point and went on to win with a last min pen scored by Neil Redfearn to win the old Div2 championship last game of the season. West Ham had finished a few minutes earlier and where celebrating on their pitch thinking they had won the league lol.

westisbest wrote:Another one I can think of, was the fa cup tie? between Spurs and Man City.

Spurs were 3-0 up, only to see City come back to win 4-3, might have been 5-3.

Am sure someone will correct me.
Some comeback though.

Yes that was amazing. Last minute header from Jon Mackan.

The Fourth Lion wrote:Two years later, Johnny Summers died from lung cancer

 
 
Not surprising he probably celebrated that night by smoking about 40 Woodbine cigarettes! That story just reminds me of the Baddiel & Skinner sketch 'old football was crap'

BlueCoverman wrote:

The Fourth Lion wrote:Two years later, Johnny Summers died from lung cancer

 
 
Not surprising he probably celebrated that night by smoking about 40 Woodbine cigarettes! That story just reminds me of the Baddiel & Skinner sketch 'old football was crap'

Of course it does. Thank you for that articulate, fascinating and insightful offering, Essex man.

I guess I asked for that!  

It is a remarkable story of course and one that will forever have it's place in the record books, but is the observation that I made such an unreasonable one? 7-6 is one of those scorelines more akin to the school playground when all the kids want to play up front and nobody wants to defend. Or the pub teams in the Sunday morning league where the ageing and immobile back four are held together by knee and ankle supports but are desperate not to hang up the boots and enrol at the local golf club just yet.

Summers five goals in 17 minutes is amazing and is almost certainly a feat that will never be bettered. But did nobody in the Huddersfield side think that tactically it might be a good idea at some stage to man-mark him? Didn't they play in a formation of 2-3-5 in those days? I wonder why it didn't catch on.

Germany 1 England 1 - 1990 world cup

A neutral may disagree but this was a nail biting game, and one we could have won.

BlueCoverman wrote:I guess I asked for that!  

It is a remarkable story of course and one that will forever have it's place in the record books, but is the observation that I made such an unreasonable one? 7-6 is one of those scorelines more akin to the school playground when all the kids want to play up front and nobody wants to defend. Or the pub teams in the Sunday morning league where the ageing and immobile back four are held together by knee and ankle supports but are desperate not to hang up the boots and enrol at the local golf club just yet.

Summers five goals in 17 minutes is amazing and is almost certainly a feat that will never be bettered. But did nobody in the Huddersfield side think that tactically it might be a good idea at some stage to man-mark him? Didn't they play in a formation of 2-3-5 in those days? I wonder why it didn't catch on.

I'm not at all sure that tactical formations really came into the thinking of many players, Blue.   Footballers were more inclined to do what was necessary to win the game, rather than robotically follow 'patterns' and 'keep their shape' as their modern counterparts have drummed into them from day one.  

A particularly telling quote by Tommy Lawton sums up the professional footballer's attitude at the time when asked by a reporter what he thought of the FA appointing a continental style coach for the first time.  He replied:   "I don't need to be taught how to head a football, and you're not going to tell me that some Hungarian schoolteacher is going to teach Stanley Matthews how to dribble.  Coaches?  Who needs 'em."

In the case of this particular match, Johnny Summers saw that things weren't going too well, and pretty much took it upon himself to move off the wing where he hadn't had very much to do and play as an additional central attacker.    Huddersfield didn't pick up on it until he'd scored a couple of goals and then I presume panic must have set in.  A modern manager would be apoplectic at a player doing something off his own initiative and I can just imagine him running into the 'technical area' waving his little folder of charts and schematics to tell the errant individual to get back into the 'tactical plan' and stop being such a maverick.  Sod winning the game, just make sure you lose according to the plan.

Actually, you may be surprised to know that high scoring matches were much more frequent in the post war years.  I think (somebody please put me right if I'm incorrect on this point) it was Charlton Athletic who became the first club to score and concede 100 goals in a season, and they weren't alone in reaching one or the other of those particular landmarks at that time.  In 1957 / 58, the top three teams in the old Second Division (now the pointlessly named 'Championship') scored 301 goals between them.  The fans got their moneys worth in them there days..!!

I know it sounds a bit old fart-ish of me to say this, but I'm sometimes a bit irritated by the modern player.  They have their controlled diets, their strict health regimes, their conditioning programmes and everything else that makes them into finely honed athletes.  The players I watched in my childhood lived on suet, drunk like fish, really did smoke woodbines.... untipped.... and played on quagmire pitches wearing kit that weighed a ton by half time from all the water it had soaked up.  The average league striker would travel to the match on the local bus, play the game, score a couple of goals, have a pie and a pint in the pub and then clock on for the evening shift down the pit.

And yet....  they never complained of being 'tired' because they had to play on Wednesday as well as Saturday.  There was no squad rotation, no substitutions to take a player off after 70 minutes to 'rest' him for the next match and they even played on Christmas Day, often with a return fixture the very next day.  When West Ham played Plymouth Argyle one Christmas Day in the 1950's, both teams travelled back to the west country together on the same train for the next day return fixture.

You come across as being quite dismissive of 'old football' and I think that is a bit unreasonable.  The game was different then and it really was a working man's game.  I'm not saying it was better or worse.  There is much to admire in the modern game, but you could forgive me for snorting in derision when I hear players whingeing about being 'tired' because they've played twice in a week, and it's all too much for them.

To quote my old dad, gawd rest 'im, they don't know they're born.

 Thanks for that post Lion, most interesting. In hindsight I do agree that I was unreasonably dismissive and for that I apologise.
 
Your comment regarding a player "clocking on for the evening shift down the pit" reminded me of a charity dinner that I was fortunate enough to attend last year. One of the after dinner speakers was Cliff Jones the Welsh winger who was part of the legendary Spurs 1960-61 double-winning side. He was asked what was his greatest match and he quoted the famous Wales 2-1 victory over England in 1955 in which he scored the winning goal.
 
He then went on to tell us that at the time he was also doing an apprenticeship at the local pit near his town. On the Monday morning he reported for his shift at 7.30am when the foreman came over to him and said:-
 
"Well done on Saturday son, now let's get some proper f*****g work done"

BlueCoverman wrote: Thanks for that post Lion, most interesting. In hindsight I do agree that I was unreasonably dismissive and for that I apologise.
 
Your comment regarding a player "clocking on for the evening shift down the pit" reminded me of a charity dinner that I was fortunate enough to attend last year. One of the after dinner speakers was Cliff Jones the Welsh winger who was part of the legendary Spurs 1960-61 double-winning side. He was asked what was his greatest match and he quoted the famous Wales 2-1 victory over England in 1955 in which he scored the winning goal.
 
He then went on to tell us that at the time he was also doing an apprenticeship at the local pit near his town. On the Monday morning he reported for his shift at 7.30am when the foreman came over to him and said:-
 
"Well done on Saturday son, now let's get some proper f*****g work done"

Thanks for being so gracious regarding our 'verbal fencing', blue. No apology necessary, but it says much for you. Thank you.

I do indeed remember Cliff Jones as a very tall, lean right side winger who played for Spurs for many years. Indeed, not only did he win the cup with them in the year that they did the double, but he was also the Spurs substitute in the 1967 FA Cup Final against Chelsea which, incidentally, was the first ever all-London cup final.

I must say, I also enjoy functions such as the one you mentioned. Former players who have had long careers often make excellent after dinner speakers.

Cliff Jones's brother (or was it cousin), Ken Jones was the Footie Correspondent for the Daily Mirror for many years/decades.

And, on the other Tottenham wing was Simon Dyson's Uncle Tel.