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 It is interesting that with the first team seemingly fixed on three at the back, with two full backs helping them, the under 18 side is playing with a back four in a 4-2-3-1 formation – or at least that is how it seemed as they were beating Norwich 3-0. However there …
Read More “Arsenal v Tottenham: The teams, and the need to kill off under performing players”
By Tony Attwood It is now six Premier League games since we beat Tottenham, a pretty shocking run. In fact as far as I can see it is the worse run that Arsenal has ever had in either the PL or the 1st division in terms of playing Tottenham. Of course the figures are a …
Read More “Arsenal v Tottenham: the tragedy of a journalist’s pathetic lack of knowledge”
By Darren Stinsman Arsenal go into a crunch North London derby on Saturday lunchtime knowing that defeat would leave them seven points behind their bitter rivals. Tottenham are in fine form at the moment and will be full of confidence following their recent 3-1 victory over European champions Real Madrid at Wembley. Arsenal were in …
Read More “Arsenal v Tottenham: return of the triumvirate, the battle of the midfield.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Sincere apologies for the lack of posts through some of today. We suffered another attack, and it took a while to recover. This time it was different – the site was still visible and comments could be posted but we were unable to put up new posts for a while. If …
Read More “Apologies for our down time and here’s some tittle tattle”
By Bulldog Drummond It seems many of us have different definitions of fairly ordinary words. “Objectivity” I take to mean working hard to take out any sort of bias. “Perspective” I think means in the context used, “a point of view”. Which is how one person can say to another, “You’re approaching the problem from a completely different perspective.” It is …
Read More “Arsenal v Tottenham. Objectivity and perspective, not quite the same thing”
By Bulldog Drummond I don’t have any difficulty in admitting that Tottenham have been doing well of late, not do I try to deny the utterly obvious. That, for example, last season for the first time in a number of years (quite a large number of years in fact) Tottenham came above Arsenal in the …
Read More “Arsenal v Tottenham: a little bit of perspective”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Yes it was in June 2015 that we first pronounced upon the fact that Nabil Fekir was about to sign for Arsenal, and we knew that because the bloggettas were full of it and full of it and full of it again. He turned up again in the following month, but …
by Tony Attwood Imagine your ran a business. You were trading with a company and suddenly you find a whole stream of its senior people being hauled into court and charged with corruption in general and taking millions of pounds worth of bribes in particular. One after another they are charged and they eventually plead …
by Tony Attwood Whenever we cover the dodgy doings by football clubs on this site, we get emails saying “your club is just as bad” and “why don’t you just write about your club” and then a few things that are not really repeatable. So we’ll take those as read, and remind everyone that …
Read More “Leicester City; the sound of chickens coming back to roost”
By Tony Attwood Sport, as the EU recognises in its regulations, is different. There is competition within it – that is by and large the whole point – but that competition is different from that of firms competing in most open markets. The competitive route is structured in a particular way – primarily through having …
Read More “Monopoly suppliers need regulators or democracy. In football we have neither.”
by Tony Attwood Some time back, I criticised a book called The Numbers Game – which purported to reduce all football to a valid statistical analysis – and I was reminded of it again when another book appeared doing the same sort of thing: claiming it had analysed every aspect of the game and was …
By Tony Attwood Arsenal, as we well know, is left in disarray, tatters or chaos (sometime all three) when a player who was “on the radar”, “according to reports” says (allegedly) that he has no intention of going to London, not even for a shopping trip. The club is also in chaos when thousands of …
Read More “Chelsea’s technical director goes but Arsenal remain the masters of football chaos.”
By Tony Attwood The news that Sepp Blatter has been accused by Hope Solo, the USA women’s football team goalkeeper, of having sexually assaulted her at Fifa’s Ballon d’Or awards ceremony in January 2013 doesn’t really come as much of a surprise, simply because nothing comes as much of a surprise with Blatter. Or come to …
Read More “As long as we fail to ask “why?” in football, nothing will ever change”
By Sir Hardly Anyone OK here we go. Some stories that you have heard, plus a new name. How exciting! 1: According to Ozil, Arsenal is still the club he wants to play for. “Massive boost for Wenger: Highly-rated star confirms he wants to play for Arsenal”. That’s pretty much doing the rounds these days. 2: Arsene …
By Tony Attwood I notice Jonathan Liew has seemingly moved from the Telegraph newspaper to become Chief Sports Writer of the Independent web site. A change of publication, but not it seems a change of style, for today he has published this: “Henry Norris, the former Arsenal chairman, is perhaps best known as the man who hired …
Read More “How to knock the Arsenal without bothering to check a single fact”
By Sir Hardly Anyone. What, one may ponder, is the difference between fake news and headline writing? Indeed I think it is fair to say that in the public house lounge bars in the leafy shires, they speak of little else. Let us therefore ponder! Fake 1: Ozil’s future (Red London and the Metro) It …
By Tony Attwood As Germany looks to sort out the mess left behind from the chaos surrounding its refereeing system, they might choose also to have a look at the salary structure of referees in various leagues. And the first thing we have to note is that just as the PGMO have gone out on …
by Tony Attwood Headlines from German and French language papers about the current football crisis in Germany give a warning of the path that they might be tempted to follow The German Football League calls for a new order of referee structure in Germany after the recent chaos. An independent organization of refereeing should solve …
By Tony Attwood One of the problems with being in the fake news business, is that you not only have to keep inventing it, each piece of fake news has to outdo the previous bit. Thus we have the headline from ArsenalShorts which reads Wenger confirms 54 goal striker will play for Arsenal next season …
Read More “Fake news index: striker next season, striker we should have kept, horrific loans”
By Sifarzone Expected Goals are all the rage today and it is certainly a great addition to the toolbox we use in analyzing and understanding football. It gives an understanding to the match beyond just the ultimate results, goals. It values long term-performance over short-term results, since long-term performance will eventually return as results. …
Read More “Dear ESPN: Expected Goals do not account for refereeing errors”
By Tony Attwood The time will come when Arsenal need a new manager. I don’t know when, but it will happen. Three options are available: a promotion from within, bringing in a famous managerial name from elsewhere, or finding a person who (like Mr Wenger when he joined) will be unknown to most supporters, unless …
Read More “Who will Arsenal’s next manager be and what we can learn from Moyes?”
By Tony Attwood Oh this is so difficult for the British media. With the commentary that the refereeing of the Manchester City game against Arsenal was not all that it might have been, they went as far as they dared without having their licences from the PL revoked. Now they have scuttled away from …
Read More “How the evolving referee scandal in Germany is causing the English media problems”
By Tony Attwood A couple of changes were made to this article at 9am on 7 Nov after it was initially published I recently wrote a little piece How fake news came to dominate the reporting of football in all English media which traced the history of fake news in the media back 100 years. I’ve …
Read More “How fake news was used to manipulate the Man C story to avoid considering the issues”
by Tony Attwood The big problem in Premier League refereeing is silence. The silence engineered by PGMO, and only just, after years of missed opportunities, occasionally broken by the normally obsequious national media in England. It is this silence that reveals why we are still struggling to show something is fundamentally wrong with refereeing in the …
By Tony Attwood We first knew something was up when Alan Green, the BBC commentator, suddenly started laying off referees. He’d never suggested there was anything wrong in terms of bias, but constantly reported that they were making mistakes. Lots of mistakes. Lots and lots of mistakes. Lots and lots and… well you get the …
Read More “Our one hope: the media is suddenly realising there is something wrong with refereeing”
