by Bulldog Drummond The injury list as published yesterday showed Arsenal in the lower reaches and Palace right up near the top with their old chums Brighton and Hove. Brighton and Hove Albion: 9 Crystal Palace: 8 Southampton: 8 Leeds United: 6 Liverpool: 6 Manchester City: 6 Newcastle United: 6 Sheffield United: 6 Wolverhampton Wanderers: …
By Tony Attwood It started with an article that turned up in The Athletic who asked “what is the latest news on Arsenal’s attempts to trim their bloated squad?” Then it spread like a virus to France with an article in France24 “Arteta says ‘priority’ in transfer window is to trim bloated squad”. Browsing I found …
By Tony Attwood Crystal Palace have been in the Premier League for the past seven years – this being their eighth consecutive season in the competition. Which is quite an amazing improvement because for each of the previous three times they have been promoted into the top league, Palace have immediately gone straight back down. …
By Tony Attwood Slowly, very slowly, there are a few people in the media who are starting to consider the wider issue of the Kroenkes influence on Arsenal in recent years. The issue that is slowly, very slowly, being raised is, is the downturn in Arsenal’s fortunes of late due to poor management by Wenger, …
By Sir Hardly Anyone It has been widely reported that Rob Holding has signed a new long-term contract, which is really not surprising given that a) he is a regular in the team and b) he is a home grown player. For as we know while we have too many foreigners in the squad, we …
by Tony Attwood It’s taken a while, but now we have the headline ‘Arsenal should get Wenger back, he’d help land top targets’ That comes from Goal, but of course there is no chance of that happening – but nice to know that after all this time at least one of Mr Wenger’s merits has …
By Tony Attwood On 5 October 2020, Arsenal announced that Matteo Guendouzi would be loaned out to Hertha BSC for the rest of the season, something I found incredibly disappointing. And the fact that the valuation of Guendouzi has now shot up to £29m shows that the valuation many of us had of the player …
By Tony Attwood If you are a regular reader you will know that whereas when crowds were present, the home teams in the Premier League were likely to win games more often than the away team. Since games have been played without crowds present the reverse has been true. The explanation for this (as I’ve …
By Tony Attwood OK it is true we haven’t just beaten Liverpool, Manchester United, Tottenham, and Manchester City. But we have just won four in a row, which considering that in November and December we went eight domestic games without a win is something of an improvement. Plus we also knocked in a couple of …
Leno, Cedric Soares, Luiz, Mari, Tierney, Elneny, Willock, Pepe, Willian, Martinelli, Aubameyang. And the subs are: Runarsson, Chambers, Maitland-Niles, Xhaka, Saka, Nelson, Smith Rowe, Nketiah, Lacazette. Which I guess means that if we are 4-0 up at half time we can then change the squad around a bit. But the great news is that …
By Bulldog Drummond Years ago we had a bash at trying to raise support for having live football on TV on a saturday afternoon, on the grounds that Arsenal’s matches were always sold out, so why not let those who can’t go to the game watch it live? Nothing came of it of course, but …
By Bulldog Drummond So we have just won three league games in a row and Newcastle have just drawn one and lost two in the league (see the last article for more details: Arsenal v Newcastle in the FA Cup: the injury situation is unprecedented What’s more, we have scored eight, and they have scored …
By Bulldog Drummond Now here is a funny thing. Just look at the injury table – we are no longer at the top, in fact we are almost at the bottom. Of course this will be an opportunity for one or two anti-Wengerians to come in and say that they told us all along that …
By Tony Attwood In this series I have looked at how we have discovered the level of influence that crowds can have on referees, thanks to the LSE research, and then considered from there how clubs have responded to that knowledge. This is the concluding article. Here is a list of the articles so far …
This is part of a major series on refereeing in the Premier League, reflecting Untold’s work in analysing exactly what is going on, using both data from academic research and from our own analyses. Here is the series so far… however each article is by and large readable on its own… How clubs manipulate referees …
by Tony Attwood This is the third in our series reviewing what is happening to refereeing in the Premier League. The previous articles are: Revealed: How clubs have evolved their “referee handling” tactics with such success How the impression refs have of certain clubs influences how they are treated You might recall that back in …
By Tony Attwood In my last article I suggested that there were numerous issues we had discovered with regards to refereeing in the Premier League. In summary these are 1: The LSE research which shows how crowds influence referees. This destroyed the PGMO assertion that referees are getting 99% of their calls right. 2: The …
By Tony Attwood In my recent articles about the bias of referees in terms of favouring the home team when there is a crowd present, I have moved away from earlier commentaries on this site which have sought to show that there is persistent bias by referees in the Premier League. Now I want to …
By Tony Attwood If you have been following this series, you’ll know that it has been shown, through research undertaken at London School of Economics (part of the University of London) that referees are clearly influenced by the crowd. This in turn explains why the bias towards there being more home wins than away wins …
by Tony Attwood When I started the articles this season that compared tackles, fouls, yellow cards and penalties between the clubs I wasn’t sure what I was going to find. And it has taken a while to work out what is going on, but I think we’re getting there, and I think it is weird. …
By Tony Attwood There is obviously a major difference of opinion between Untold’s scribblers and those all knowing all seeing transfer correspondents of other blogs and the newspapers concerning the rules for transfers of players now England is not part of the European Union. I’ll try and set it out once more as I understand …
By Tony Attwood Of course we never know all the ins and outs of player issues within the club, but Arsenal do have some urgent work to do to restore a sense among players of being an organised club with a clear set of plans. Buying Saliba and then not including him in the squad, …
By Sir Hardly Anyone. We are in a curious transfer window. The key issues (how to bring in non-English players under the new post-Brexit regulations, and how to move on players to make room for new comers in the 25 when everyone is facing the same problems of ditching unwanted foreign players) are just being …
By Sir Hardly Anyone It turned up on a BBC radio programme today: Benjamin Mendy broke the Covid-19 isolation regulations by inviting people from outside his household to a New Year’s Eve party. Of course he’s not the only one to do it within the world of football. Erik Lamela, Giovani Lo Celso and Sergio …
by Tony Attwood Well, to answer the question in the title, several things. Because although three wins and a good splattering of goals are fine, but there are still some problems. The biggest problem I guess are the bloggers and journalists who are daily telling us that a) Arsenal must buy lots of players and …
