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 If you missed it please do consider having a look at our last article: Exclusive: Uefa admit match fixing is now too big for them to fight it. There is the old tale that the prime sign of madness is doing something that fails and then doing it again, and again, and …
Read More “Arsenal v Palace. Injury news, possible line ups, goal scoring data”
By Tony Attwood, (and I rather think this might be an exclusive in the UK – although not in Europe where match fixing is something to be investigated not hidden). We don’t use the word “exclusive” much here. Indeed the biggest exclusive that we have run – the story that the US police were within …
Read More “Exclusive: Uefa admit match fixing is now too big for them to fight it.”
By Bulldog Drummond It is possible that you may remember from first hand experience the arrival of Robert Pires at Arsenal. You may remember like me the glorious moments of his career, and perhaps the hattrick he scored that started the run of 49 games unbeaten. But what about Pires at the start of his …
Read More “Arsenal v Crystal Palace: the edge is clearly with us”
By Tony Attwood At the start of his second season Wenger bought Overmars. Emery at the same moment in his Arsenal career bought Pepe. By the end of the season people were nodding very knowingly about Overmars who by the last game had got 12 valuable goals. But here’s the thing: Overmars was a fixture …
by Bulldog Drummond “Why is Arsenal’s match against Vitoria being played on a Wednesday?” screams the Sun, which is rather alarming if one believes they are talking about the match at Arsenal stadium this evening. But in fact they were not but rather about a debate concerning when the second match against Vitoria will be …
Read More “Arsenal v Vitoria. Not much can go wrong, can it?”
By Bulldog Drummond Vitória Sport Clube also known as Vitória de Guimarães, play in the Portuguese first division, but are outside the traditional top teams from that league: Benfica, Porto and Sporting. Indeed since the Primeira Liga was created in Portugal in 1999/2000 only these three teams have won the league, and Sporting have only …
Read More “Arsenal v Vitória de Guimarães: how the visitors are doing this season”
by Tony Attwood If you want a single word to summarise Joe Montemurro then “impressive” is probably the word that would spring first to mind. If you want two words then they would probably be “bloody impressive.” One could go further but then the words become a trifle more risqué in expressing their appreciation. For example, …
Read More “An interview with Joe Montemurro, manager of the Arsenal Women’s team”
By Sir Hardly Anyone The fact that Arsenal are fifth in the league and not challenging for the title raises many questions, most notably concerning the abilities of the manager and his future with hundreds of commentators calling for him to resign or be sacked. Among the headlines yesterday we have had in the last …
Read More “If Emery goes will Arsenal really suddenly get much, much better?”
By Dr Billy “the Dog” McGraw, senior psychologist at the University College Hospital of the North Circular Road and head of the “What Lies Behind” unit. “Wilfried Zaha delivers warning to Arsenal fans about Nicolas Pepe’s £72m transfer,” shouts a story on Football.London, the eccentric website owned by the Daily Mirror. So we ask, what’s …
Read More “What’s behind Zaha’s warning about Pepe’s transfer to Arsenal?”
By Tony Attwood We live in a world in which we are encouraged to think that to all complex problems there is a simple solution. If the team is not performing well, get rid of the manager, the new man will surely do better. And who knows, maybe if we go on getting managers and …
Read More “The figures show exactly the sort of manager Arsenal need at this time.”
by Bulldog Drummond Last season Sheffield United had these home defeats in the league Date Game Res Scored Competition 04 Aug 2018 Sheffield United v Swansea City L 1-2 Championship 01 Dec 2018 Sheffield United v Leeds United L 0-1 Championship 14 Dec 2018 Sheffield United v WBA L 1-2 Championship 30 Mar 2019 Sheffield …
Read More “Arsenal injuries ahead of Sheffield Utd away and various possible line ups”
By Dr Billy “the dog” McGraw, senior psychologist at the “What Lies Behind Department of the University College Hospital of the North Circular Road. There was a hilarious piece in the Mirror recently under the title “Arsenal need to be careful with Pierre Emerick Aubameygang – trouble could be brewing.” So we wondered, what could …
Read More “What’s behind the story that Aubameyang is going to Liverpool?”
By Bulldog Drummond It is interesting to note that while Arsenal play in five competitions at the moment (League, League Cup, FA Cup, Europa League and Football League Trophy), Sheffield United along with other teams in a similar position only have three: the League, FA Cup and League Cup thus putting less strain on their …
Read More “Sheffield United v Arsenal: how United have been doing this season”
by Bulldog Drummond The last time we had a regular series of league matches against Sheffield United was in the early 1990s, but then the club dropped ouf of the top league in 1994. However during that era although they didn’t manage to beat us they did manage a series of 1-1 draws. Eventually …
Read More “Sheffield Utd v Arsenal, remembering the kiddies getting 6, and other big scores”
By Tony Attwood One of the central themes that Untold has worked on in the past 11 years is that of having evidence of a statistical nature upon which analyses can be built. Sometimes the amount of evidence is not that great of course, but generally speaking there is evidence of some sort available. Sometimes …
Read More “How clubs are performing, against how they might be expected to perform”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Would you like to be a football journalist who is paid money for writing the same thing over and over and over and … well, you get the idea. Then yes it can be done with the British media. What you do is take any incident in European football, and “call …
Read More “Calling on Uefa to act is a political ploy which gets a headline but no action”
by Tony Attwood Imagine that Arsenal had played eight games this season and won them all 4-3, the club would be second in the league but would have the worst defence in the league. The headlines would be “The statistic all Arsenal fans should be worried about this season.” Here’s another one. Imagine was had …
Read More “We’ve always asked for more stats and fewer opinions… but not like this”
Dear Loyal and Hardcore Regular Untolders , I think that a fellow regular Untold Arsenal poster, Les Williams, and myself may have inadvertently stumbled upon a million pound idea, which may not only enrich our UE coffers, but may also bring much joy, happiness and possibly solace to our regulars, and the Arsenal fandom at …
Read More “A radical solution to the problem of football journalists”
By Tony Attwood The story of football in China really is something to behold. It goes like this: The Chinese government realised a while back that most sports at which the Chinese excel are individual sports like table tennis, rather than team sports like football. But they realised that for the economy of China …
Read More “How even the Chinese football revolution became a chance to knock Arsenal”
By Tony Attwood In an earlier article I was pointing out that the first eight games of the season don’t provide any sort of accurate prediction as to what will happen during the rest of the season. Quite simply there are far too many variables in Premier League football, for eight games to be much …
Read More “How negativists don’t just avoid stats, they misuse them too”
By Tony Attwood It is a central assumption on the part of journalists and bloggers that they can look at Arsenal’s current form and tell us what changes are needed to make the club more successful. And this is based on… well, presumably their superior knowledge; the knowledge that the highly paid team of directors …
Read More “How the first 8 games predicts the outcome of the league across the last 6 years”
By Sir Hardly Anyone So here we are third in the league, the top team in the southern half of the country, one point behind last season’s champions. You might, if you were perhaps a believer that there are Arsenal fans who support their team, who like their team, who actually want their team to …
By Dr Billy (the dog) McGraw We have had so many years of the media chattering about the extra money clubs are earning from TV rights it is hard to remember that the actual earnings of English clubs from TV next year will be down. And that came before beIN Media started talking about reducing …
Read More “If TV football rights payments crash as predicted, who will gain?”
by Tony Attwood Does where a team stands after eight games actually tell us anything much about how the season will turn out in the end? It may feel like it doesn, but in fact if we judge by last season after eight games, and consider that as a predictor of where the clubs would …
Read More “How the table after 8 games shows where Arsenal will end the season”
By Tony Attwood When Arsenal declared its 25 man squad at the start of the season, and we saw there were only 20 men in it, and we noticed that some of those 20 players were still likely to be transferred out, some of us had a few worries for the forthcoming season. 20 senior …
Read More “How Arsenal sneaked 29 players into its list of 25 team members”
