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 Zuruvi Change is often good. Change is sometimes bad. Change can bring new excitement. Change can bring great despair. Change (like taxes and death) is a constant feature in our lives. What can change bring to Arsenal? Arsene Wenger has stated that Top 4 is NOT Arsenal’s target. He stated at the beginning of …
By Tony Attwood Yesterday evening, working through the multiplicity of comments that had come into the site, I spotted one in particular which seemed to me to be a perfect case of “that sums it all up” as they say before each game. The writer in question picked up on Walter’s comment about referees, and …
Read More “Arsenal and the broken telephone: the perfect example of non-debate”
By Tony Attwood Since our two reviews of referee decisions across the first 160 Premier League games of this season, complete with the links to video evidence the PGMO (the highly secret organisation that runs refereeing using the approach that led to the Italian refereeing scandal of 2006) has been preparing to make a riposte. When we …
By Tony Attwood This is not the first time Arsenal has suffered from relentless attacks from the mass media, and the “broken phone” metaphor seems to be utterly apt for the regular fights that have beset Arsenal over the years. In fact it seems to happen every ten years or so, which in a way …
Read More “Arsenal and the broken phone. Welcome to the 12th round of 125 years of fighting.”
by Blacksheep Sitting here listening to Liverpool !! vs Citeh on the BBC whilst reading Untold reminds me that I’ve been trying to think of an article to write for the site weeks without inspiration. Like Tony and Walter, and most if not all of those that write for Untold, I am an Arsenal supporter …
by Tony Attwood Perhaps the biggest problem for all single issue campaigns of the Wenger Out type is what they do after they have got their way. There is a second biggest problem, but I’ll come to that in a moment. I like to try and keep problems in an orderly queue. The movement that …
Read More “The biggest problem will only hit Arsenal after Mr Wenger leaves”
By Bulldog Drummond The question on everyone’s lips is would you support Arsenal if Pulis were made manager? Actually it isn’t on everyone’s lips as I just made that up. But I find it an interesting ponderable (a new word it seems, but I reckon there needs to be an opposite of imponderable.) Would I …
Read More “WBA v Arsenal: would you support Arsenal if Pulis were made manager?”
By Tony Attwood Every weekend the journalists who have spent a little too much time in the saloon bar the night before and haven’t come up with a semi-decent invention to parade before the fake football news department of the paper for whom they work, generally slink away and cook up their “Ten things to …
Read More “Ten things to watch out for this weekend in the match at West Brom.”
By Bulldog Drummond West Brom under Pulis have pulled themselves up the league somewhat, and have maintained their position in the last few weeks… (stats from Statto.com as always). Game Date Opposition Venue Result Pos Pts 22 21.01.2017 Sunderland home W2-0 8 32 23 31.01.2017 Middlesbrough away D1-1 8 33 24 04.02.2017 Stoke City home …
by Tony Attwood Last season Paul Merson wrote an article for the Daily Express in which he said that Arsene Wenger must be sacked if the Tiny Totts or Leicester win the Premier League. It was a most curious piece in that it seemed to imply that all the clubs near the top of the table …
By Tony Attwood Of course we need to be clear here: referees have been protected by the media for years because of the fact that the media will always put their own self-interest ahead of the need to report reality. Thus ever since the 1970s TV has been in the business of promoting football as …
By Sir Hardly Anyone M.Sc, PhD, (Burk). It has been a breathless few days on Planet Earth what with yesterday being pi day (March 14 – 3.14 if you see what these maths bods mean.) And indeed breathless on Planet Arsenal too, and again for a mathematical reason – in this case expotentialism. In order …
Read More “New manager negotiatons, players to return, injury boost; record beaking deal”
By Sir Hardly Anyone For the past year or two the media has filled up blank spots on its web sites with a range of articles that began with “Three things we learned this week”, and then not to be outdone by a rival became “Five things we learned this week” which soon mutated into …
Read More “Nine and a half things we learned from the media this week”
A summary of the research by the Referee Review team 160 games researched in detail It is commonplace for occasional visitors to Untold to write sarcastic comments about referees and our views thereon. The view, usually expressed very simply, and occasionally rather rudely, says “you always blame the refs when it is obvious to anyone …
By Tony Attwood Of course having a bent foreign referee overseeing a match full of foreigners in a foreign place with a crowd made up of foreigners isn’t exactly big time news in England. Rather the scenes of BT Sprout commentators being ordered by the producer to get up and leap about, (instead of wonder …
Read More “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Barcelona/PSG was the moment football finally changed.”
By Tony Attwood Just a couple of days back I raised the notion that maybe, just maybe, the football media was taking the first tiny, tiny steps towards recognising one of the the core problems in football: that they not only have viewpoints they also set the agenda. They decide what is an “issue” in …
by Tony Attwood Imagine you are paid to report football stories and likely rumours. Not weird made up tales but stuff that could well be true. Now imagine that you were doing this job 18 months ago and your boss said, “I want you to write a piece about who will win the domestic trophies …
By Tony Attwood I was talking to friends on the way back from the game, about their experience of the match in the family enclosure. They’d got tickets for three adults and four children in the lower tier, clock end, positioned next to the Lincoln supporters, and I was rather sorry to hear that it …
Read More “Stewarding must be a rotten job, but that’s not an excuse for not doing it properly”
By Tony Attwood Ewan Murray is the Guardian and Observer’s golf correspondent, with added responsibility for overseeing coverage of Scottish football. Ewan’s outside interests revolve around his own substandard golf game and Vladimir Romanov’s stewardship of Heart of Midlothian. So by and large he is not the man you would put at the top of …
Read More “The only question that remains is, was the ref bought or was he just incompetent.”
By Bulldog Drummond. The illness question is the most puzzling part of today’s game: Danny Welbeck and Alex Iwobi are said to be down with it. Mesuz Ozil (as WhoScored now have him listed) seems to have had it twice, has recovered, but is on the Physioroom sick list and out for weeks. All …
Read More “Arsenal v Lincoln: the teams, the upsets, the media menace, the man of the match”
By Bulldog Drummond It is interesting that Untold is receiving comments from the occasional reader telling us not to write negative articles. I am not sure that we are that guilty of such an offence; for a truly negative article how about “The 24 most boring Premier League teams ever” which appears today in the …
By Bulldog Drummond It is, to say the least, interesting to reflect upon the fact that our opponents this weekend were founded two years before Dial Square, who after one match in 1986, then in January 1887 became Royal Arsenal. Indeed the interesting if occasionally inaccurate official website of the club gives a decent chronology of …
by Bulldog Drummond And so, the FA Cup. Derided by the anti-Arsenal-Arsenal and dismissed by the Arrogant Amnesiacs with Asssumptions, undoubtedly in both cases because Arsenal are rather successsful at it, but still a competition of some merit and worth in my view.(as anyone who has had the pleasure of being at an FA Cup …
Read More “Arsenal in the FA Cup; change of rules, change of name, the heritage, the records”
By Tony Attwood The desire of some supporters seems to be to have Arsenal getting results akin to those achieved by Manchester United in the 21 seasons between 1993 and 2013. During that period they won the league 13 times, they came second five times and came third three times. It came after a period …
Read More “How can we get the sort of Arsenal that the Anti-Arsenal and Arrogant Amnesics desire?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone. Let me confess that no one in the weird news industry (by which we mean what used to be called Fleet Street, TV, radio and the bloggettas) is, at the moment at least, coming close to the suggestion that Alexis suffers from dissociative identity disorder and has eight different personalities. That’s still …
Read More “Weird News: semi-skimmed stuff about Arsenal and origami for pyromaniacs”
