Arsenal vs Ipswich Town Timeline & H2H Stats

In spite of the fact that Ipswich Town was formed as a football club in 1878 and Arsenal, known as Dial Square at the time, was created eight years later, it actually took until 1962 for the two sides to meet one another for the first time. That is largely because of how long it took the Tractor Boys to be voted into the First Division, but if the Gunners thought that they’d be pushovers when they arrived then they were sorely mistaken. The first game between the sides ended in a 2-2 draw, with the second resulting in a 3-0 home defeat for Arsenal that was something of a shock at the time. It was, in some ways, a sign of things to come.

Modern day football fans would doubtless assume that the two clubs had rarely faced one another, largely unaware of Ipswich Town’s spell in the Premier League in the 1990s, to say nothing of the amount of time that the Tractor Boys spent in the First Division in the 1970s and 1980s. Add into that the fact that the pair have played one another in the likes of the League Cup and the FA Cup and you can see that the clubs have indeed got some history. In terms of the dominant force, it swung back and forth over the years, with Arsenal winning seven times running between 1970 and 1973 then Ipswich winning the same number of times between 1974 and 1977.

The 1977-1978 FA Cup Final

Given the manner in which the superiority of the matchup had swung between the two clubs during the decade before, it is perhaps quite fitting that Arsenal and Ipswich Town faced one another in the FA Cup final at the end of the 1977-1978 season. The Tractor Boys had had to defeat Cardiff City, Hartlepool United, Bristol Rovers, Millwall and West Bromwich Albion to make it to the final. Arsenal, Meanwhile, smashed Sheffield United 5-0 in the third round, sneaked past Wolverhampton Wanderers with a 2-1 win the fourth and then stuck four past Walsall in the fifth. A 3-2 win over Wrexham in the quarters and a 3-0 over Orient in the semis put them in the final.

There the two sides played out a close game, with no goals being scored in the first-half. As the second 45 moved on, a Roger Osbourne goal gave the Tractor Boys a slender 1-0 lead in front of around 100,000 people. They held on, winning the FA Cup for the first time in their history. It came more than a decade after they had won the First Division in a season when Arsenal were languishing in tenth and not really causing anyone any issues. For Ipswich Town the FA Cup win was one of the most celebrated moments in their history, but within a decade they had been relegated out of the First Division and didn’t return until 1992.

Arsenal’s Full Match History Against Ipswich Town