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 Tony Attwood If you ever spare a moment to read the anniversaries that are posted on the home page of this site most days (occasionally I forget or the technology goes wrong – normally I blame the latter but the former is usually the real reason), you might know what is coming up. Because …
By Bulldog Drummond As you will know perfectly well (so I am not quite sure why I am telling you, but I’ve started so I will finish), we are in a 12 match run without defeat; a run that now has nine wins and three draws. Here is how it goes… 1 20 Aug Leicester …
Read More “Arsenal vs The Spectacles. The teams and other stuff.”
by Tony Attwood We’ve got so used to having youngsters break through into the first team from the youth sides that it seems almost inevitable that we will have another such player this season. Another Bellerin, Coquelin or Iwobi. Or looking back a bit, another Ramsey (who came aged 18, and then did loan spells …
Read More “All the young dudes – but which one is this year’s breakthrough kid?”
By Tony Attwood Way back, ten years ago in fact, the Daily Mail ran the headline (28 September 2006): English football ‘most corrupt in all Europe’ It was a theme Untold took up, but with a twist, for we have often argued that the corruption that is part of football is there not just because …
Read More “The gross incompetence of England’s football authorities exposed, once again”
By Tony Attwood TV money funds the Premier League. Not just Big Time, but Very Big Time. OF course if the TV companies started to lose interest in the Premier League, then nothing would happen much at the start as the TV companies would be forced to continue to pay for live programme rights they …
By Tony Attwood Whenever Arsenal have a few duff games the cry goes up about the need to buy more players and spend more money. And yet, as I have tried to point out before, only a minority of players become a significant success very soon after a big money transfer. The figures suggest that …
Read More “How are some of this summer’s big value transfers doing thus far? A case study”
By Tony Attwood Last year I passed a few hours examining how various teams’ league positions compared with their position in terms of how much money they spent in the summer on players. I’ve waited until nine games have gone this season, but now I think it might be time to see how …
By Tony Attwood Poor Sky. Poor Sky commentators. (I think one of them is Niall Quinn, the other Rob Hawthorne). Come to that poor Guardian reporters. Goals are not goals unless the referee gives them as goals. And then the goal is followed by a kick off by the other side. In the centre circle. …
Read More “Inattentive journalists and pundits totally bemused by the notion of offside”
By Tony Attwood There is a little bit of a debate going on about the issue of empty seats at the Emirates, and how unfair it all is that some people have season tickets and then don’t show up for games. The suggestion is that such people should have their season tickets forcibly removed by …
Read More “Manipulative, misleading and ill informed: the debate over empty seats at the Ems”
By Bulldog Drummond. “If God exists and one day I go up there and He will ask: ‘Do you want to come in? What have you done in your life?’ And the only answer I will have is, ‘I tried to win football games.’ He will say, ‘Is that all you have done?’ And the …
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 …
