Manchester United, Arsenal and the 'Battle of the Buffet' – told by those who were there

On October 24, 2004, Manchester United took on Arsenal at Old Trafford in one of the most explosive — and most controversial — matches of the Premier League era.

A fierce rivalry had raged for years as the two teams battled for Premier League supremacy. What began with enmity and distrust between managers Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger escalated into grudge matches on a scale the league has not seen since — two outstanding teams united by mutual loathing.

The previous season had seen the so-called “Battle of Old Trafford”, a tempestuous clash that ended with a red card for Arsenal captain Patrick Vieira and then an ugly brawl after United forward Ruud van Nistelrooy missed a last-minute penalty. Eight players (six Arsenal, two United) were charged with improper conduct by the FA. Four Arsenal players (Lauren, Martin Keown, Patrick Vieira and Ray Parlour) were banned for a combined total of nine matches.

That campaign, Arsenal went on to win the Premier League title without losing a single game. Having carried that form into the 2004-05 season, Wenger’s Invincibles had gone 49 league matches undefeated, a record-breaking run stretching back almost 18 months.

Match No 50 took them back to Old Trafford. Tensions were high. Greater Manchester Police issued a warning beforehand, urging both sets of players — and referee Mike Riley — to keep things under control in what it said could be “a volatile fixture”.

Volatile was putting it mildly.

Arsenal’s proud unbeaten record was ended in contentious and acrimonious circumstances, but the match is best remembered for the moment that Ferguson was struck by a flying pizza in a post-match tunnel fracas — and for the mystery that endured for years until the culprit owned up.

This is the story of “Pizzagate”, also known as “the Battle of the Buffet”, revisited by The Athletic with the help of former United players Tim Howard, Wes Brown and Phil Neville, former United assistant manager Mike Phelan, former Arsenal players Lauren, Pascal Cygan and Patrick Vieira, former Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein, former Arsenal physio Gary Lewin and former Arsenal equipment manager Paul Johnson.

Twenty years on, some of them can see the funny side. For others, still seething at what happened on the pitch or in the tunnel, it is no laughing matter.

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Phil Neville, the United midfielder: In all my career, I never played in games of that intensity, quality, rivalry. Every game had something. Every game was a war, every game was a battle.

Lauren, the Arsenal defender: Playing against Man United was the biggest challenge in our in our era. It was brilliant because you had to be, first of all, individually, the best in your position. In my case, you’re facing Ryan Giggs or Cristiano Ronaldo. You are facing the top players.

David Dein, the Arsenal vice-chairman: In many respects, there was a healthy rivalry between both teams as they were both challenging for honours most seasons.

Phil Neville: It was two teams that were incredibly talented. It was the fact we were fighting for league titles. It was us and Arsenal, it was Wenger versus Ferguson, it was two brilliant teams. A lot of people think about the hatred — and it was at that time — but there was an incredible respect between both teams, if you know what I mean, in a funny way. We knew that they were a great team. They knew we were a great team.

But memories of the previous season’s match at Old Trafford are still fresh.

Wes Brown, the United defender: That was when Keown jumped all over Ruud (van Nistelrooy). It was still blowing up. That’s why the game was really big.

Pascal Cygan, the Arsenal defender: I can’t lie: when I look back at the photos from after Van Nistelrooy’s penalty miss, it’s like we’re all possessed or in a trance. We weren’t ourselves. It’s only sport and it’s all relative, but you have to put yourself in the shoes of the Arsenal defenders in that moment. We had a referee who was pretty much only blowing his whistle for one team. Referees back then rarely punished Manchester United. That made it all the more glorious when we got that result.

In the build-up to the rematch at Old Trafford, Ferguson repeats his claims from the previous season, saying Arsenal — “that mob” — “got away with murder”.

Wenger is asked whether he is worried that tempers might boil over again. He says both teams have a responsibility to keep things under control.

“Football is not a war,” he says. “It’s a sport of human beings. You want gladiators who are ready to go in with full commitment and a big passion. I don’t think it will happen again, but … .”

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Rumours persist that Arsenal’s players have had T-shirts printed with the phrase “50 not out” on the front, to reveal at the final whistle if they avoid defeat at Old Trafford.

Brown: I heard about the T-shirts. Because they would have been ready for it. I just remember the rumour that they’d got all these shirts ready.

Gary Lewin, the Arsenal physio: I know some of the Man United players thought that because they mentioned it at an England camp while I was there as physio. I can honestly tell you, as far as I know, we didn’t. There were no T-shirts laid out in the dressing room.

Paul Johnson, the Arsenal equipment manager: I don’t remember anything like that. We were far too dignified for something like that.

Lauren: It was not on my mind to get to 50 games. My mind was trying to be the best every single day. To be an Invincible, in my point of view, wasn’t the main thing. I don’t think it was in the minds of the majority of the players.

Lewin: Subconsciously, everyone wanted to do it. But the hype of the game was enough. Not the fact that we would have gone 50 games unbeaten.

Mike Phelan, the United first-team coach: They were a top team, a serious team, playing some good football, and they had this momentum and the record they were going for. But we always felt that if anyone could (end their unbeaten run), it would be us. I think that’s just through the players we had; the attitude. When it came to it, nobody could really get near them, but Man United had something about them that could really upset that momentum.

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United are in the midst of a rebuild. Wayne Rooney has just arrived from Everton, joining Cristiano Ronaldo, but Ferguson’s team have started the season poorly, with just three wins from their first nine Premier League matches. Roy Keane was absent with a virus, so Phil Neville deputised in midfield.

Phil Neville: It was like a movie. You knew that when you tuned into that game, at that time, it was going to be box-office on and off the pitch. Whether it was the two managers, the two captains, the set of players, it was just boiling. It was a knife edge. At any moment somebody could have just taken the pin out and it could have just exploded. But that was the beauty of the game. You could feel it. The crowd knew it. The viewers knew it. It was … at any moment, you’re walking down the tunnel, you’re walking up the tunnel, you’re going on the pitch, almost like nobody was safe, if you know what I mean.

Lauren: Everybody was on their toes. Everybody wants to be on the front foot from minute one.

Brown: Tackles are flying everywhere. It was that era. You were allowed to tackle. You’re allowed to commit, in a way. For those bigger games, it was more put on you, so everyone’s a bit more fired up. It’s one we knew we had to win.

Cygan: The bench at Old Trafford was right next to the fans and the atmosphere was absolutely electric. You could feel the animosity between the players on the pitch and between the two sets of supporters.

The first half speeds by with barely an opening at either end, but there are numerous controversies. Arsenal’s players are unhappy that Freddie Ljungberg, with a clear run on goal after an excellent pass from Edu, is wiped out by Rio Ferdinand on 19 minutes. It looks like the denial of an obvious goalscoring opportunity — therefore a red card — but referee Mike Riley waves play on.

Lewin: Freddie was clean through. The referee described it as a coming-together when we all know Rio just took Freddie out. That would have been a sending-off and could have been a goal. That probably would have changed the game completely.

Arsenal’s sense of injustice grows when an ugly challenge by Van Nistelrooy on Cole goes unseen and unpunished, with the United forward going studs-up and catching Cole just below the knee.

Just before half-time, United’s players accuse Thierry Henry of deliberately trying to injure Gabriel Heinze while the Argentina defender is on the ground. Riley does not see the incident, having already given a foul.

It is a bad-tempered, highly attritional game and Arsenal’s young winger Jose Antonio Reyes bears the brunt of United’s aggression. Both Neville brothers are booked late in the first half for fouls on him — and both could easily have been booked earlier for challenges on the same player.

Lauren: It was horrible the way that Gary Neville, especially, went against Jose Antonio Reyes. It was disgraceful.

Cygan: It was a bit like the treatment Robert Pires always got. People couldn’t stop him by fair means so they resorted to violence and aggression. You saw it often.

Lauren: One of the ways to stop us was being very aggressive, being very competitive. That day was horrible, the way that they were kicking Reyes from minute one, and nobody said anything to Gary Neville or (Wayne) Rooney.

Lewin: Gary Neville could have got three red cards on the day. He just went through the back of people. They made the decision to hit Reyes hard and got high up on the pitch because the belief of referees is if you smash an opponent in their own half, you don’t get booked. If you do it in your half, you do. I remember Gary kicking Jose all over the place, but always in positions where he picked the ball up early.

Gary Neville wrote in his autobiography that this was the only match in his career in which he was accused of “brutalising an opponent”. He rejected the accusation but said he felt within his rights to try to “intimidate” Reyes, who was 21 and new to the Premier League.

“Some say I crossed the line,” Gary Neville said. “How? People say we ganged up on Reyes, but Phil’s collision with him was a nothing tackle. He got there a bit late and pushed Reyes off the ball, which wasn’t hard to do. I’m not going to deny an element of intimidation, but only because Reyes wasn’t tough enough to take it. Cristiano Ronaldo would get that sort of treatment all the time until defenders realised (…) it just made him more determined.

Phil Neville: It was one of those games where I think you just use the dark arts of football. You win any way you can. We didn’t allow them to play their silky football. We had to be aggressive, we had to tackle, we made fouls. And that game was a game where I think we probably, at times, overstepped, no question about that.

Lewin: That’s where you’re reliant on the officials. If you watch it nowadays, there probably would have been about four or five red cards. The way it appeared was as if Mike Riley was going to let everything go.

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United, distinctly second-best in the first half, gain a foothold in midfield after the interval. Phil Neville and Paul Scholes start to get the upper hand in midfield. Arsenal’s front four — Ljungberg, Reyes, Dennis Bergkamp and Henry — see less of the ball. 

Phil Neville: As an individual, it was one of my best games for Manchester United. Roy was out and they (Arsenal) had an incredible team; brilliant team — physicality, speed, quality, absolutely everything. It was a brilliant game of football to play in.

Brown: The game was tight. They had some good chances. Then we get a lucky break with the pen.

Phil Neville: It was Rooney and Sol Campbell, who were England team-mates. Rooney just sidestepped him and then he just dangled his left leg … and Rooney went down easy.

Lauren: Looking at it today, I still think it’s not a penalty. Sol Campbell got more frustrated, especially with the way they were kicking at Jose Antonio Reyes and Robert Pires. They were brutally kicked and the referee did not show a red card. And then all of a sudden they got the penalty.

Cygan: Everyone who saw it understood it was a nothing penalty. But what can you do? The refereeing just wasn’t there at that time.

Lewin: If it was a penalty, it was a really soft one. But it’s difficult one to argue that (Riley) got it completely wrong because we gave the referee the opportunity to make the decision. But for me, the biggest thing was the level of aggressiveness in the tackling that was allowed to go before that.

Patrick Vieira, the Arsenal midfielder: You know it wasn’t a penalty.

Campbell accuses Rooney of diving, but Arsenal’s protests are ignored. The spotlight falls on Van Nistelrooy, who sends Jens Lehmann the wrong way to give a United 1-0 lead.

Phil Neville: You think about what Ruud had gone through the year before, when he missed the penalty and then all the Arsenal players, Keown, Vieira, Ashley (Cole), they all jumped on top of him, which was incredible. Ruud was under incredible pressure because of that. So that was a massive relief for him when he scored.

Vieira is booked moments later for a lunge on Giggs. Arsenal dominate possession in the closing stages, pushing for an equaliser, but at the other end United appeal for a second penalty. Cole’s sliding challenge on Ronaldo looks far more worthy of a penalty than the one given against Campbell.

United hold firm before finally, in stoppage time, substitutes Louis Saha and Alan Smith combine to set up Rooney to secure the victory, his first Premier League goal for the club — and on his 19th birthday. A small skirmish follows, with Lehmann and Campbell jabbing fingers at Rooney, but it is kept under control.

The final whistle brings raucous celebrations, a cursory handshake between Ferguson and Wenger and a few confrontations on the pitch. Campbell and Bergkamp remonstrate with Riley. Henry holds animated conversations with Ferdinand and then Roy Carroll.

Ferguson clenches his fists and salutes the crowd as he heads down the tunnel. Neither he nor anyone else realises that the drama is only just beginning.

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Dein: I normally went down to the dressing room 15 minutes after the game finished, when the adrenalin has subsided. As it was such an ill-tempered end of the match, I went down earlier. As I approached the tunnel, I could hear raised voices, accusations, and tempers were clearly rising.

Lewin: When you get beat up there, a lot of players just want to get off the pitch and others come off a bit later, so they don’t come in as a team. They sort of drift in. The players were aggrieved by the penalty. They were aggrieved by the Freddie thing.

Vieira: There were so many people around in the corridor. I don’t know if you remember the corridor at Old Trafford. The first dressing room was the away dressing room and there was a lot of talking and shouting.

Brown: I was probably one of the first in our changing room. I remember sitting down. Normally the manager just comes in, but he was waiting at the door; I can only think to speak to Arsene Wenger. It might have been ‘Sort your f***ing players out,’ I don’t know. So he’s waiting and lads are starting to come in. I don’t know what Arsene Wenger said or what the gaffer said, but they’re having a go at each other.

Ferguson claims in his autobiography that Wenger confronted Van Nistelrooy in the tunnel. Ferguson says he then “rushed out” to tell Wenger, “You leave my players alone.” Ferguson says the Arsenal manager was “incensed” and “livid” with “fists clenched”. Wenger says in his autobiography that “the players were shoving one another, the managers too”.

Cygan: It all exploded. We were frustrated. United’s players had been up for a fight and things boiled over.

Phil Neville: Somebody just said, “Fight!” I went back out and there was a melee of people. You wouldn’t believe it — 22 players in the tightest tunnel you’ve ever seen. All I remember seeing was Sol Campbell on their side and I think there was Rio, Ruud and Roy Carroll, who was another big guy, on our side. All the big guys were at the front. I was in the best possible place, hiding at the back with a melee of six-foot-four giants in front of me.

Brown: And then the next thing you see is this pizza flying, hit the gaffer on his neck and a bit of his chin. And bear in mind it must have been a good throw. It was a good 10 metres from door to door.

In his autobiography My Defence, Cole says: “It was if all movement and all sound stopped (…) as all eyes turned and all mouths gawped to see this pizza slip off that famous puce face and roll down his nice black suit.”

Brown: It was one of the moments that’s shocking. Imagine us throwing a pizza at Arsene Wenger. Regardless of what’s gone on in the game, it’s a p***-take. The gaffer is an old man. The gaffer then took a deep breath. Bear in mind he had just had this heart/pacemaker operation. I don’t know everything about pacemakers, but I know his heart is not the best. And I’m thinking, ‘He’s not saying anything here, he’s just shocked.’ So when he took that breath, you react. Absolutely no chance is that being allowed to happen. That got everyone in that changing room so angry and we all rushed out and it was a full-on brawl. You’re backing up your boss. The point is, they took the p***. We’re not gonna let the gaffer go like that. Absolutely no chance.

Tim Howard, the United goalkeeper: It was a sea of people. Just a sea. Too many people in too small an area and you didn’t know who was who. It was crazy. Wes loves a scrap. Wes could start a fight in an empty house, so he certainly enjoyed himself.

Brown: It was like, ‘OK. Let’s go. Let’s have a few punches.’ The ref probably wasn’t there yet. If he’s got his door shut, he doesn’t see anything. Honestly, it was a full-on, rushing head-to-head clash, ‘Boom!’ ‘Who threw that?’ It was just, ‘What the f*** you doing? Taking the p***.’

Howard: I vividly remember Rio Ferdinand coming around the Arsenal players, but he’s got to push his way through the Arsenal players to then turn around and start pushing them. It’s just because of the confines of the hallway. A lot of pushing and shoving, a lot of yelling and cursing.

Brown: It was a full-on brawl. Punches flying. It was like one of them battles from back in the day when they just charge each other. Punches flying. And that corridor was really small. Imagine both teams pretty much in a deadlock there.

Cygan: I had never seen so many people in such a tiny space. You had to clamber up on someone’s shoulders to see what was going on. There were security guards, players, police officers, directors… so many people, all stuffed into this corridor between the two dressing rooms.

Lauren: I was far away. I didn’t get involved.

Phelan: I was always at the back of everything, probably because I didn’t have the legs to run and join in.

Brown: After a while I’m thinking, ‘We’re all going to get in trouble here.’ So then people are trying to break it up.

Security staff and stewards get involved. When the melee dies down, Arsenal’s equipment manager Johnson is nursing a cut to the face.

Johnson: How could I forget? It was on the nose. Somebody swung for someone, the person in front of me ducked and I copped it. I would rather not say who it was. But it certainly wasn’t an Arsenal player or an Arsenal member of staff.

Phil Neville: We came back (into the dressing room) and the boss was there, in his blazer, or a suit, and he said, ‘F**ing hell, somebody’s thrown a f***ing pizza at me!’ And … I won’t say it was funny, but because we’d won the game it was almost funny, if you know what I mean.

Phelan: I can see the manager wiping his face and he’s got it (pizza) on his shirt and his tie and … he’s not in the best place. He’s gone from looking immaculate coming up the tunnel to being in the dressing room (covered in pizza) and I’ve thought to myself, ‘He hasn’t done that himself. I know the game might not have been brilliant, but he certainly hasn’t put his head in a pizza’. Not many people have seen Sir Alex with pizza down him. I’d seen red wine go down him before, but not pizza. I can laugh at it now and I can see the funny side, but it definitely wasn’t funny at the time, I can assure you.

Cole disagrees. In his autobiography, he says, “We all went back to the dressing room and fell about laughing. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen: to see this guy, a legend of the game, splatted like that.”

Despite the ill feeling between the two managers and the two sets of players, there is an immediate agreement between the two clubs to try to keep the incident under wraps — partly to avoid the threat of an FA investigation.

Brown: The manager sat us all down — and it was class from him, I’ll always remember, because he said, ‘Listen, regardless of what’s just happened, no one speaks about this’.

Vieira: I don’t remember if Arsene mentioned something like that, but we of course didn’t want to talk about it because that’s one of the stories that we as players are not proud of.

Phil Neville: It’s not like nowadays, where within 20 seconds people are tweeting, Instagramming it, telling their agent, and it’s all out in the open. No, it was a game of football where 22 men battled and whatever happened on the pitch stayed on the pitch.

Howard: Of course, two brilliant managers, Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson, neither of them wanted that nasty stain on either club, so we tried to keep it hushed. But as you know, it’s impossible.

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Shortly afterwards, Wenger airs a number of frustrations at the post-match press conference, saying Reyes was subjected to “deliberate kicking” and that “there was no contact (on Rooney) at all” for the penalty.

Wenger also vents his anger at Van Nistelrooy for the challenge on Cole, saying, “We all know how Van Nistelrooy behaves. He can only cheat people who don’t know him well.”

But the Arsenal manager does not mention anything about a fracas in the tunnel — and is not asked about it, since word has yet to filter upstairs to the media suite.

Ferguson, as usual, swerves the post-match press conference. But curiosity is piqued when the United manager appears to have changed from his suit into a tracksuit for his post-match television interviews. There are murmurs that something “went off” in the tunnel after the game — though Ferdinand, when asked by Sky Sports, says, “I didn’t see anything, mate, to be honest to you.”

Journalists frantically make enquiries and, although officials from both clubs are tight-lipped, a picture begins to emerge of a huge confrontation. On further investigation, it transpires that Ferguson has been pelted with food — specifically pizza, though eyewitnesses at the time said soup was also thrown at him. The story is on the back page of several newspapers — and even the odd front page — the following morning.

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The big unanswered question — for years — concerned the identity of the phantom pizza-thrower.

Phil Neville: The first thing we thought was, ‘Who threw the pizza?’ We heard afterwards that it was Cesc Fabregas. I wasn’t sure who it was. I don’t think any of our boys would have wasted a pizza on throwing it at any of them. We loved our pizza after the game.

Vieira: Cesc Fabregas — naughty, as he can be at times — was the one who threw the pizza. It’s all a good souvenir, I would say.

Cygan: We all knew that it was Cesc who had thrown it. He wasn’t aiming at Ferguson. There were so many people in front of him when he threw it. It could have hit anyone, even a policeman.

Dein: I saw Cesc with a pizza, lobbing it into the middle of a huddle. It was a schoolboy prank and Cesc was only 17 at the time. He was a polite, respectful, hugely talented young man, a prodigious talent and also very passionate about the game.

Brown: I don’t know if Fabregas knew the manager was standing there. But knowing the little s***, he probably did and he just took a hit and hope. A few people’s names got shouted out, but it’s just whispers until he admits it. When that happens you lose respect.

Fabregas does not own up publicly until 2017 when he is quizzed by James Corden in an episode on the Sky Sports show A League of Their Own.

“I heard noises and I was like, ‘What’s happening? What’s happening?’” Fabregas, who by then is at Chelsea, says. “I go out with my slice of pizza and I see Sol Campbell, Rio Ferdinand, Martin Keown, everyone, boom boom, pushing each other, Vieira, and I was like, ‘I want to get in with them!’ and I didn’t know how to, and so I went (makes throwing gesture and missile noise).”

When Cesc Fabregas revealed he was the one who threw pizza at Sir Alex Ferguson in the famous ‘Pizzagate’ saga 😂🍕

We wonder who will confess to spilling milk over Jose Mourinho in years to come 🤔 pic.twitter.com/Wq8eTvxJrC

— Soccer AM (@SoccerAM) December 12, 2017

As for the important question of the topping, Phelan thinks it was pepperoni — which is consistent with Fabregas’s claim on Gary Lineker’s The Rest is Football podcast.

“I was just very small, very tiny, and I didn’t know what to do,” Fabregas says. “I wanted to bring something to the table to defend my team-mates and that’s what I did. I didn’t aim at anyone. You know when you throw something into a crowd just to see if you hit someone? And then I hit the big guy, Sir Alex, unfortunately, unfortunately … .”

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Fabregas’ secret lasted years, but it only took a few days for the truce of Old Trafford to fall apart. As further details drip-dripped into the media, Ferguson accused Arsenal of leaking stories. He then said United were “collating a lot of information” to send to the FA and that “what we send out will be so clear-cut they will need to do something.”

But the FA did not take action against either club — perhaps in part because a spirit of solidarity persisted at boardroom level, with Dein and his United counterpart David Gill holding clear-the-air talks later that week. In the absence of video footage, the FA said there was not enough evidence to charge either club.

The only disciplinary proceedings were: 1) Wenger was found guilty of improper conduct and fined £15,000 ($27,000) for his post-match comments about Van Nistelrooy, and 2) Van Nistelrooy was banned for three matches after accepting a charge of violent conduct for his challenge on Cole. Ferguson’s attempts to draw attention to the Henry-Heinze incident did not result in action against the Arsenal forward.

But Arsenal were damaged by what happened at Old Trafford. The defeat was the start of a run that saw them win just three out of 11 matches in all competitions. Having gone into that game top of the table, they were soon overtaken by Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea, who charged to their first Premier League title under Roman Abramovich’s ownership.

Arsenal have not won the Premier League title in the 20 years since and, while the story of their post-2004 decline owed far more to financial circumstances, Wenger wrote in his 2021 autobiography Life in Red and White that the defeat at Old Trafford was a “heavy blow for me and the team. We knew that the good times were over; that unique moment, the time without fear, had passed and we knew it would be hard to recapture that state of grace.”

There was another tempestuous clash between the teams at Highbury the following February, with Keane and Vieira clashing in the tunnel before the game. As Phil Neville said, tensions could boil over at any minute — “almost like nobody was safe, if you know what I mean”.

But that changed as many of the big personalities departed over the years that followed and both teams suffered a dip in fortunes. United re-emerged as the dominant force in the second half of the 2000s, wrestling supremacy back from Chelsea, but the Premier League landscape had changed. United and Arsenal were no longer the two unrivalled heavyweights.

Relations between Ferguson and Wenger had sunk to an all-time low in the months after Pizzagate. An attempt by Richard Caborn, then the Minister for Sport, to get them together to settle their differences — over pizza, hilariously — was ignored. But gradually relations between the two managers thawed. By the time Ferguson retired in 2013, they were bordering on cordial.

But both managers, both sets of players and both sets of supporters retain a certain nostalgia for those matches and for that era — even if perspectives on some of those matches vary wildly, with each fanbase convinced their team were the good guys fighting against an evil empire of cheats, thugs and bullies.

As Phil Neville says, it was box-office. It wasn’t always edge-of-the-seat entertainment but there was always the feeling that tensions could boil over at any moment and in any area of the pitch, on the touchline, in the post-match flash-interview area … and most certainly in the tunnel, where barbs would be traded, hackles and fists raised and even pizzas could fly.

“The Pizzagate is just the tension and the love and hate between the two clubs, United and Arsenal, between Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson, between the two captains,” Vieira says. “It’s just rivalry. Sometimes emotions take over.”

(Additional contributors: Amy Lawrence, Laurie Whitwell, Paul Tenorio, Jack Lang)

(Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)