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 Bulldog Drummond Rather interesting that a quick flip around the more “serious” newspapers at noon, such as the Telegraph and Guardian, reveal no on line match preview for West Ham against Arsenal. We do have the usual interesting stuff such as The 20 fiercest rivalries in English football – where does Arsenal v Tottenham …
Read More “WHAM v Arsenal: the formation, the teams, the guesswork.”
By Bulldog Drummond Yes it is always rather nice to go along to the so-called “London Stadium” and think “I paid for this through the taxation I paid the state year after year.” It gives me that extra bit of ownership, although my experience there has been that the stewards never quite realise that I …
Read More “State Aid United v Arsenal at the Tax Payers Stadium. The sacrifice of many for the few.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone. Just as I was about to take a couple of weeks in the south of France with the jolly old yacht being airlifted from Rutland Water to Monaco (which of course I know isn’t in France but I’m not one for details), so I am asked to write another column because …
Read More “Suddenly the transfer scene has woken up with an explosion of stories. We have names!”
By Tony Attwood Arsenal will play Ostersund in the next Europa Cup round on February in Sweden and at the Ems on February 22. It is, I suspect, a dream draw for the club, although let me say at once I don’t have a Swedish correspondent to check this with. If I have made mistakes in …
Read More “Ostersund v Arsenal. Welcome to the most wonderful fairy story in football.”
by Tony Attwood Bayern Munich have won the German league five times in a row. In fact they have won it 27 times, which is a record. And they are currently eight points above their nearest rival at the top of the league, so that might well be six times in a row, come next …
Read More “As the Premier League embraces the Euro model, competition is more or less deceased”
By Sir Hardly Anyone I am sure it has nothing to do with it, but the little series we’ve been running on the real transfer news (see the links at the end of this piece) – looking at the players Arsenal are actually likely to sell and therefore which replacements are needed – has coincided …
Read More “Arsenal transfer market revived with amazing transfer reports.”
By Bulldog Drummond Flipping through the tittle tattle this morning, one of my favourite lines comes from “101 Great Goals” which tells us With less than a month to go until the January transfer window opens, it’s no real surprise to see rumours in the tabloids. Given that the tabloids, the bloggettas that they …
Read More “Southampton v Arsenal the teams amidst the threat of snow”
By Bulldog Drummond If you are a really, really long term reader of Untold you might recall that one of our first campaigns to was expose what we called Rotational Fouling. It was a notion that the media ignored, and commentators laughed at us in relation to. We were out on our own (how often …
Read More “Southampton v Arsenal; modest home v modest away, but WHU lurking.”
By Bulldog Drummond Our recent (and on going) series on what will really happen in terms of transfers next month has already suggested that goalkeepers and wing backs are not on the agenda. But when it comes to centre backs (or as we used to say in the ancient days, centre halves) there could be …
Read More “Southampton Arsenal: a chance to test the theory that we don’t need a new centre half”
by Tony Attwood It was, I think, about five years ago that Blacksheep, Walter and I drew up a list of ten reforms that between us we felt could make Premier League football much more enjoyable all round, and one of these was the live TV broadcasting of all matches with a return to all …
By Tony Attwood Arsenal II – that second team of Mr Wenger’s has had a fair run of games in the Europa and the League Cup, and that has no doubt benefited a lot of the squad who by now are used to playing together. It also allows them to make a claim for a …
Read More “Arsenal II hit six as the sneering and sarcasm from the Guardian drones on and on”
By Tony Attwood A Prize to the Football Forecast website for noticing that if BATE actually beat Arsenal and Red Star and Cologne draw, then BATE could qualify for the knock outs. Here’s the table to prove it Group H Team P W D L F A GD Pts 1 Arsenal 5 3 1 1 …
Read More “Arsenal and the Tractor Boys: the final instalment.”
By Tony Attwood It has been interesting to read the media’s response to the little tiff that occurred when Match of the Day presenters got rather miffed at being called out over alleged bias against Arsenal. The Guardian and the Telegraph handled the event in slightly different ways. The Telegraph responded with “To those lambasting …
by Sir Hardly Anyone The Metro on 26 August this year told us “Arsene Wenger is ready to green light a late exodus to raise funds for two massive January arrivals.” Explaining who they thought would be leaving the club the paper said that Arsenal risked “losing a number of players before the window slams …
Read More “The real January transfer news and the signing of a new centre back”
by Don McMahon In his most recent article, Tony quite accurately reviewed the seriously flawed logic of Mr.Clattenburg and his rather bizarre public revelation about how he manipulated a game to achieve a personal end. Some people posted criticisms of UA’s concerns but there are many other issues that Tony didn’t mention and I’d like …
By Johnny Foreigner Every now and again at UA an idea crops up, either suggesting that somebody somewhere is an ‘original fan’ or that someone else is a ‘foreigner’. Unfortunately both ideas have implications which are impossible to verify once we start to scrabble around a bit under the surface. The idea of being …
by Tony Attwood The trouble with home and away ties against teams that we don’t know too much about is that one tends to use up all the information available in the first leg. When it comes to the second leg there then isn’t too much to say. But rather than offer you a blank …
Read More “Arsenal v the Tractor Boys – the final part of the Europa League part one”
By Tony Attwood It must be fun to be Paul Merson’s scriptwriter, coming up with ever more crazy things to. say each day. But also a worry given that everything said then has to be outdone, and always in comparison to that masterstroke about Olympiakos: “I could win the league with Olympiakos. I am not …
By Tony Attwood Context, logic, breadth of analysis, overview and detail, evidence… the sort of things I learned when studying science and the scientific method, and then later psychology. I wasn’t a particularly brilliant student, and certainly not a brilliant scientist, but I think I got the thread. You know things by gathering evidence, making …
Read More “Wright and Shearer lose the thread, Wright apologises, but neither really gets it”
By Tony Attwood A major part of the argument that suggests that referees are not following the laws of the game but are following a different set of rules has come from Mark Clattenburg in relation to the notorious Chelsea v Tottenham game near the end of the 2015/16 season. In an interview he has …
Read More “Clattenburg confirms what we feared: referees are making up their own rules”
By Tony Attwood I recently wrote a little piece trying to show how journalists create a piece of fantasy transfer news ahead of a transfer window, and did this by looking at our goalkeeping situation, the insane tales from last summer relating to keepers, and then adding in what I thought would actually happen. A …
Read More “The antidote to transfer rumours: real insights into who we are signing in January”
By Tony Attwood . There’s been a bit of annoyance spreading in the world of football of late. First off we had “the inability to confirm the time and date of the Tottenham Hotspur v West Ham United Premier League fixture in late December is both unacceptable to fans and symptomatic of a deeper problem …
Read More “Contempt: the prime way in which broadcasters and clubs and the FA treat football fans”
By Tony Attwood I knew before I started the three hour journey from my home to the ground that I shouldn’t have gone. Not because I feared for the result – I had hoped we could win, or at the very least take a draw – but because I had been coming down with a …
By Bulldog Drummond And so after the usual visits around the houses we come to the teams, and just as we have discovered this wonderful effective front three, one of them looks like dropping out, although as one report said, actually Lacazette is going to play. I think not, but you never know. If he …
Read More “Arsenal’s front three have revitalised the team. Now can they do it with a change?”
By Bulldog Drummond It is interesting to note that Manchester U have lost two and won three of their last five matches. Date Game Res Score Competition 05 Nov Chelsea v Manchester United L 1-0 Premier League 18 Nov Manchester United v Newcastle United W 4-1 Premier League 22 Nov FC Basel v Manchester United …
Read More “Arsenal v Man U. Prognostications, Ozil vanishes and injuries”
