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 Just as the Premier League has its quaint regulations concerning players in PL matches, with the list of 25, the home grown list, and quite probably a few other quaint lists as well, so Uefa has its own little regulations that we have to go through each year. What we haven’t yet …
Read More “Arsenal’s Europa list and the curious case of the Salisbury goalkeeper”
By Tony Attwood There were some huge variations in the amount of money being lashed out this summer – and indeed in the amount of money being received by clubs for players sold. Each year different sources quote different sums of money being spent, and so as per previous years I have limited myself to …
Read More “Who spent the most money this summer and has it done them any good?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone It took Nicklas Bendtner nine years to play 108 games for Arsenal and score 24 goals. Which doesn’t sound that good – although to be fair, for three of those years he was on loan, playing 42 games for Birmingham City (11 goals), 28 for Sunderland (8 goals) and nine …
by Tony Attwood Yesterday we published Arsenal’s 20 man squad for the new season So it was with a little surprise that the editorial group at Untold peered at its screens soon after and saw the headline from the Express saying, “Arsenal 25-man Premier League squad revealed as Unai Emery includes new signings.” Had we …
Read More “The 25 players who left Arsenal this summer, and the tiny squad left behind”
By Sir Hardly Anyone “Man United will finish in the top four but Arsenal are battling for sixth’.” When talkSPROUT issued this headline to the world there was no need even to look up who said it. It was of course their one man Anti-Arsenal machine Tony Cascarino. Quite well known for being arrested …
Read More “The one man tirade against Arsenal which the media just loves to report”
By Tony Attwood Now this is where I traditionally go very wrong, so when you spot my errors please can you correct my workings gently, recognising that I am now a year older than I was last season, when I was pretty old anyway. We actually have a squad of 29 players. But four …
By Sir Hardly Anyone Well, well, well, as they say at the watering hole, what have we here? Another load of old bananas plus one piece that, even if you don’t agree with it, really does have a few thought provoking (as opposed to mind numbing) moments. Of we go, and gibberish first… 1. Arsenal …
Read More “The craziest Arsenal headlines of the last few days, and one piece well worth reading”
by Tony Attwood I am not sure when people started talking about a “top six” rather than a “top 4” or any other designation for clubs that regularly finished near the top of the Premier League, but it seems to have become a permanent feature of the way in which the Premier League is thought …
Read More “Is the “top six” a Premier League fixture or is something about to change?”
by Tony Attwood With the recent demise of Bury Football Club – a club that won the FA Cup twice and came fourth in the Football League in the season that Arsenal reached above that position for the first time ever – one or two questions are starting to be asked as to who should …
Read More “Who is a fit and proper person to own a football club and does Arsenal have one?”
by Bulldog Drummond Even in the days when Arsenal were Woolwich Arsenal, playing in Plumstead there was a strong rivalry between ourselves and Tottenham – although probably the biggest rivalry for Woolwich Arsenal was that with Chelsea. Arsenal and Chelsea were the two clubs who had ignored the Southern League and instead applied successfully for …
Read More “Arsenal v Tottenham: teams and what’s happened before”
By Bulldog Drummond This is a difficult game to predict using our favoured home and away statistics, because Tottenham’s form has been affected by their sojourn at Wembley. Now back at Newhl anything could happen. Their home form might dip, as generally happens when teams move stadia (and this is effectively a move, given the …
Read More “Arsenal v Tottenham: recent games and trophies won by each club this century”
By Bulldog Drumond There have been 30 Premier League games so far this season. But only 10 of them have been home wins. That is, rather obviously, 33% of matches that have ended in home wins. Last season it was 48%. And what makes this quite interesting is that this is a sudden change after …
Read More “Why are supercomputers getting their predictions wrong and how to outsmart them”
By Tony Attwood There are four possible reasons I can see why Laca has not started each match so far this season: First, by having one of our three forwards coming on fresh in the second half we can catch out the defence as they tire. Second, the three forwards have not practiced enough together …
By Tony Attwood The impact of a new stadium on a club has been one of my favourite themes across the years of Untold, not least because I think it is one of those little analyses that we came up with first – and which of course everyone else has ignored ever since. But we …
Read More “How are Tottenham reacting to their new stadium and what happens next?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Like dinosaurs raging across the primeval swamps our nation’s scribblers daily produce so many silly headlines (not to mention stories), that it is getting hard to pick out the most insane, although at Untold Towers we really did quite like this one from the Daily and Sunday Express website. This appeared …
Read More “The most screamingly silly misleading headline about Arsenal of the week”
By Tony Attwood The visit to the Sixfields Stadium in Northampton proved to be a disappointment in terms of the result – we lost 4-3 on penalties after a 1-1 draw. But it was an interesting experience with a decent away support occupying one end of the ground with 600 of us there, making ourselves …
Read More “Arsenal under 21 lose on penalties to Northampton (video)”
by Tony Attwood For those of us living in the East Midlands the EFL trophy can be a welcome chance to take a look at Arsenal’s under 21s. I recall a rather fun evening out at Coventry City last season where we met both Tony Adams and Per Mertesaker (pictures all round). And we’re off …
Read More “Northampton v Arsenal tonight in the EFL Trophy. All the details.”
by Tony Attwood England has a long tradition of abuse. King Henry VIII was a fan; he had a bear baiting pit built in Whitehall so he could attend. Queen Elizabeth I enjoyed it too, and when she went around the country the locals were sure to put on a bear baiting display for her. …
Read More “Those who make the biggest fuss about abuse at games are themselves part of the problem”
By Tony Attwood After a summer in which we were told by the blogs and newspapers that every single player in Arsenal’s first team squad was leaving, we’ve found that, not surprisingly, that was not true. Now I know this might come as a bit of a shock – that something predicted so strongly by …
Read More “Mr Emery tells players they can leave. And he’s not the only one with a problem”
By Tony Attwood Last year on 4 August we published Andrew’s analysis of European football which showed the correlation between winning the league and having the most valuable squad in the league. Following this Untold predicted who would win six European leagues, and we got them right. Those leagues were the Premier League in England, and …
Read More “Last year we predicted six league winners correctly. Can we do it again.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone In the previous article the point was made that the Guardian report of yesterday’s game was ludicrously negative. But of course it is not just them that takes this approach to Arsenal. On Match of the Day Gary Lineker was critical of Arsenal players in the match against Liverpool. Is that …
By Tony Attwood Newspapers and websites love to present themselves as the neutral reporters of events. The world is out there, they suggest; they merely tell their readers about it. But in fact newspapers and websites are the opposite: they are the manipulators of reality, manipulating the stories they tell in order to maximise their …
Read More “The utterly manipulative way in which one paper reported Liverpool v Arsenal”
By Bulldog Drummond There was an excellent article in Goonernews recently which made the point that “Liverpool have not lost at home in 40 matches in the Premier League. You have to go all the way back to April 2017 when they succumbed to Crystal Palace in the league.” The article also points out that Liverpool “have …
Read More “Arsenal injury news and team selection ahead of Liverpool”
By Tony Attwood Just in case we don’t get a chance to say this again for an Arsenal match – here we have the top club against the second in the league.. Liverpool’s results thus far have been fairly impressive as we would expect from the team that ran Manchester City close last season… Date …
Read More “Liverpool v Arsenal. Liverpool’s doings and the recent past.”
By Tony Attwood I was interested to see how much interest my little piece Why the media are desperate to see Liverpool thump Arsenal next weekend attracted and I thought the comments on that piece were really interesting. And having read the comments another thought struck me. I am generally quite a positive person, and despite …
