Untold Arsenal: Supporting the club, the manager and the team
"I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art." A Wenger
What Are the Biggest Issues Facing Football Today? Football is the most popular sport in the world, with around half of the global population reported to follow the game to at least some extent! The joy of playing and/or watching football is hard to beat, but unfortunately there are several issues that threaten the future …
Read More “What Are the Biggest Issues Facing Football Today?”
“The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now.” That comment about the future of journalism was written in 1948, but could have made in relation to today’s reporting of football where all we have, straight statement. And that is not just bad writing, …
By Tony Attwood The Mirror newspaper has published the result of a survey in which it says, “Arsenal fans seem to have faith in most of their squad ahead of the 2021/22 season.” Now I would argue that is perfectly reasonable given the dramatic turn around in tactics and the extraordinarily powerful final two thirds …
Read More “Arsenal: “a disappointing end to what started as a promising campaign.””
By Tony Attwood Just imagine you are a football journalist and some way through the season your editor shouts [which is what he does because that is what editors do] that he wants an “Arsenal article.” Putting down your tipple of choice [because having a tipple of choice is de rigueur for journalists] you ask …
Read More “If this were you, and if this were Arsenal, what would you do?”
By Minser Double “To say it was a tough season for Arsenal and Arteta last season would be an understatement because he was probably lucky to survive it without being shown his P45.” That was HITC on 5 July. I don’t suppose HITC worries about its inaccuracies, after all they have already reported 42 players …
By Tony Attwood We’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about the defence at Arsenal of late for two reasons. The most important is that it has been the scene of the most extraordinary tactical reformation that I’ve seen in my time as an Arsenal supporter (a period which goes back to the Neolithic …
Read More “Arsenal’s problem of late? Shots, goals, and (last season) accuracy”
By Tony Attwood From the work I have done so far on the issue of the reduction in the number of tackles that many clubs have implemented over the last few years, it struck me that there should be some sort of link between tackles and goals conceded. And it occurred to me that it …
Read More “Amazingly, in 2020/1 the more clubs tackled, the more goals they let in!”
By Tony Attwood This story is four days old, and I’ve waited until now to run it because I wanted to see what the UK media would make of it. And the answer is, with one notable exception: nothing. For most English fans, the story is not there. But Reuters have run it and it …
Read More “Court orders Uefa to reverse sanctions against Super League and allow it to proceed”
By Sir Hardly Anyone The idea of many bloggers and journalists is that there is no real planning going on by Arsenal when it comes to transfers. All this business about having thousands of hours of video recordings which are analysed by computers and then people to find exactly the right player – that all …
Read More “Number of players tipped to be coming to Arsenal reaches 100! The full list.”
By Tony Attwood To summarise where we have got to… five years ago several clubs began finally to realise that there were two factors in each football match that they had not been taking into account in the past, but which if taken into account, could give them the edge. One was which referee they …
Read More “How Arsenal’s 40% decline in tackling over the past five years has sparked the revival”
By Tony Attwood In my reviews of this last season, I have made much of the fact that Arsenal cut their yellow card rate by almost half compared with the previous season, while cutting their tackling rate considerably. But I wanted to go further and see how Arsenal’s figures compared both to Arsenal’s past record …
Read More “How Arsenal learned from PGMO and so climbed the table after Christmas”
By Tony Attwood It was 31 December 2018 that we published Andrew Crawshaw’s groundbreaking article “How four clubs commit fouls with impunity, while others constantly get punished” Since then we’ve been looking constantly at the issue of fouls and the way referees treat Arsenal, and so it was probably inevitable that we’d be the people …
Read More “Shocking new referee statistics suggest outright bias against Arsenal”
By Tony Attwood “Arsenal have grand ambitions to strengthen Mikel Arteta’s squad this summer and technical director Edu is hoping to wrap up several new signings before the 2021/22 season begins.” And so Football.London are telling us that Arsenal have signalled their interest in signing Sassuolo midfielder Manuel Locatelli by tabling their first “official bid” …
Read More “Arsenal: from escaping the disaster through exciting plans”
by Tony Attwood I have often argued that talk of our needing a new defence is ludicrous as we had the third best defence in the league last season. So let’s look at the attack. This table is ordered by goals scored (marked in bold) and here we can see Arsenal were only three …
By Sir Hardly Anyone The completed transfers are thought to be those of Nuno Tavares (pictured left) and Albert Sambi Lokonga. More on those below, but first the question of slowness for slowness is the accusation every transfer window, we go slow, dither about, argue over terms, don’t buy when we could, and then lose …
Read More “Arsenal’s first two transfers appear to be complete. But are we being slow?”
by Sir Hardly Anyone You’ll have perhaps seen our last list of 91 transfers already “announced” by the media and in just a few days we’ve found more so here we are at 99 players – or at least we thought we did but an eagle eyed reader corrected us so we have had to …
Read More “The 99 players the media has said Arsenal are considering signing this summer”
By Tony Attwood To almost all the other bloggers and the journalists who cover football, the answer to the question about what Arsenal have to do to get into the top four is blindingly obvious: get rid of at least half the team and buy better. Indeed with this in mind The Athletic have “revealed” …
Read More “New facts reveal how Arsenal will become a top four club again”
by Sir Hardly Anyone So the craziness goes on – with 99 players now tipped to be in negotiation to come to Arsenal, and the first signing tipped for today, 29 June. “Mikel Arteta’s side needs some fresh faces after a poor season that saw them miss out on a European spot. The Spaniard is now …
Read More “First Arsenal signing tipped for today – but who will it be?”
by Jabin Thearm As entry to and from various countries around the world becomes more and more problematic, and the numbers of infections in the UK rise once more (daily case up 5592 from last week) it is good to know that Uefa are doing their bit by demanding that all their free-loaders and hangers …
Read More “Here comes the Uefa Variant (and it’s not a player)”
By Sir Hardly Anyone It is the story every summer. Arsenal are in for around 120 players but only manage to buy five or six. And of those only half turn out to be any good. Below you will find the actual numbers of purchases (including free transfers but excluding loan arrangements and players moving …
By Tony Attwood If you ever see a film of Mr Arteta while at Manchester City you’ll see him sitting still, rarely reacting to the play but instead making notes. Of course I have never had access to those notes, but I think that by looking at the past four seasons we can work …
Read More “Exactly how did Arteta turn Arsenal around after Christmas last year?”
By Iver Pound-Note Caughtoffside recently wrote, “Arsenal have had so many problems over the years when it comes to contracts and extensions: The main issue has been handing out huge long-term deals to those who aren’t worth it while the contracts of their stars have been allowed to run into the final year, so there …
Read More “Kroenkes don’t spend enough on Arsenal: the evidence”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Of course it is not surprising that the media are inventing Arsenal transfer stories right, left and centre. They cost nothing and with over 115,000 professional players in the world to choose from there’s still plenty more to name. And the back is, as Caughtoffside said, “Arsenal have had so many …
Read More “With 20% of the transfer window gone, 91 players tipped to join Arsenal”
By Sir Hardly Anyone “Ben White to Arsenal transfer claims dashed as well-placed source reveals cold, hard truth” That uncomfortable headline came from Team Talk. And it was uncomfortable because a lot of “sources” have been telling us the opposite. As with the report from Team Talk (yep the very same) that White was already …
By Tony Attwood As we know, last season, with no crowds present for most games, the traditional balance between home and away wins was upset. Only 38% of games ended as home wins while 40% were away wins and 22% were draws. The average across the Premier League years before this past season was 46% …
Read More “Will home advantage (and referee bias) return with the crowds next season?”
