By Bulldog Drummond It is a sign of the times, undoubtedly, that the Guardian’s web site does not have one single mention at all of the Community Shield match today. No preview, not even the statutory slagging off of Arsenal. Just total and absolute silence other than an article headed, “Arsène Wenger unsure if Chelsea’s …
By Bulldog Drummond Just as a taster for what is to come, try this in the warm up to the season Arsenal’s FA Cup final victory that denied Conte’s team the domestic double … does beg the question of how Wenger is going to make up the ground with the gruelling added extra of Thursday …
By Tony Attwood A bit of idle curiosity arose after reading a piece telling me that a good start to the season is essential for any team wanting to win the league, as I wasn’t sure that this was the case last season. Indeed a quick flip back to 1 October 2016 – a date …
by Ian Brookes I was at the Emirates Cup this weekend with my 2 sons and has been the recent tradition, I treated them to a new shirt for the season. Of the 3 on offer both opted for the Home kit in short sleeve with Lacazette and number 9 on the back. The cost …
By Tony Attwood Very very little transfer action by the clubs that ended up in the top ten during the past couple of weeks. Top spenders are still Manchester City with £217m spent followed by Man U who have overtaken Chelsea into second position having spent £146m. Chelsea third with £126m. Everton have now …
By the Very Bold, Sir Hardly Anyone. Actually I didn’t mean to be in bold, it just happened, so I paid Tony £1m for it to stay like that. Typesetting correction fees have escalated in the past year apparently, and although I expressed surprise, he did tell me that they are index linked to transfer …
By Tony Attwood So say Arsène Wenger, reaching the same conclusion as we did. When you let a country own a club, all chaos is bound to cut loose. Likewise when you let a country like Qatar hold the World Cup then all chaos is bound to cut loose. When that country then suffers a …
By Tony Attwood Suddenly people are talking about FFP rules not being legal – all over again. Just after we’ve had two peaceful years of thinking that was all settled, Neymar comes along and some people get all excited thinking that FFP will be torn up by the European Court of Justice. So first the …
By Sir Hardly Anyone It is surely the biggest indictment so far of the millions of pages of rumours spread across thousands of bloggettas and newspapers that virtually no one picked up in advance on the loan of Emiliano Martinez to Getafe CF, before it happened. All those inside stories from people really in the know …
By Tony Attwood For Paris Saint-Germain the issue of the Neymar transfer is not just one of getting the player. It is a case of getting the player and not getting debarred from, or penalised within, the Champions League. Of course PSG know a bit about FFP since they have already come under fire from …
by Tony Attwood Reading the always interesting “A cultured left foot” blog this morning in relation to the decision by Kroenke to bring his big game hunting channel to the UK, I came across the sentence “The reality is that while the MOTV incident brings football into disrepute, nothing will be done.” And yes, I …
By Sir Hardly Anyone There are seven new players on Arsenal’s transfer list this week taking the grand total to 89 players who are said to be joining Arsenal this summer. Last year it was 114 and we have got 31 days left to find the missing 26 players that will make this the all …
By Sir Hardly Anyone According to the Daily Mail, Arsenal’s “summer clear-out” has been “delayed with players refusing to take pay cuts to join new clubs.” So at last, we have our Arsenal summer crisis. The players won’t leave!!! Well, at least it is original. Anyway the headline grabbing news is that, “Arsenal are …
By Tony Attwood This little piece contains brief details about five things that I think are indeed wrong with football, but which most people in the media seem to find ok – except when it involves knocking Arsenal of course. 1: Drugs in football? Who cares? Drugs testing is treated as irrelevant nonsense in football, …
By Ian Brookes Towards the back end of the 1990/91 season Arsenal announced the launch of a new Debenture Bond scheme. The idea of the scheme was to assist in the funding of the development of the North Bank following the Taylor Report post Hillsborough. The Bonds were known as “A” and “B”. An A …
. Seven Transfers Arsenal are said to be involved in, and the changes noticed in the pre-transfer talk. . By Sir Hardly Anyone The notion of a transfer index which charts all the players said by the media to be coming to or going from Arsenal, was of course set up to show how stupid …
Arsenal 5 Benfica 2. By Tony Attwood In the UK the Arsenal v Benfica match was shown on Quest – a TV channel I have not previously associated with football. Or come to that anything. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever watched it before. But what a stunning revolution it was. No pundits full …
By Bulldog Drummond Trying to get the teams right is tough enough at the best of times, and Blacksheep (whose phone always seems to get the teams before anyone else in the pub before the match) does take special delight in the way that the Untold team predictor service is somewhat less viable as a …
By Tony Attwood While the media in Britain has occasionally hinted that maybe all is not well, most of the time they seem to be enjoying the hyper-inflation of transfer fees that is going on. But the public in Germany are now being told that Bayern Munich will not participate in the current “madness” of …
By Tony Attwood The latest from the source, (which is to say Arsenal) is that Gabriel is still a few weeks away from returning to training, Jack Wilshere is much closer to returning , there’s no date for Santi yet but he is “getting better every day”, and no one else is injured. Except that the …
by Sir Hardly Anyone. For the first time ever I have seen a bloggetta run a transfer rumour with the headline “Nobody believes it”. The source is Talkingbaws – which is a new one on me – and it runs like this. Real Mad are going to buy Kylian Mbappé, just to show that they can. …
By Sir Hardly Anyone It is as if someone in football has read my name and instead of seeing it as, well, not to put too fine a point on it, my name, they have taken it as what they should be doing in terms of signing players. And in fact in the past week …
by Tony Attwood OK, if you have been paying attention you’ll know that over the last couple of days we’ve been exploring the British press and the way in which when it comes to football it has embraced fake news as real. Part of my argument is that this effect is achieved in three ways: …
By Tony Attwood According to the Sun, Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona both call surprise press conference half hour apart as Neymar’s £195m switch to PSG. Of course the chances are that this is typical Fake News from the Sun, the Express and the other media outlets. But even so, the huge transfers going through …
By Tony Attwood Try this headline for size Preseason shows Arsenal committed to back three but need attack options Now this pre-season involved travelling around the world, playing in ludicrous humidity, food poisoning, and our top scorer from last season not present, plus a match in which the authorities refused (for a while) to …
