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 As far as I can work out (and I must admit I am only an amateur historian) fake news was introduced into English newspapers as a method of filling their pages during the first world war at a time when the government imposed a strict censorship on the war news. If you …
By Bulldog Drummond Yesterday’s meander around the possibilities of who might play against Red Star Belgrade on Thursday gave us this range of possibilities Ospina, Holding, A, B, Nelson, …
Read More “Red Star Belgrade v Arsenal: an alternative approach to the line up.”
by Tony Attwood The FA, like all national associations, allies itself utterly and totally to Fifa, an organisation known to have used, and quite probably is still using, corrupt methods in its running football. And an organisation known to being working hand in glove with a country that uses slave labour to build its …
Read More “Every day the FA reveals its corruption and incompetence more fully”
by Sir Hardly Anyone Part 1: Sign the wonderkid When we have the Metro quoting the Mirror and the Mail for a story whose origin is “according to reports” you know that reportage has got just about as low as it is going to go. But for the sake of the record, let’s give it …
Read More “The amazing centre back revelation and kicking Mesut out the door.”
by Bulldog Drummond And so off we go again into foreign parts, primarily with a different team from that which played at the weekend in the League. Just so you know what to expect here is a picture of the stadium. It is a 2 hours 40 minutes flight, and there is also a …
Read More “Red Star Belgrade v Arsenal: the team and early prognostications and whatnot”
By Tony Attwood Ever since the organising countries for the world cups in 2018 and 2022 were announced questions have been asked. Russia, because (to give just one tiny example) it undertook all of its application work and correspondence on computers that it hired, and then gave back to the company it borrowed them from. …
Read More “Fifa and Uefa: the corruption continues. Is it really just limited to the world game?”
By Tony Attwood The little piece yesterday afternoon giving the reasons why it is logical to expect there to be corruption in Premier League football, brought a larger than normal amount of vitriol and a larger than normal number of commentaries that had little if anything to do with the post, or contained no evidence …
Read More “How do we know if match fixing is taking place or not?”
By Tony Attwood There are, it seems, many people who don’t or won’t believe that the Premier League has been corrupted in way. And I have begun to wonder why they believe that there is no corruption. After all, one only has to look around the UK to know that corruption is everywhere. Indeed …
Read More “Why would anyone ever believe that the Premier League is not corrupt?”
By Bulldog Drummond You might have thought that one or two journalists might have learned the lesson from Untold’s long-running criticism of Amy Lawrence over her comment about Arsenal having only two players who scored in double figures the season before last. The point was, it was true, there were two such players. But the …
by Bulldog Drummond For a year or two now I have been reading about clubs being on “High Alert”. Apparently at the moment Manchester City are on “High Alert” because they might be able to buy Alexis in January. For a year or two now I have been reading about clubs being on “High Alert”. …
Read More “Watford v Arsenal. High alert, score predictions, who passes most, and the squad”
By Bulldog Drummond “According to Nick Ames in the Guardian Arsenal will keep enjoying false-dawn months like September, batting away Bournemouth, Brighton and BATE before coming undone when in-form opposition from the top five bowl up.” An interesting thought. I suppose it might be meant to be funny, but humour either needs to be based in …
Read More “Context is everything: Watford v Arsenal, the prognostications”
A lot of the criticism levelled at Arsene Wenger and the Arsenal board over recent times has been for their lack of ambition or skill in taking the club into its next era. From the outside looking in it seems Wenger has always controlled most things, if not them all, as manager of …
Sir Hardly Anyone. Try this one for size: “Arsenal Fans Lose Their Sh*t After What Arsene Wenger Has Just Said” Now first off we need to work out what that little asterisk means. Is it an a, e, i, o, or u? I think we can all guess, which raises question one. Why not write …
Read More “The wildest transfer rumour yet causes another meltdown, so what is likely to happen?”
By Tony Attwood International football. Isn’t it wonderful! Don’t you want more? Of course you do!! So let’s have not just one international tourney (the World Cup, or WC as its known in the Untold Penthouse) or even two (adding the Uefa European Championship.) Any idiot can see that is nowhere near enough. After all …
By Melissa Hart At 28, Theo Walcott should be coming into his prime, but like many players who made the step up to the first team at such an early age, he looks on the wane. Now, don’t mistake that for affirmation that we need to sell, but it’s the proverbial elephant in …
By Sir Hardly Anyone Yes, here’s a new whizzo wheeze: take a look at the wild ravings of the bloggettas and newspapers, with their amazing 3 out of 100 rating in terms of prediction accuracy, give them a rating for each rumour, and then come back and see, were we right or were they or …
Read More “Latest stories concerning Arsenal complete with Truth Rating”
By Tony Attwood So Brazil beat Chile 3-0, Alexis doesn’t seem to have been injured and as a result of other games, Chile are not now playing New Zealand in a two leg world cup play off. So we get Alexis back for a while. The sad news is that some other team is likely …
Read More “Alexis: good news and sad news, plus threats of imprisonment and TV madness.”
By Bulldog Drummond You may have thought that the international type of games were all over, but far from it. There’s another game tomorrow (Wednesday) morning between Brazil and Chile – which means Alexis is playing. Brazil have qualified for Russia. Chile will be going to Russia if they beat Brazil – but the …
Read More “Watford v Arsenal: the return of the injured, and Alexis still south of the equator.”
By Tony Attwood The current youth academy system for English football was designed in 1997 by Howard Wilkinson, the man who took Leeds United from the lower reaches of the second division to be the final winners of the old First Division, using an interesting squad complete with Vinnie Jones. Now in an era when …
Read More “If the home grown project is failing, has the Academy system has failed too?”
by Tony Attwood In June 2010 I filled up an otherwise rather boring day researching what it was that made some international sides better than others. Was it the number of players who played in their own country’s league? The size of the country? Or something else? It turned out to be something else: the …
Read More “How the home grown rule has completely failed to make any difference at all.”
By Tony Attwood Oh yes oh yes oh yes, the injury crisis is back and the bloggettas are knocking each other over in a desperate bid to get the absolute ENORMITY of the crisis registered. Because MAKE NO MISTAKE this is the big one. It is “horrible for Wenger” according to the quaintly named 101 …
Read More “Absolutely amazing overwhelming Arsenal injury crisis brings club to the edge”
by Tony Attwood Sometimes I see a story and think, “no, another bit of made up blarney”, but this one has me intrigued. TMW claim that Ajax Director of Football Mark Overmars has reached an agreement with Arsenal to leave his club with the Eredivisie side at the end of the season and join Arsenal as …
Read More “Marc Overmars to join Arsenal as director of football according to…”
by Dr Billy “the dog” McGraw. Shkodran Mustafi is going to be out of football for “some time” after he was quite unnecessarily played by Germany in a ludicrous 5-1 World Cup victory against the mighty Azerbaijan yesterday. And this straight after I ran a piece about the insanity of world cup football and the …
Read More “And now it is our turn: Mustafi out for “some time” as we are stuck in Flatland.”
By Dr Billy “the dog” McGuire, Untold’s occasional expert medic. In a recent interview, former Manchester United captain Roy Keane suggested that if a player is “worried about the physical side of any sport, then play chess”. Backing him up the England U-17 coach Steve Cooper said his lads are not softies and can bring …
Read More “We’re surviving so far but will Arsenal yet succumb to the international injury crisis?”
By Tony Attwood At the start it is always the same. First there are the deals and the regulations: in the case of football the requirements that the Premier League and others place on broadcasters, such as not showing any pitch invasion, not showing violence in the ground, limiting the questioning individual refs and never …
Read More “Football analysis: hear it, read it, see it enough, and it starts to become true.”
