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
by Bulldog Drummond The league table this morning shows something of an odd sight – and I don’t just mean the situation at the top of the league…. Team P W D L F GA D Pts 6 Everton 9 5 1 3 19 16 3 16 7 Aston Villa 8 5 0 3 19 …
By Tony Attwood For football journalists life is black and white, good and bad, yes and no, with no bits in between. And the reason for that is simple: they treat their readers as idiots who can only understand black and white, rather than real life. After last Sunday if you had just taken your …
Read More “The emergence of brilliance, the idiocy of the media”
By Bulldog Drummond Although Arsenal went through the group stages last season as winners, there was a serious bit of slipping up going on in the second half of the campaign – exactly the point we are now at. With three straight wins everything was plodding along nicely (although that third match saw something of …
Read More “Molde v Arsenal: the teams. The chances of a game for Pepe…”
By Bulldog Drummond While Arsenal appear to be challenging for the longest period without a league goal from open play, Molde have been getting on with the business, in their Date Comp Home Score Away Res 01/11/20 League Mjøndalen 1 – 3 Molde W 05/11/20 Europa Arsenal 4 – 1 Molde L 08/11/20 League Molde …
Read More “Molde V Arsenal: injuries reach a new height and playing in front of a crowd”
By Sir Hardly Anyone This is a time when Arsenal need all the support they can get in order to recover some form and move up the table. And it is good to see it coming from at least one quarter with Tony Adams saying that he was totally wrong in his assessment of Bernd …
Read More “Farewell honeymoon, the knives are now out for Arteta.”
by Tony Attwood A comment in response to an earlier article really got me thinking. It read… “Let arteta be trusted to do the job,like they say Rome was not built in a day.Klopp was given time at Liverpool and allowed to build a team on his principles, this has worked:If he had been told …
Read More “Arsenal: a decade of mismanagement? How does the evidence stack up?”
By Tony Attwood So Arsenal have a spot of a problem. Actually make that five problems. a) Some fans are turning on our most expensive purchase who is currently in the squad. b) The management has turned against our most expensive player who is currently not in the squad. c) We’ve had three managers across …
Read More “Arsenal: we have a problem, but the proposed solution is a problem also”
By Tony Attwood This season we have been looking at some statistics that seem never to become headline news in the media, but which, when we look at them really give us pause for thought. This is the table we have gradually been building as the key issues have arisen. Exceptional numbers are in bold. …
Read More “How the top clubs foul with impunity – this week’s statistics analysed.”
By Tony Attwood And so we have now had the first suggestion that we should get rid of Mr Arteta and bring in… Brendon Rodgers. That’s the media’s idea of course, I’ve no idea what other Arsenal fans think of it. Not something I’d like to see. But it goes on and on. We got …
Read More “As Arsenal sink lower changing the manager again is not the answer”
By Bulldog Drummond We enter the fray as we have been for much of this season so far, on a mountain of negatives. Dani Ceballos and David Luiz are said to have come to blows – but of course no one knows. Aubameyang spent the night on the floor of an airport ahead of an …
Read More “Leeds v Arsenal: the team selection from across the media.”
By Bulldog Drummond Games between Arsenal and Leeds are shown as being surprisingly balanced in the records: 47 wins to Arsenal, 41 to Leeds United and 32 draws. But these figures hide some interesting features. To begin they don’t include matches between Arsenal and Leeds City – which was pretty much the same club as …
Read More “Leeds v Arsenal: when we were the greatest of rivals and the away win issue”
By Bulldog Drummond Compared with the week before the international nonsense the number of players who are now injured is utterly outrageous. Why the top clubs allow this to continue is completely beyond me. However they do, so here is the top of the injury league as supplied by Physioroom.com Liverpool: 10 Brighton and Hove …
Read More “Internationals inevitably mean injuries and here they are all lining up”
By Tony Attwood Of late I have been trying to get a handle on the very curious statistics that started to emerge in the Premier League last season and which are continuing this season. These in particular include tackles, fouls, yellow cards and penalties (given and received). Much of the discussion has of course centred …
Read More “Arsenal v Leeds: tackles, fouls, penalties, yellows… what to expect”
by Tony Attwood It was Arsene Wenger who once said (and was then severely censured by Uefa for saying it) that international managers are like car thieves. They take your vehicle, use it however they want, in ways that are often completely unsafe, and then hand you back the wreck with orders to have it …
Read More “International managers are like car thieves. And football’s fake news”
By Tony Attwood It is quite amazing the lengths journalists will go to, in order to knock Arsenal. Like running two articles on unsuccessful stadia moves just so they can end with Arsenal’s move to the Emirates. In doing this they place Arsenal alongside Sunderland, Derby, Oxford United, Darlington, Coventry City, MK Dons, Cardiff City, …
Read More “The lengths some journalists will go to, to attack Arsenal”
By Tony Attwood Taking certain referees off the rota is just one of the things we have campaigned about for years in relation to PGMO – the ultra-secretive agency that handles refereeing in the premier league. We’ve also questioned the regional bias of the referee group, the fact that we have far fewer referees in …
Read More “Referee changed after Liverpool demand; even the excuse makes no sense”
By Tony Attwood My little series on FA cock ups and disasters has reached part 8. We have published enough FA stories of this sort to go on for another 15 or 20 articles, but we’re heading towards the resumption of proper football in a couple of days, so I will make this last one …
Read More “How the FA have manipulated the stats in order to try and gain more power”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Leicester are different for two reasons. One is that their statistics suggest they play a tactical game in a completely different way from other clubs. The other is that they are rather neatly changing their tactical game from time to time, depending on whether the referees have tumbled what they are …
Read More “Could Arsenal adopt Leicester’s tactics and follow them up the table?”
This is a series of articles about the Football Association and some of their activities over the years. So far we have had Sweet FA. A history of the idiocy and incompetence in football administration The FA scandals part 2: The minister says reform or we close you The FA scandals part 3: hiding racism …
Read More “Tracking the fun things the FA have got up to over the years. Part 7.”
by Tony Attwood By and large football journalists don’t criticise each other, and that for one simple reason: most of the time most of them make up what they write. If one criticises another he or she can then be criticised back, simply because everyone is writing about fantasies. The difference between football journalism and …
Read More “When football journalists fall out, there’s something nasty exposed beneath”
By Tony Attwood This is the sixth part of a series of articles reviewing the catastrophe that is the Football Association and the total inability of the UK government to stop funding it with tax payers money Sweet FA. A history of the idiocy and incompetence in football administration The FA scandals part 2: The …
Read More “The failures of the FA: Part 6 – if we don’t communicate it is your fault”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Journalists and bloggers do have a hard time of it, lacking technical and detailed knowledge but at the same time trying to make a story out of a snippet, in order to draw in readers. Take for example the headline “Edu ‘finds another Martinelli’ for Arsenal after being given work permit …
Read More “A second Martinelli, selling a “flop”, Arsenal’s huge error: the big Gunnerstories”
This is the fifth part of a series of articles reviewing the catastrophe that is the Football Association and the total inability of the UK government to stop funding it with tax payers money Sweet FA. A history of the idiocy and incompetence in football administration The FA scandals part 2: The minister says reform …
Read More “The crimes of the FA: failing to deal with Fifa and with discrimination”
by Tony Attwood The average number of penalties awarded to teams in the Premier League so far this season is fractionally over two per club. That is around one every four games this season. But there is one club that is getting awarded penalties at a rate of four times as many penalties as you …
Read More “Last season we found weird tackle statistics. Now penalties have gone crazy”
This is a series of articles about the Football Association and some of their misdemeanours in terms of handling football in England. Sweet FA. A history of the idiocy and incompetence in football administration The FA scandals part 2: The minister says reform or we close you The FA scandals part 3: hiding racism and …
Read More “The FA scandals: a history of the destruction of football: 4 Wenger v FA”
