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 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.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone I notice Alexis scored the winner for Chile to keep them in with a chance of qualifying for the Russian World Cup. Chile has moved up to third in the South American league having beating Ecuador 2-1. And with little else to talk about following some rather unexciting football in Europe …
By Tony Attwood Arsène Wenger is among four managers nominated for September’s Premier League Manager of the Month award. After a problematic August Arsenal’s September results were Date Game Result Score Competition 09 Sep Arsenal v Bournemouth W 3-0 Premier League 14 Sep Arsenal v 1.FC Köln W 3-1 Europa League 17 Sep Chelsea v Arsenal …
Read More “Arsène Wenger nominated as September Premier League manager of the month”
By Tony Attwood That question above is an important one in my view, and it is one that has been hanging around for a long time. The general feeling in the media these days is, “nothing much”. The feeling among some fans is “protest about Wenger”. My view is a little different, and it starts …
Read More “What can Arsenal fans do to change the club and challenge for more trophies?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone. First the serious bit. It is now two months since the Community Shield match raised money (we don’t know how much, but it should have been a lot) for the families and survivors of the Grenfell Tower disaster. And still there is not a word on where the money has gone. …
By Tony Attwood Goodness knows how many police raids, tax fraud allegations, court cases, questions about contractual clauses and the like we’ve covered in the nearly 10 years we’ve been running, but it has been quite a few. Spanish football has been rife with scandals, but there has been some activity in the UK too. …
Read More “Newcastle United charged with tax fraud over player transfers”
By Tony Attwood It is not normally my style to emphasise the fact that things are getting worse, but then also it is not my style to ignore statistics that take all issues into account. And if we compare Arsenal after seven league games this season with the same moment last season the comparison does …
Read More “Last season, this season, later this season… is Arsenal on the way up?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone. Football, it seems, has fractured. Or if you preferred, it has splintered. Splintered into a million little splintery things that are…. Well splintery. But here are some of the many diverse stories slurping around on the floor of the football hothouse, each screaming for attention until trodden underfoot by the pressure …
Read More “Barcelona in PL, Large Sam sues FA, Usmanov speaks, Fabregas throws pizza”
By Tony Attwood The Independent has carried the story that Lacazette has said he has been taken aback by the nature of refereeing in the Premier League, the player quoted as saying “The refereeing decisions still surprise me. Sometimes I think it is a bit dangerous. “But then I see that nobody is shocked, so I …
Read More “Player speaks about weird refereeing, mass boycott planned, Arsenal to move into debt?”
By Tony Attwood It’s not much of a talking point in England largely because of the huge investment made the English media in talking up Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea but in Europe there is an almost continual debate going on concerning the ability or otherwise of Uefa to control the super-rich clubs – …
Read More “Clubs are getting round FFP and Uefa know what they have to do. But will they act?”
By Tony Attwood I know I know. I have bored you stupid with talk about evidence. The huge amount of evidence we have gathered year after year to show that the level of errors made by PL referees is so ludicrously high that at times the PGMO might as well employ a computer to give …
Read More “How the media use fake evidence to attack clubs over crowd figures”
by Tony Attwood October 2015. Expected to do their usual demolition job on a lower league team Arsenal lost to Sheffield Wednesday in the league cup 3-0. True the Ox and Theo were injured early on, but even so it was a shock. As were Mr Wenger’s statements afterwards, in which he said none of …
Read More “From humiliation at Sheff Wed to the Magnificent 7 youngsters in the space of 2 years.”
by Andrew Crawshaw Following my look at the Squad values of all of the clubs in the Europa League, the question arises: do the results of the first two games show any deviations from where one might expect them to be based on squad values (expressed in millions of pounds). To clarify, where the league …
Read More “The Europa League: are the clubs performing as we might expect so far?”
By Stevie Bee A game of one half if ever there was one. Izqueiŕdo how it actually wasn’t settled until midway through the second half, the Knockaert blow ultimately being landed Bruno-style by AFC’s Iwobi. In the first half, it was all Arsenal apart from one moment when B&HA stole a March on the sleepy …
Read More “A radically different approach to reviewing the Arsenal v Brighton game”
By Bulldog Drummond A sunday noon kick off means there won’t be time for me to do the usual chit chat in the morning, what with having to get up and get to the meeting point for us all to drive from Northants to London (allowing time for the chaos that now seems to be …
Read More “Arsenal v Brighton, the teams who’s injured and who deserves a rest”
