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 As I have said before, by now I should be on the estate in the heart of the Rutland Forest hunting wildebeest, but it seems we now have a 365 days a year transfer rumour window and these pesky devils at Untold have me on a contract that says when there …
by Tony Attwood The notion that if only Arsenal could replace the manager we would then have someone who will ruthlessly identify the players needed and bring them to the club, is, in my view, not a reasonable one. The expenditure by Manchester City and Manchester United is now getting so far ahead of Arsenal, …
By Tony Attwood And so the world spins, and the statistics are chosen to back up a point and fairy stories continue. On the fairy story front we have “A number of Real Madrid stars are reportedly not keen on the idea of a January move for Arsenal forward Alexis Sanchez,” from the ever fanciful …
Read More “Chelsea on track to get 23 red cards this season and Arsenal to get 53 yellows.”
By Tony Attwood Seeing a club lose their third player to a red card this season it was hard not to think that had it happened last season or the season before it would have been Arsenal who would have had at least one man sent off in this match, not Chelsea. To lose one …
Read More “Chelsea’s problem with the Reds and a red, and China’s problem with Arry the Red.”
By Bulldog Drummond To start with an admin note: you may have seen that pages on Untold suddenly reduce in size to allow extra advertising. This normally works with the text but screws up our tables. I’m talking with our ad agency about this, but if you do find it affects your reading just click …
Read More “Chelsea v Arsenal: the supporters and the team; the injuries and the discipline.”
by Tony Attwood This is a translation of what the newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitungde put on its website in the aftermath of the Cologne game 15,000 Cologne fans travel to London for the first European League game for 25 years, but only a few have tickets. But how big was the chaos? Peter Stöger [head coach of …
Read More “Arsenal v Cologne: what did they think of the fiasco in Germany?”
By Bulldog Drummond In March 2014 Andre Mariner sent off Kieran Gibbs for doing … nothing, in a match against Chelsea and gave Chelsea a penalty. Two mistakes – one, as replays showed, was that the ball was not going into the net when the Arsenal player touched it, and two it wasn’t Gibbs. In …
Read More “Will the referee’s change of style seen in the Cup Final continue on Sunday”
By Tony Attwood Gradually the issues following last night’s fiasco have begun to emerge. Cologne have been charged by Uefa with crowd disturbances, setting of fireworks, throwing objects and acts of damage. Arsenal have been charged with the blocking of stairways in an away supporter section. Arsenal’s statement however includes the comment that, “Many tickets …
Read More “It is ludicrous that Arsenal are still saying they are trying to stop ticket touting”
By Tony Attwood We live in a world in which all major western cities are on total alert against terror attacks. Except in seems in London. For last night we had an outbreak of much lower level (but still dangerous and still unlawful) misbehaviour, which was announced a week in advance, and Arsenal did not …
By Bulldog Drummond And moving on to the final episode of our Cologne previews, of course there is Jack who has now been working with Mr Wenger for ten years. Mr W said… “Jack is very hungry and very determined, He is also not completely at his best but he is getting there every week. …
Read More “Arsenal v Cologne: The teams, the Jack talk, the growth of penalties in Europe.”
By Bulldog Drummond “Arsenal are falling apart. One must clearly say, Arsenal show signs of disintegration under Wenger.” Now which middle of the road unbiased neutral critic might have said that? Oh look it was former Liverpool midfielder Dietmar Hamann, now a Sky Germany pundit. He said it in an interview with Sport Buzzer which is …
Read More “People with not much to say, and even less insight, saying things that aren’t true”
by Bulldog Drummond And the stories keep on emerging about Arsenal’s line up tomorrow, along of course with all the transfers that will take place in January – after all the window opens in in a mere 109 days so it is good to get the rumours in early. I’ll leave the transfers for Sir …
By Bulldog Drummond Approaching the game against 1. FC Köln I was pondering how a team that could do well enough to get into the Europa, could then be bottom of their league by the time the first Euro game came around. The answer turns out to be not too hard to fathom, and it comes about …
By Sir Hardly Anyone, Now normally I only leave the Ancestral Republic of Rutlandshire to cover transfer nonsense, but it seems that nonsense has now become an all the year round event, and so I have been invited, as an experiment, to comment on chit chat that happens during what I believe the lower classes …
By Tony Attwood We’ve had the story that Jack Wilshere will be brought back against Cologne abut 20 times, which can only mean he probably won’t start, but if he is in the squad, he’ll be on the beach. And I write that because normally when the same story goes around and around and around …
Read More “Jack against Cologne, Kos is out, crowd trouble worries, and doping in German football.”
By Tony Attwood You might recall that on August 18 I wrote a little piece asking if the money from the FA Community Shield game had gone to the beneficiaries – those who suffered in the Grenfell Tower fire. I expected to be told that the money had gone to the said people, and that …
By Tony Attwood I realised from the very start of Untold that I would learn a lot from reading the comments made by readers. But what I didn’t realise was that I would find therein a whole group of people who run their lives in a way so very different from mine that I can’t …
Read More “The strange fantasy world inhabited by some who comment on Arsenal”
By Tony Attwood Yes, according to a very little bloggetta Arsenal “fans” have turned on Xhaka. This is the same Granit Xhaka who so far this season is the top rated passer in the PL this season, ahead of 3 Man C players, David Silva, Nicolas Otamendi and Fernandinho. Other top passers of the ball …
Read More “Arsenal “fans” turn on Xhaka to criticise him for being… best in the League”
The aaa Arsenal laws…….. by Don McMahon I recently read the history of Murphy’s laws created in 1950 and found that they resembled a certain mindset we too often see on UA: Everything that can go wrong will ……No matter what Wenger or the players or the board do, we are doomed to suffer the …
Read More “With Arsenal, if everything seems to be going well, you’ve overlooked something”
By Tony Attwood This is an example of how the media is constantly seeking to undermine Arsenal by twisting every scrap of news – even the most positive news – into a tale of chaos and disaster. The whole issue centres on a fairly ordinary, planned, change of support staff within the club, which …
Read More “New Arsenal fake news reveals concerted effort to undermine Arsenal at every turn.”
By Bulldog Drummond. It appears that the media, rather than focus on the weekend’s games would sooner continue to take the transfer window to bits. I can’t say “analyse” the window because they don’t do that – but the headlines are amusing: “Crocked Vincent Kompany makes Pep Guardiola’s spending spree look perverse ahead of Liverpool …
By Bulldog Drummond You may have noticed that over the summer we were enjoying ourselves (or being incredibly prattish depending on your perspective) by writing brief commentaries about the supporters of all the clubs in the Premier League. They all appear in the “Watching Supporters” section of the web site. Here’s what we wrote …
Read More “Arsenal v Bournemouth: their supporters, the journalists, AFCB’s in and out,”
By Bulldog Drummond According to some in the media Mr Wenger is contemplating changing the formation against Bournemouth, to a back four. There’s no real evidence that he will do this, beyond the fact that in pre-season the manager said that he would keep the players practising both three and four at the back, …
Read More “Arsenal v Bournemouth: Mr Wenger’s commentaries and press speculation ahead of the game”
By Bulldog Drummond. And now back to the real thing, and the first point to look at must be Bournemouth’s activity as an away team. Here’s their performance away from home last season Pos Team Pld W D L GF GA GD Pts 10 Everton 19 4 6 9 20 28 -8 18 11 …
Read More “Arsenal v Bournemouth: home and away prognostications, and injuries”
By Tony Attwood Ian Wright, Martin Keown, Paul Merson, Thierry Henry, Tony Adams and Lee Dixon have, as you may have noticed, all been having a go at Arsenal of late. Which has become rather dull and boring, not least because none of them have been successful club managers, as far as I know. …
