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 It’s one of those funny end of season games where a has to beat b unless c loses to d by six or more goals and e has a goalless draw. Or something. If Villa win, Watford need to better their result by two or more goals to survive on goal difference. …
Read More “Arsenal v Watford. The teams, and BT Sport goes bonkers.”
By Bulldog Drummond There are some real odd issues that are arising from the league table as we approach the end. Team P W D L F A GD Pts 1 Liverpool 37 31 3 3 82 32 50 96 2 Manchester City 37 25 3 9 97 35 62 78 3 Manchester United 37 …
Read More “Arsenal v Watford: why are Arsenal still getting so many injuries, 2 years on?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone The Toppled Bollard, home to the journalistic elite who day by day invent transfer tales of which just three percent per annum are true, is once more fully open. Journalists are all wearing face masks decorated with their favourite slogans (“Get in there” is the most popular) and spend their hours …
Read More “The ten (sorry six) (sorry 3) big big stories about next season’s Arsenal team.”
by Tony Attwood One of my prime concerns is how the history of Arsenal is regularly wrongly written in the media, invariably in a way which reflects poorly on Arsenal, suggesting that in the early part of the 20th century it was a club run by crooks. For example, as I have mentioned earlier this …
Read More “Still getting Arsenal’s history wrong, after all these years”
by Tony Attwood It was back in April, just a few weeks into the corona virus, that we first raised the issue of how people could be stopped from celebrating around a club’s stadium after a trophy was won. Since then we have had three nights of mass gatherings in Liverpool and several nights of …
Read More “Liverpool and Leeds knock back chances of stadium return for next season”
By Tony Attwood Last season Barcelona became the biggest earning operation in football, up 22% on the previous year pulling in €840.8 million in that year. Around 10% more than Real Madrid. They had money everywhere. What could possibly go wrong? One could have asked a supporter of AC Milan, the third-wealthiest club in football …
Read More “When spending a fortune in football can go seriously wrong”
By Tony Attwood Two headlines caught my attention. One read, “Seven times Arsenal tried to ‘lowball’ clubs in the transfer market” and the other was, “Latest Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang update is not good news.” The two headlines come from one article within which the story is simple. Arsenal continuously muck about in transfers, pulling every silly …
Read More “Are Arsenal really the bad boys of football, as some want to suggest?”
By Tony Attwood One of the features that links together most blogs and I suspect all the newspapers and their websites, plus the TV stations and the radio stations, is the importance of transfers. We can see this at once from the fact that they spend so much time each summer on transfer rumours, 97% …
Read More “Why the media all want Arsenal to buy buy buy, and why we shouldn’t”
By Bulldog Drummond In the injury charts Arsenal are still right up there at the top with seven alongside Newcastle and Leicester. Every other club has fewer. As mentioned before, in the days of Mr Wenger he was blamed repeatedly by a couple of eccentric commentators, and their views were taken up by the media …
Read More “Aston Villa v Arsenal; why all these injuries? the corruption of 2013; the team”
By Bulldog Drummond Aston Villa are in what we experts call “a mess”. Since lock down Villa have played eight games and won just one of them – beating Crystal Palace 2-0 at home. Indeed five of their eight lockdown games have been at home and the results of those other than that single win …
Read More “Aston Villa v Arsenal, how did last summer’s spending work out for each club?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone, transfer correspondent of the Rutland Water Gazette. If you are a reader of the AISA Arsenal History Society website you’ll know that after the takeover of the club in 1910, the aim was to make the club self-sufficient, which had always been the intention of those who founded the professional club …
Read More “How Manchester City have helped fund Arsenal over the years”
By Tony Attwood It has been a very, very long time coming, but suddenly, after the wins against Liverpool and Manchester Money the talk has all been about Arsenal’s brilliant players. Rather than a tedious array of 120 players Arsenal are supposedly trying to sign (and here’s a question – how many staff on transfer …
Read More “Buying more players is exactly the opposite of what Arsenal need now”
By Tony Attwood There is an ongoing clamour to buy some more players, and indeed the latest Untold chart of players tipped to be coming to Arsenal this summer is now running at 122. But there’s a problem with this, apart from the fact that even the best of new players can take a year …
Read More “Where next for Arsenal? What leaving the EU is going to mean for our squad.”
By Tony Attwood “For some clubs it is easy,” Mourinho said. “You just break the rules, you forget the financial fair play, you spend what you want and you get the good players. Easy. For some other clubs, it’s more difficult. You want to follow the rules. You don’t want to be seen with the …
Read More “BT Sprout disgrace; Xhaka and Mustafi brilliant; Arsenal win; Mail critical”
by Bulldog Drummond Since lockdown ended its been a funny ol’ set of results Date Game Res Score Competition 17 June Manchester City v Arsenal L 3-0 Premier League 20 June Brighton and Hove Albion v Arsenal L 2-1 Premier League 25 June Southampton v Arsenal W 0-2 Premier League 28 June Sheffield United v …
Read More “Arsenal v Man C – when the bookies wouldn’t take bets, and team predictions”
By Bulldog Drummond Arsenal are playing in their 30th FA Cup semi-final – no side has ever played in more. They’ve reached the Final on 20 occasions, which is also a joint record (level with Manchester United for both). But where Arsenal stand alone is in the number of times the club has won the …
Read More “Arsenal in the FA Cup semi-final: where do we stand?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone One of the new games in town is for sites to set up headlines and then have articles that have no information on the story in the headline. Take for example “Brighton and Hove Albion star confirms departure as Arsenal ‘lodge’ bid for prime Everton target with free agent deal in …
Read More “8 new players coming to Arsenal to give us 122 transfer rumours this summer”
By Tony Attwood Tony Attwood is a member of Arsenal Independent Supporters’ Association and runs the AISA Arsenal History Society. According to a report in the Telegraph, “A group of cross-party MPs have launched an 11th hour bid to torpedo the Saudi Arabia takeover at Newcastle United, by telling the Premier League any deal …
Read More “Human rights abuses: has our little campaign had unexpected support?”
By Tony Attwood Does it matter what the media in Germany think about Manchester City and its fight with Uefa? After all the Bundesliga does its thing, and the Premier League goes its own way, and Uefa waddles about getting itself in a tangle. Why should anyone in England care about the rest of Europe? …
Read More “What do they think in Germany about Manchester City and Uefa”
By Tony Attwood It has been an interesting few days. Guardiola attacked the media – which was expected but still interesting, for it will be illuminating to see how the media respond. Will they bow down and worship him, as they have consistently done since he arrived in the UK, or after an attack like …
Read More “Some questions asked, not many answered. Arsenal, Liverpool, FFP”
By Bulldog Drummond Arsenal remain pretty much at the top of the injury tree. Newcastle United: 8 Arsenal: 7 Bournemouth: 6 Everton: 6 Leicester City: 6 Aston Villa: 5 Burnley: 5 Tottenham Hotspur: 5 Bottom of the table is Manchester City with one player injured. Here’s the list Player Reason Further Detail Potential Return Status …
By Bulldog Drummond Playing the champions elect brings with it some concerns that we might be badly beaten (given our recent results) and some hope that they will not play well (given their recent results). The takeover of the club’s decision making by the “Fourth is not a trophy” gang has led to a very …
Read More “Arsenal v Liverpool: worryingly Arteta asks for more of what we’ve just been doing”
By Tony Attwood Of course we have not yet had the full details of the CAS ruling in the Manchester City case, but CAS has been overturning Uefa rulings for so long (typically cutting punishments in half) it seems unlikely that Uefa will have much of a mind to let things carry on as before …
Read More “What will Uefa and the clubs that obey FFP do now that FFP has been wrecked?”
By Tony Attwood They worked very hard to get rid of Mr Wenger, some of those people who used to write in here complaining that “fourth is not a trophy” and demanding the removal of the most successful manager Arsenal ever had. And in the end their got their way – although of course it …
Read More “After the removal of Mr Wenger and the victory of Man City, what now for Arsenal?”
By Tony Attwood Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, the prosecution, the defence, and the threats of bringing down Uefa, the net result is that Manchester City’s actions in relation to the money they have spent, is deemed worthy of a fine (which given the context of the case is not likely to …
Read More “And so, mega-expenditure is not deemed to be a problem”
