By Sir Hardly Anyone Much of the fun of visiting the Toppled Bollard, (public house of choice for the London based journalists and bloggers), is the feeding of invented stories to half baked reporters, knowing these self-same bonkers comments will instantly turn up on blogs and in newspapers, and even on the radio, the following …
By Tony Attwood Reasons to be cheerful? At a time when… Some Arsenal supporters have recently behaved appallingly in my opinion, booing the captain, and writing articles which seem to have the premise that the manager is a dodo who is as good as gone and the only debate to be had is Mourinho or …
By Tony Attwood It seemed to be all over the blogs and cheap-seats newspapers too: Mourinho was in a secret meeting with Arsenal top bosses. Football.London got so excited about it all that they even ran a computer program to find out how well Mourinho would do as Arsenal manager. Then Arsenal put out a …
By Sir Hardly Anyone Let’s face it, with a crowd like that at Arsenal the next manager is going to have to be immediately successful, and either very popular with the crowd, or a person who does not care one jot what others think of him. For the situation, we have now is similar to …
by Tony Attwood As Mourinho is the man that the media say is coming to Arsenal as the next manager, I thought I would look at Mourinho and his record with the clubs he has managed – and indeed look at what happened after he left (generally following a mega-falling out with the club). Because …
by Tony Attwood One of the great things about running a blog like Untold Arsenal which for over a decade has been digging into issues that everyone else ignores is the fact that people who are kind enough to read what’s here then often come up with other information, or even supporting evidence. So, if …
By Bulldog Drummond Managerless Arsenal? Well, to a degree, since the mainstream media and the bloggers have always been against Emery (just as they were against Mr Wenger, but he managed to smile it off), and now the dominant discussion is not about when he is going to be sacked (it is simply assumed that …
By Tony Attwood As you may know, there has been a long term link between Untold Arsenal and the official Arsenal Belgium supporters club. Our good friend and regular correspondent Walter Broeckx has been associated with the Belgium group since its foundation, and as a referee himself has often written on Untold Arsenal on matters …
By Tony Attwood Why did the Premier League introduce VAR a year later than most other leagues? And why is its introduction in England causing so much dissent even though the officials had so much more time to get it sorted than most of the rest of Europe? Two perfectly reasonable questions it seems to …
by Bulldog Drummond Kolasinac is said by Football.London to have been injured in the match against Liverpool, and was noted limping out of the stadium “with Ainsley Maitland-Niles and Joe Willock also struggling.” As for past matches between Arsenal and Wolverhampton we have played them 114 times, winning 57, losing 30, and drawing 27. The …
By David Clarke Arsenal are in turmoil following captain Granit Xhaka’s confrontation with fans at the Emirates Stadium following a below-par performance against another London side in Crystal Palace. The Gunners were tipped by most football experts to collect three points at home to The Eagles, but they made heavy weather of what should have …
By Tony Attwood The penalty shoot out could have gone either way – as is so often the case. But Arsenal lost and that is enough for the negativists who now effectively run Arsenal’s future. Arsenal for Life blog summed up the situation with the headline “Arsenal collapse once again in Unai Emery’s last game”, …
By Tony Attwood We saw it of course last weekend for the match against Crystal Palace. The crowd were moaning about the way a two goal lead was thrown away, and about the lunatic situation over VAR, in which we were unable to see anything on the screen, save that the referee and his PGMO …
By Bulldog Drummond It is quite possible that Arsenal will put out something of a reserve and under 23 side while Liverpool! using very few under 23 players. This will be because having been banned from signing new junior players because of their behaviour towards a young player and his family not surprisingly they have …
By Tony Attwood What role does the media, from TV soap operas like Match of the Day and Gillette Soccer Saturday, to the tiniest bloggetta, play in how we understand football? None whatsoever, according to the media operators who endlessly pedal the myth that they just report the news, they don’t create it. But their …
By Tony Attwood At the weekend I mentioned the failure of the UK media to report Uefa’s admission that match fixing has now reached such a high level that they can’t cope any more and want outside agencies to tender for the chance to study match fixing and report it back to Uefa. This is, …
Does this page look different from usual? If so, try loading via Firefox, Google, Bing or any other alternative. We know very occasionally a variant front page occurs, but can’t find the cause. However changing your route in, normally resolves the issue. Apologies for the inconvenience. By Tony Attwood If you were not at …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
