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 Tony Attwood From the off Untold has argued that football reporting via the mainstream media is warped. Broadcasters agreed with football authorities not to cover certain issues, such as the quality of refereeing. Under pressure from the authorities all agreed and only one or two rocked the boat. Alan Green on BBC radio, and …
Read More “Dear Arsenal Supporter, you are being brainwashed”
By Tony Attwood Since the WC final there’s been a perfect example in the today of how different papers can take totally different positions when it comes to the same event. The Guardian has been full of headlines about how the French nation rejoiced at their victory in the world cup, and celebrated the arrival …
Read More “Seven fantasies, 11 nightmares and Ramsey’s agent tweets “keep making the stuff up”.”
By….Don McMahon Well its all over and done with…..France beat a courageous but outclassed Croatia, there were blunders galore, the pundits literally burst their seams with pointless and repetitive ¨observations¨ about who was and wasn’t the cock of the walk this particular match, etc. One observation I didn’t hear was about how peculiarly inept the …
Read More “All the things we didn’t learn from the world cup.”
By Tony Attwood What annoys me – and annoys me a lot – is when lazy journalism means that football stories are published without any reference to relevant context. For example, stories about Arsenal signing all sorts of players continue, even though the club has now reached the £70m limit that the media told us …
By Tony ATtwood Here is a list of PL clubs for the coming season showing the amount spent, how many players have been bought, and in the case of the top six clubs in the league last season, who has been bought. Club Amount spent No of players Names Arsenal £71.4m 5 Lichsteiner (zero) Leno …
By Sir Hardly Anyone A certain football journalist — for such men, I regret to say, do exist — has made the remark that my last column contained ‘all the same football transfer rumours stories but just with different players’ names inserted’. I have asked the secret police to do him over (once they have …
By Tony Attwood Please note that because I thought Walter would not be covering the match I tried to write a commentary as it went along, but believe me it is much much harder than it looks to do it. As with everyone else I lost the feed in the second half and so stopped …
By Bulldog Drummond In case you don’t get to matches at Arsenal Stadium, let me explain. As the game is about to get underway the stadium announcer announces, as announcers tend to do, in an excited voice, “Football is back in N5, enjoy the game!” so I thought we’d use it today, although it took …
Read More “Football is back in WD6 5AL. Enjoy the game! Here’s the Arsenal team.”
by Tony Attwood 2002/3 had been an ok year – we had ended up second in the league, five points off the leaders Manchester United but nine point above Newcastle in third. Pos Team P W D L F A GD Pts 1 Manchester United 38 25 8 5 74 34 40 83 2 Arsenal …
Read More “Arsenal in the summer: why a poor pre-season could be just what we want.”
By Bulldog Drummond Trying to get background and history on this fixture is tough. For example, visit google and you find “Boreham Wd 0 – 2 Arsenal – Match Report & Highlights – Sky Sports” which takes to a page headlined Results Friday 13th July 2001 which contains nothing of the kind. Are they trying to …
Read More “Boreham Wood v Arsenal all the players we’ll see plus videos of recent encounters.”
By Bulldog Drummond Apparently, tomorrow in Glasgow there will be a capacity 50,000 crowd at Ibrox for the match between Rangers and the might giants of Macedonia: FK Shkupi of Macedonia. There won’t be such a crowd for Arsenal’s opener against Boreham Wood but I think the match is pretty much sold out, and it …
Read More “Boreham Wood v Arsenal. Football’s coming home. At last.”
By Tony Attwood England has a population of 53 million. Croatia has a population of 4 million. England have a country co-efficient calculated by Uefa that puts them second in European standings. Croatia is 16th. Croatia has the problem of all their best players playing overseas. England was the only country in this WC that …
Read More “Supposing it had been Arsenal not England who lost to the minnows last night. What then…”
By Tony Attwood The activity figures are looking a bit more usual, but only a bit. As we shall see there are certain imbalances in spending which are different from anything we have seen before. Here is the chart for the top six clubs using such data as we can find across the media. Club …
Read More “The transfers of the top six clubs in the Premier League and across Europe”
By Bulldog Drummond It seems months since Arsenal last played a game, and it literally has been months. You’ll recall the end of Mr Wenger’s reign I’m sure… Date Game Res Score Competition 06 May 2018 Arsenal v Burnley W 5-0 Premier League 09 May 2018 Leicester City v Arsenal L 3-1 Premier League 13 …
By Tony Attwood Back in April it was widely reported that Arsenal were limited to a transfer budget of £50m. Then at the end of May it was said that Arsenal had had their budget increased to £70m. And that is where the figure has stayed ever since – unless we made a big money …
Read More “We seem to have spent the £70m transfer budget. Have we covered everything?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone I have been remiss, for I have failed in the past to dedicate my regular transfer column to all the “journalists” (I use the word lightly) of the various bloggettas and newspapers (I again, use terms without a clear definition) from the mighty Foot Lond with its 40 Arsenal stories a …
Read More “Some transfer stories make no sense while others are like the wheels on the bus”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Last time around we passed the 100 mark with transfers. And if previous seasons are anything to go by all the media will pile in one day ahead of the transfers that are actually happening, and then do the “As reported in the Daily Gibber” thing as if to suggest they …
By Sir Hardly Anyone So what’s what and who’s who, whose coming whose going and all that sort of caper…. The big ongoing story of the day is that Lucas Torreira “will be joining Arsenal very soon”. That is what it says in Arsenal Fever, and loads of other places. The other one that keeps …
Read More “Who are Arsenal buying? Opinion, it seems, is divided.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Never have I seen anything like it. Not once, not ever! Upon finishing my nap upon the Saturday afternoon I took what I expected to be a gentle motor across England green and pleasant rolling hills from Imperial Rutland to the megalopolis of Leicester that home of the working man. But …
Read More “The nation goes bonkers but no one can tell the difference”
by Tony Attwood There were several reasons why I stopped watching football on TV: the cost of my subscriptions to Sky Sports and BT Sports was getting ludicrous, and my anger at the way Arsenal was portrayed by both media were enough, but when I took the step last August I did so in the …
Read More “A year ago I stopped watching football on TV. Nothing changed except I have more money.”
by Tony Attwood There are articles on some of the web sites of the English national media that have been on their sites for weeks. They are kept there to make it look as if there really is some new news around what Barney Ronay in the Guardian calls “the ceaseless clamour around an ever-more engorged …
Read More “What else is on beside the daily jamboree in the WC?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone What makes a football journalist? It is tempting to think of her or him as a layabout who stumbles from the public house to the computer, bashes out some wild story and then stumbles back. But maybe we have got this wrong. What if the football journalist was doing this …
Read More “The factual list of your actual transfers and no exaggeration!”
By Dr Billy “the Dog” McGraw, senior psychologist at the University College Hospital of the North Circular Road with apologies to China Miéville. There are two Arsenal’s: The Arsenal and The Arsenal. They sit next to each other but to each the other does not exist. You cannot be in both and cannot easily travel from …
Read More “The Arsenal and The Arsenal: two realities, no communication, worlds apart.”
By Tony Attwood It’s funny to think that the draw for the opening round of the European competitions has already been made, while the WC is plodding along as the media and governments make it clear they have no concerns about the corruption and fraud associated with the organisers. Anyway in exactly one week the …
By Bulldog Drummond If you have been reading Untold regularly you’ll know three things about Untold and international football. The first is that we don’t care for it because of it is run by the mafia-like Fifa and allows the mainstream media to idolise corruption, theft and violence – all of which are associated with …
Read More “England v Sweden: the Untold prediction. Will our run of correct predictions continue?”
