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 Sir Hardly Anyone One of the things I have noticed is that the further north you get the slower the information travels. Thus they are still dealing with the last transfer window in Birmingham, as the ReadWestBrom web site tells us “West Brom made a late bid to try to sign Portuguese winger …
Read More “Arsenal make first signing of the next transfer window!”
By Tony Attwood Goodness it is difficult running a blog during the interlull. I mean you try and enter the news desert with some good back up stories ready to roll, but even so you are dependent on some sort of news coming in to keep it all rolling along. So I look for good …
Read More “A spot of good news, a spot of bad, a spot of gibberish, a spot.”
By Tony Attwood It is of course commonplace to claim that Arsenal have the most expensive tickets in England, Europe and the world, the solar system, the galaxy, the Local Cluster, the universe and the multiverse, although none of these claims is true when like is matched with like. Pricing is a complex issue, and …
By Tony Attwood Power in football – now that is an interesting topic and I am obliged to the Daily Telegraph by thinking about writing an article on it. It is a bit of a tough read because there is so much puffing up of themselves and all their collective work in coming up with …
Read More “What organisations and what people really have the power in football?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Now normally I take the honest working man’s regular holiday – September to December, February to May – but quite ludicrously Untold has demanded that I work in October and write a column all about transfer type things. Well! I mean, “Well!” And to my utter surprise the transfer rumours have …
Read More “There is no open window, but there are ten transfer rumours for Arsenal next January”
By Tony Attwood If you feel that the commentary columns of Untold have been rather quiet of late it has been largely because of the fact that (for reasons that are not yet clear) we have dropped off the pages of NewsNow. I have written to the publishers several times telling them about it …
Read More “Revealed: the psychological condition behind the anti-arsenal-arsenal”
By Tony Attwood I have oft made the point that newspapers follow each other. One club is a great historic family unit that everyone loves, and nothing that happens there can change this. Another is a stumbling, rumbling disaster of incompetence, and it only takes one hiccup for the old stories to be rolled out. …
STYLE AND STEEL By Don McMahon While reviewing and watching the fallout from the Burnley game from the pundits, players and media, this comment came up multiple times in describing AFC’s gritty win against a park the flotilla team. Adrian Clarke and Skodran Mustafi aptly described it as an ugly performance meriting all 3 points …
Read More “Style and Steel: the rise of the polyvalent player”
By Andrew Crawshaw and Tony Attwood The story is that Arsenal can’t do transfers. The manager won’t spend money, the club dithers, there is an overarching level of gross incompetence. We’ve heard it often, and of course it is difficult to prove or disprove without having closer access to the club than any of us …
A very personal odyssey, by Tony Attwood It started with three of us from AISA having a meeting at the Emirates with the club’s chief exec discussing how the area around the stadium could be made more Arsenal-like. Never having been a retiring sort of fellow I immediately pitched in telling Mr Gazidis in no uncertain terms …
Read More “The Untold Banner on TV, continuing the tradition of the club and our blog”
By Max Kerr One of the saddest stories for me to have emerged from football, is that of Justin Fashanu (1961-1998). A talented striker, who played for England, scored the goal of the season while playing for Norwich in 1980, and was the first black footballer to command a million pound transfer fee (to Brian …
Read More “Professional football: one of the last bastions of homophobia.”
By Tony Attwood Watching the game on Sky and listening to the studio conversation after the match there seemed to be a general consensus that a) the Ox did not touch the ball, it was Kos who kicked it forward, and b) although the ball his Kos’ hands it was not handball. Of course if …
Read More “A goal or not a goal? Burnley v Arsenal – the first reactions.”
Continuing from this morning’s preview… Meanwhile the Burnley manager has been making the usual positive noises about how wonderful Mr Wenger is but he has added to that, “As managers we all understand the fan mentality, the thirst and desire to win and be successful, but from a manager’s point of view you have to scratch …
Read More “Burnley v Arsenal, the team, two contrasting styles of play and the sequences”
By Bulldog Drummond “Seven and a half?” I hear you shout… well all the papers are doing their “five things” this and “ten things” that, so Untold, being Untold likes to go somewhere else. Seven and a half seems about right. 1: Style and efficiency Leading up to today’s games Mr Wenger said, “In recent …
By Tony Attwood On 24 November 1996 Arsène Wenger took charge of his first derby. It ended Arsenal 3 Tottenham 1. It was a victory those of us there celebrated at considerable length as I recall, because Arsenal had not beaten Tottenham in over 3 years and Tottenham were unbeaten at Highbury in the league since …
Read More “A reminder of how things have changed and why top four finishes are not to be decried”
By Tony Attwood A couple of years ago I reported on an analysis which showed that roughly only 25% of big value transfers came good in their first season. Most made a fair impression within three years but a quarter still failed to make the grade even in that space of time. The point …
Read More “Just how well have Premier League clubs been doing when it comes to big money transfers?”
By Tony Attwood Last night at the Arsenal Stadium (as we have to call it on Euro nights) before the match I bought a bottle of water. The young man selling it to me removed the cap before handing it over, presumably on the grounds that I would otherwise throw the tiny plastic cap …
By Tony Attwood In the end the FA couldn’t even sack him. Instead we find that the appalling Allardyce left his job as England manager “by mutual agreement”. As various newspapers have pointed out, Allardyce has been known for many, many years to be a man who regards the basic rules of football as an …
Read More “How much longer must English tax payers fund the criminal idiocy of the FA?”
By Tony Attwood You will almost certainly know (at least if you live in England) that the manager of the England football team is today accused of telling people whom he thought were Far East businessmen that it was possible to “get round” the rules about third-party player ownership. Various issues immediately jump out: one is …
By Tony Attwood Apparently it seems that we have never played Basel before, so we’ve never had a chance to do lots of Fawlty Towers jokes – but I won’t start now. That would be far too silly. But we have played Swiss teams before and have done quite well, winning four times in competitive …
Read More “Arsenal v Basel. Basel’s amazing form, Theo’s comeback, Arsenal’s team.”
By Tony Attwood If we take it for a moment that a little of the more extreme behaviour of referees witnessed over recent years has now been removed from Premier League matches then we truly are going to enter a new age of football. Not an age wherein referee bias is removed, nor an age …
By Tony Attwood It was Opta who cleverly picked up on the fact that Alexis Sanchez had scored 47 goals in his 100 appearances, one fewer than Thierry Henry (48) in his first 100 apps for the club. Which undoubtedly helps understand Mr Wenger’s move to put Alexis at number nine this season. So I …
Read More “Is Alexis Sanchez the new Thierry Henry? Here are the figures.”
By Bulldog Drummond When it suits the media and their chums in the aaa they focus on the last match, or maybe the last couple of matches. But with Arsenal having just won four and drawn two of the last six, and with the two draws being away to last year’s champions of England …
Read More “Arsenal v Chelsea: the teams, the predictions, the fair play league thus far”
By Bulldog Drummond, If you have been reading the definitive history of Arsenal in the 1930s you will be used to the Arsenal / Chelsea pattern of the era. Each season Arsenal win the league by beating Chelsea in front of 65,000 and Chelsea just about manage to stay up. As the story of the …
Read More “Arsenal v Chelsea, groundhog day, oddball referees, injuries and Mr Africa to buy AFC.”
We need to talk about Granit By Tim Charlesworth There is a lot of bizarre hysteria in the Goonersphere at the moment about why Granit Xhaka is not playing (why spend all that money on a bench-warmer etc. etc.). It makes me wonder what team some people have been watching for the last ten …
Read More “We need to talk about Granit. Is he DM or box-to-box?”
