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
The “Striking Department” By Tim Charlesworth After recent forays into writing about the Labour Party and the US national anthem, I was jerked back to reality by the pure joy of Mesut’s hat-trick, and decided to write about football again. There are lots of things that annoy me about football – my darling wife has …
By Tony Attwood There is something strange about the way the media treats the Arsenal. Like the Telegraph giving a rating of Arsenal player performances in the game and giving everyone seven out of ten except Ozil with nine, Alexis with eight, and the two central defenders with six. And why? Well, we don’t quite …
By Tony Attwood Last night as I drove back to the Midlands after the Arsenal match there was a piece on the radio about a guy who, before each game, bets on Exeter winning 4-1. For each match he gets different odds, but he never changes his approach, and keeps betting. Apparently he is £600 …
Read More “Why the predictions of Arsenal’s season have thus far been soooo wrong”
By Bulldog Drummond OK, enough of those Ludo jokes. Let’s move on to the question… does Mr Wenger play the regular first team including Granit who isn’t yet debarred, or does he think this is fairly straightforward and give players a rest? Given that we haven’t been unbeaten in the opening three Champs League games …
By Bulldog Drummond Oh where are the old days? The days when you could safely click onto a football web site and read about Arsene Wenger’s dithering and predictions that this will be the season when Arsenal get relegated, thus putting a stop to the celebrations in 2019 of 100 years in the top …
Read More “Time to get the old board game out as Arsenal play Ludo”
By Tony Attwood I’ve noted before that Arsenal have this season nominated the full list of 25 players that they are able to make available for games – something that most clubs have not been able to do. And we have five under 21s who are also very much part of the first team squad …
Read More “Players used vs league position, and the range of top scorers so far in the league.”
By Tony Attwood Most people who watch Premier League matches do so on TV – and the TV companies make much of this. Back in the early part of the 21st century Man U v Arsenal games were hyped as the “most watched on the planet” and Sky spoke of global audience of 1 billion. …
Read More “How the media twisted Arsenal v Swansea and Liverpool v Man U”
By Tony Attwood When Arsenal lost to Liverpool on the opening day the knives were out. Losing on the opening day was a disaster said the doubters. That’s it. All over. But just as people have said that only teams that spend loads of money do well, (the stats show that there is little relationship …
By Tony Attwood The news from the press on Granit X is that Arsene Wenger thought the tackle that led to him being sent off was a “deep yellow” which I suppose those who look at rainbows would call orange, and so the club will not appeal. So Granit gets a three match ban, effectively …
Read More “Granit gets 3, and what would it have been like if we had signed Icardi?”
By Tony Attwood One of my eternal rants, with which I have bored you stiff in recent years, is that the FA is guilty of a multiplicity of misdemeanours, ranging from ineptitude to the failure properly to investigate corruption, from the refusal to accept the proven fact that England do badly because of lack of …
By Bulldog Drummond And so off we go again after another unwelcome interruption. And once again the press are struggling to find something negative to say about us. Here’s the Guardian’s latest attempt Four consecutive clean sheets leading up to the international break suggests that defensively Arsenal have found an encouraging solid platform, …
By Bulldog Drummond The general chit chat is that Arsenal should win this at a stroll, but Arsenal will always let you down just when you expect them to win. But we must note that Swansea change managers as regularly as Tottenham, and the Untold view that this doesn’t normally work does include the word …
By Tony Attwood So off we go on our run of four consecutive home games starting this week with Swansea and then with a game against Ludogorets Razgrad on Wednesday. And the associated need to finish top of the Champs League group to avoid the child molesters in the next round. And the good news is …
By Tony Attwood On the afternoon of 13 October 2016 two things happened. First the other Untold site, Untold Dylan, started to get hits like it has never done before. Untold Dylan is doing ok with an audience of over 300,000 page views a year, but its subject matter is a bit esoteric. It deals …
Read More “How Arsene Wenger’s spending on players has given us a team to marvel over”
The Yanks are coming! By Tim Charlesworth The American influence has been growing in the Premier League for many years now. Two of Arsenal’s directors are American citizens, and our own Silent Stan is the wealthiest of the Americans to buy a Premiership club. This Americanisation is more than just skin deep – the statistics …
By Tony Attwood How many players do Arsenal have out on loan? It is not a difficult question, and I suspect that if you are here as an Arsenal supporter not only will you get the answer right you will be able to name the players The number is five and the details (taken from …
Read More “Chelsea and Man City dominate the loan system. But what is the point?”
By Tony Attwood I get sent a fair number of video links but rarely pass them on, because most other sites do that, and we are after all Untold. But this one from FFDTV is worth watching – all the way through. Here is what they say… Arsenal’s highly rated 15 year old Trae Coyle demonstrates …
By Tony Attwood What is it in football that makes corruption so likely? It is not just the large amount of money – that always causes problems in every industry, and not every industry is in such a mess as football. Rather, according to the Financial Times, it is the short termism in football. …
Read More “The 10 major sources of corruption and dubious practice in football”
By Tony Attwood International football is dying. It is a phrase that Untold wouldn’t use because the general view here is that it died a long, long time ago, and is now only kept alive by the corrupt and the gullible (see last few articles on this site). To support international football is to support …
Read More “International football is dying, and at last the media discover why.”
By Tony Attwood From time to time we get comments at Untold that the site’s operators in general (or more often, me in particular) are too smug and self-satisfied, endlessly talking up Untold as a crusader that gets things done. That’s not how I see Untold (not surprisingly), but I do find that I like …
By Tony Attwood As Walter pointed out in his article Taking on Fifa: How the Dutch FA has become the first to tell Fifa it has had enough Fifa is now facing legal action in the Swiss courts over alleged complicity in the mistreatment of migrant workers in Qatar. The writ argues that “Swiss law, and …
Read More “At last Fifa being taken to court: what the legal case claims.”
By Tim Charlesworth Congratulations to the leader of a red army who has managed to stay in his job for a surprisingly long time. I speak, of course, of loyal Gooner, Jeremy Corbyn, who has been re-elected as leader of the Labour Party. Despite having been a Conservative candidate in the 2001 General …
By Tony Attwood It has long been noted that people with an agenda will re-write history to fit their message. Thuat the aaa notoriously re-write Arsenal’s history to show that this is a bad time in Arsenal’s history. Football journalists and their chums in the FA rewrite the England football teams history to make out …
Read More “There is a big problem in Britain with not seeing our history honestly”
By Tony Attwood Arsenal’s next four games are something of an oddity – for they are all at home: Swansea Ludogorets Razgrad Middlesbrough Reading Swansea and Middlesbrough, our league opponents, sit next to each other in terms of their league fortunes just now. Here’s the table with the final column showing the results this season …
Read More “What is likely to happen in Arsenal’s next four games?”
By Tony Attwood It may seem strange that the FA, whom we know as an organisation that will willingly crawl on all fours to lick up the droppings from the grand table of Fifa, might actually consider pulling out of internationals, but that is exactly what they did in 1934. Not all internationals I should …
Read More “On an interlull weekend let’s remember when the FA contemplated stopping internationals”
