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 Sir Hardly Anyone We often report that 3% of all transfer rumours end up being correct – but this number would be far lower than this were it not for the fact that we include rumours that suddenly emerge en masse just a few days before an actual signing. One such event looks like …
Read More “8 more players heading for Arsenal and 3 more leaving. Plus coaching shake up.”
Research by Andrew Crawshaw, opinions by Tony Attwood The FA have for years been trying to break away from the EU imposed rule of allowing EU players from all nationalities to play for clubs without restriction. UEFA introduced the rule at the start of the 2006/07 football season requiring that all teams entering European club …
Read More “Cohen and his Englishness: the most bonkers neo-nationalistic FA story ever”
By Tony Attwood As you may have read in the media, an Arsenal academy coach has been fined and banned for three matches having called a female teenage referee “little prick,” at the end of a game for Under 9s. He was charged with using improper language and behaviour towards a referee and insulting the …
By Tony Attwood Recently one of the most read Arsenal stories doing the rounds on the internet was “Arsenal would commit the biggest transfer blunder by signing this 26-year-old flop even though it is for free.” The story appeared in Media Referee and came with the sub heading “Gunners should drop their interest in …
Read More “Arsenal transfer commentary language changes: now the pundits know best”
By Tony Attwood David Dein was the Arsenal director who introduced Arsène Wenger to Arsenal, and ultimately recruited him as Arsenal’s manager. When Dein resigned as a director it was a huge shock to Mr Wenger, and to most Arsenal watchers. And indeed a few of us were very fearful at the time as to …
Read More “David Dein’s prison project: the positive story of football putting something back.”
By Tony Attwood You may recall that we recently undertook a bit of an analysis comparing Mr Emery’s first season at Arsenal with Mr Wenger’s last. The full report is here in case you missed it but the long and the short of the analysis was that at home we conceded the same number …
Read More “Mr Emery kept Arsenal stable in his first season, so what’s he going to do now?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Many people question why I hang around in public houses as derelict and beaten up as the Toppled Bollard on Wapping Swamp, talking to derelict and beaten up so-called football journalists in an attempt to find out who is going to transfer to Arsenal this week. And I must admit the …
Read More “This transfer makes no sense: worrying times indeed for Arsenal”
This article continues from the piece, “No Champs League again, but how are Arsenal going to turn this around?” published earlier today. It is 100 years since Arsenal were elected to the first division upon its expansion. Take out 11 years when football was not played, and we have been in the first division for …
Read More “Arsenal: 100 Years in the First Division – but what about more titles”
By Tony Attwood There was an interesting article recently by Nick Hornby which looks back at the past season and says, “We used to blame Wenger and the kinds of players he liked, the technically gifted, physically unimposing attacking midfielders who seemed to occupy every position on the pitch. Torreira, Granit Xhaka and Sokratis Papastathopoulos …
Read More “No Champs League again, but how are Arsenal going to turn this around?”
By Tony Attwood Every summer for the last few years we have charted the names of players who are touted by the newspapers and radio stations to be coming to Arsenal, and those who are leaving. Each year the total has got to over 100, with on average no more than 3% of the predictions …
Read More “44 players Arsenal are tipped to sign this summer; 16 are going.”
By Tony Attwood Looking back, as one does at this time of year, it was interesting to see how quickly the build up of excitement and enthusiasm in the media concerning the Champions League final dissipated. And it wasn’t just a feeling of regret that surrounded the Tottenham v Liverpool match in the media, it …
Read More “It’s going to be great, it was awful as we expected, Santi Cazorla and Leeds.”
By Tony Attwood . The last three posts have been talking about corruption in football. Where corruption is taking place on a major scale it ought to be possible to predict who is going to win the league, and have already mentioned in an earlier post that at the start of the 2018/19 season, Untold …
Read More “We predicted six champions before the season started. We got all six right.”
By Tony Attwood So far in this series: Is football fixed? Part 1: The logical reason why we might well think so. Is football fixed? Part II: why we need to have change I had already written the two previous “Football is Fixed” articles that appeared yesterday, when the news came in that the match …
Read More “Is football fixed? The final chapter: match fixing in Spain.”
By Tony Attwood This article concludes the discussion on why change is needed in the way football is run in the Premier League. As the Guardian pointed out, when Southampton were beaten 6-1 by Manchester City, the expected goals result suggested a 2-2 draw. And we say, ah well, stuff happens. Or we might …
Read More “Is football fixed? Part II: why we need to have change”
By Tony Attwood There are two answers to the notion that football is fixed, which journalists and bloggers like to trot out over and over again. The first is that the people who suggest football is fixed are simply loopy – that they go around wearing tin hats, believe that the BBC is the universal …
Read More “Is football fixed? Part 1: The logical reason why we might well think so.”
by Blacksheep I must say, from the start, that I started this past season with low expectations. I thought we’d miss out on the top four (when Tony often said we’d make it). I expected we’d do better in the Europa League than last season because, well, history tends to suggest that a little …
By Tony Attwood In the 15 years since Arsenal’s unbeaten season – an event which has not yet been emulated of course – only four teams have won the Premier League: Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea and Leicester City. Noting this I thought it might be worth asking the question, “Does that mean that the …
Read More “Football is getting so predictable one season seems much like the last.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone It seems that a few people took a look at my recent little amble through the backwaters of what is laughingly called football journalism and thought either we were making it up, or that we took these tales seriously. So a quick explanation: each year for the past few years we …
Read More “The 36 players Arsenal are now tipped to sign and no sign yet of Edu.”
It goes without saying that unless you’re English, you’ll have no clue of the immense passion that is deep-rooted in the sport of football, which has become ingrained in the nation’s culture over generations. In this article, we have listed some of the essential tips that non-native English football attendees need to know before they …
Read More “What You Need to Know About Attending English Football Matches”
by Tony Attwood As we know, last season the difference between Chelsea in third and Arsenal in fifth was just two points and two goals. So in the simplest of terms we could argue that Arsenal just need a small adjustment to get back into the top four. Team P W D L F A …
Read More “Why we really only need one new defender to get into the top four.”
By Tony Attwood Prior to the Europa final an article in the Guardian contained the comment, “…it is difficult to overstate just how critical this match is to Arsenal. Returning to the Champions League after a two-year hiatus has been their No 1 aim all season. No one is under any illusion about the perils …
By Bulldog Drummond All told it has been a far from happy build up to the Europa League final, although just as the FA always shrug off problems at Wembley cup finals and carry on doing their own thing, I am sure Uefa haven’t even noticed that fans are not ecstatic about the journey nor …
Read More “Arsenal v Chelsea: the preview, the teams, the managers’ records and Wrighty.”
by Bulldog Drummond This decade has been a good one for Chelsea, with three doubles: 2009–10: League and FA Cup 2011–12: FA Cup and UEFA Champions League 2014–15: League and League Cup In addition they won the League in 2017, the Europa League in 2013, and the FA cup in 2017–18. Whatever we might think …
Read More “Arsenal v Chelsea: Europa Final. Using past stats to predict the result”
By Tony Attwood Summer is always the time for a bit of a meander around the subjects we’ve plodded through during the past season, looking for bits we’ve missed and issues that maybe we could take a bit further. And of course it is also a time for taking a deeper look into what other …
Read More “Untold Arsenal providing stats for the Guardian? Well yes, so it seems”
By Tony Attwood The notion that a lack of English players in the Premier League is bad for England, bad for football, and quite probably bad for Brexit, is standard fare in terms of what England managers say. And it is noticeable that they never give any evidence of why this is the case. It …
Read More “England managers should stop playing into the hands of the extreme right wing”
