This week Reading and Arsenal played an amazing game of football in the Capital One Cup (the League Cup in old money). They shared twelve goals between them with the London club winning 7-5.
Reading went 4-0 up but as half time approached Arsenal got a goal back. It is not known what Gunners manager Arsene Wenger said at half time but his team certainly out-gunned the opposition after the break.
It was a remarkable game but it is not the first time Reading has conceded seven goals. On the 29 September 2007 they lost 7-4 to Portsmouth in the Premier League. Two months later they were defeated 6-4 by Arsenalֳ North London rivals Tottenham.
If you want entertainment you should watch Reading.
High scoring games
Any follower of British football who also partakes in pub quizzes will know that the highest scoring British game ever was between Arbroath and Bon Accord. The game finished with Arbroath winning by an amazing 36-0.
The game was played in September 1885 before the age of substitutions. So it would be easy to assume that the goalkeeper was injured. That in the early stages he had required first aid supplies and could not keep goal properly.
Bon Accordֳ goalkeeper was a poor chap called Andrew Lornie and there is no evidence that he played the game wearing an ankle support or that there was anything to restrict his movement. The problem was that he was a cricketer and not a footballer.
It seems that Bon Accord was in fact the Orion Cricket Club and we can only surmise that Mr Lornie was the wicket keeper. It could have been worse though it seems that the referee disallowed seven Arbroath goals for offside.
League record score
On the 6 January 1934 Stockport County beat Halifax Town 13-0 to set the record score for a match in England. In an amazing game two players, Joe Hill and Percy Downes, both scored hat tricks.
Amazingly, County were only two goals up at half time but in a blistering second half display they added eleven goals to their tally against a team who were fourth in the Division Three North table at the time.
World record score
According to the Guiness Book of Records the world record score for a football match is 149-0 in a match between AS Adema and Stade Olympique de Lօmyrne (SOE) in Madagascar on 31 October 2002. Presumably the goalkeeper did not turn up at all for this game.
Either that or he had such severe knee pain that he could not dive to save the ball or move at all. To concede more than a goal a minute there has to be something seriously wrong with the guy between the sticks.
The reason they conceded so many goals was not due to the keeper but because they scored them all themselves. The goalkeeper did not even have to move. As a protest for a refereeing decision that had denied SOE the title the week before they deliberately scored 149 own goals.
After the game the manager and a number of the players received bans. The fans, despite seeing so many goals, demanded a refund.