Author: Tony Attwood

By Bulldog Drummond Known to historians as the Yo-Yos, having transferred themselves between the top tier and the second level of English football no less than 13 times, with the occasional visit to the third tier (as in 2008/9), Leicester have now had four years in the top division. Since coming up from what has …

Read More “Leicester worried about referee for monday, and the Arsenal v Leicester stats”

By Tony Attwood 3pm saturday kick offs are sacrosanct.  You can’t show a live football match between 3 and 5pm in the major heartlands of football.  That is England, Scotland and er… Montenegro. And why? Ah well that is where it gets tricky.   There is the suggestion that 3pm was the historic time to kick …

Read More “3pm Saturday is exactly the wrong time to have football kick offs.”

By Tony Attwood “Golden Generation” is one of those phrases that is generally either used far too early, or way to late (as in the all too common phrase “whatever happened to…” after the players en masse have failed to live up to the hype I am sure I can be proven wrong, but I …

Read More “Nelson, Smith Rowe, Maitland Niles, Eddie: slowly the world is awkening”

By Tony Attwood Yes the car thieves – the international managers who go round nicking players, wrecking them, handing them back and then demanding that that players are made fit for the next round of games. So who suffered this time around? Well they certainly worked hard with the wrecking ball, knackering as many players …

Read More “What the car thieves did to Premier League players in the international break.”

By Tony Attwood There are two stories floating around at the moment.   One involves the possibility that the royal family of Saudi Arabia might be thinking of buying Manchester United, the other involving a West Ham coach of their under 18 side who has attended a rally held by a right wing group. Which is …

Read More “In football, why are individuals called to account, but not whole nations?”

By Tony Attwood There are ex-players and ex-players, and when you meet one for the first time it can be quite a shock.  They come from different backgrounds, have different approaches to life… that of course is to be expected.  But so often one finds that the man is different from the player. And that …

Read More “Meeting a player you have admired can be such a very strange experience.”

By Tony Attwood No one quite knows what “We’ve got our Arsenal back” means, although clearly it has some sort of relationship with an Arsenal club or team from the past which is now back playing once again.   Although not exactly the same players of course, for that would be silly. And it cleraly has …

Read More “We’ve got our Arsenal back. But which Arsenal is that exactly?”

By Tony Attwood The last time we had a great start to the league, in terms of the first eight games, was in 2016 when on 18 October the league table looked like this… Pos Team P W D L F A GD Pts 1 Manchester City 8 6 1 1 19 8 11 19 …

Read More “Does the first eight league games of a season tell us how it will end?”

By Tony Attwood Sometimes one is forced to stop and think, “Who pays the players?”  and “Who has to keep paying players even when they are injured in an international match?” Come to that, “Who takes the players on at a very early age, builds and runs the training facilities, develops their skills, advises them …

Read More “England’s woes are all the fault of selfish clubs, at least according to the car thieves”

Sir Hardly Anyone explores drainpipe theory with Marianna Trench. Yes media drainpipe after media drainpipe (the things those quaint little bloggettas call outlets) are all shouting out the same story-story.  That Arsenal are going to sign Ismaila Sarr and Kai Havertz. As more and more and more of the pesky blighters copied each other over …

Read More “When almost every media source says the same transfer is happening, what does it mean?”

By Tony Attwood Below is a “this season vs last season” table, showing for key figures just how the clubs have changed in the course of a year after eight matches. Looking at each team there are two rows – one for key indicators at this time last season and one for now. In the …

Read More “Last year’s top six – how this season is rather different from last time around”

Tony Attwood I was wondering where on earth the statistics came from showing that Arsenal were the dirtiest team in the league, and expressed incredulity as I worked through the analysis in previous articles. But others came to my rescue and found more and more figures, and in the discussion after the article “Arsenal are …

Read More “Who in the Arsenal team has committed the most fouls this season? You will not guess!!!”

Chelsea Women v Arsenal – Sunday 14 October 14:00 Preview By Andrew Crawshaw This a match that will really be a test of our title credentials. So far we have comfortably won all three of our league matches, albeit they have been against teams we should expect to beat. Chelsea on the other hand have …

Read More “Chelsea Women v Arsenal – Sunday 14 October 14:00 Preview”

By Tony Attwood It was the story that Sky used years and year ago to discredit Arsenal and its manager Mr Wenger.  We were the dirtiest team in the League.   Unfortunately the source of their data was never given, nor any other team’s figures, so no one could check.  But seveal people challenged the figures …

Read More “Arsenal are the dirtiest team in the League this season. Errr? Really? Are you sure?”

By Tony Attwood Are we looking at a golden generation of Arsenal youngsters coming through? It is one of those questions that is so hard to answer.  One watches Reiss Nelson play for England’s under 21s, and think, he really is rather good.  And then remember that he is just 18 and think, actually, he’s …

Read More “Why it’s so vital to help our young players understand that Twitter is not real.”

By Tony Attwood When it comes to England games something strange happens to the reporting.  and not just with the delicate way the media handles the FA, suggesting that they might be reasonable decent set of  people trying hard to do their job (as opposed to them being a bunch of charlatans happy to take …

Read More “Would you trust a bankrupt corner store with £600 million of taxpayers’ money”

By Sir Hardly Anyone There was an awfully large amount of fuss about shutting the 2018 summer window early so that transfers were done before the season started. Which makes it seem rather odd not to say illogical not to say bizarre that we now have a one month transfer window during the season launching …

Read More “Arsenal transfer index: all the players we will sign in January 2019”

By Tony Attwood “The Arsenal and The Arsenal” theme suggests that there are two different groups of people interested in the club, and each sees what is going on, and considers what is important, in ways so different from the other that there is just no connection between the realities, except that they are all …

Read More “Football is changing, although most of the time it doesn’t look like it.”

By Tony Attwood As you may have read, in Belgium there has been a series of arrests at football clubs and elsewhere related to fraud and match fixing.   These followed around 50 raids in Belgium and another raft in France, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia. Reports suggest that the Brugge coach Ivan Leko and a former …

Read More “If there were match fixing in England would we ever be told?”

By Chayasai Very early in the season Arsenal played Chelsea and Man City without those players who are the backbone today.  And, in hindsight, with the great advantage of having training under Emery, and getting immensely better, physically, mentally and tactically, Arsenal can justifiably believe that they are a completely different team right now from …

Read More “Emery’s Arsenal EPL and Europa Winning Team, with Lozano, Pavon, Filipe Louis and Jardel”

By Tony Attwood Over the years when it comes to football, newspapers, broadcasters and most recently bloggers have merged their own thoughts and prejudices with the facts, to produce their version of reality.  And for years  that version of reality has been one in which Arsenal make more mistakes than anyone else as well as …

Read More “Arsenal under unprecedented attack. To survive it is time to join the Resistance”

By Dr Billy “the Dog” McGraw Arsenal’s upturn in form, in the guise of winning every single match in every single competition since the opening two games of the season, has caused some commentators a problem. Their whole approach to Arsenal is that Arsenal is a failure.  If Arsenal win then it is by chance …

Read More “Arsenal are going to concede a shed full of goals soon, but it really doesn’t matter.”

By Andrew Crawshaw I met Mark at Hammersmith Station just after 11.00 giving us plenty of time to walk to Craven Cottage. For those of you who don’t know the ground it is rather old fashioned and, for the Premier League, quite small with a capacity of some 25,700; so less than half of that …

Read More “Retrospective: what was it actually like being at Fulham?”

by Sir Hardly Anyone and Marianne Trench. Our complete update on the really big stories this evening that are showing us what a huge thing a football is.  But first, something no one actually said about Fulham but might have While they were content to peck cautiously at the ball, the never spared themselves in …

Read More “Shocking claims: the ten biggest stories about Arsenal doing the rounds this evening.”

By Tony Attwood As we speculated a while back, Arsenal’s next kit sponsor will be Adidas, with the deal worth £60m a season.  This is roughly double the size of the last deal (that’s the one that I’ll always remember as Puma released a video to commemorate the launch, which included a good five seconds …

Read More “Comparing this season’s start to that of the unbeaten season (And a new kit sponsor)”