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 “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?”
By Tony Attwood This is the team that Arsenal put out last weekend against Hull City. Cech, Bellerin, Mustafi, Koscielny, Monreal, Cazorla, Coquelin, Walcott, Ozil, Iwobi, Alexis. On the beach: Ospina, Holding, Gibbs, Elneny, Xhaka, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Lucas. And the team against Forest Martinez, Maitland-Niles, Holding, Gabriel, Gibbs, Elneny, Xhaka, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Reine-Adelaide, Akpom, Lucas On the …
Read More “How the transformation of Arsenal applies to both the first XI and the back up team”
By Tony Attwood We have often heard in recent years the stories about how Arsenal is a “selling club” unable to hang on to its youngsters, with the proven child traffickers Barcelona endlessly sniffing around trying to buy back players that they have let go to Arsenal, while using the old “Barca DNA” gibberish as …
By Tony Attwood So just how much impact has the mad money spending of this summer had on the Premier League thus far? To try and get an early view onto what all the expenditure has done I’ve created a league table with three extra columns in it. The “Last Year” column shows where the …
A year on, and how the tune has changed. By Poul Tree. A year ago we met the Tinies in the 3rd round of the League Cup. Our team was Ospina, Debuchy, Mertesacker, Chambers, Gibbs, Arteta, Flamini, Ramsey, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Campbell, Giroud. This time against Forest the team was Martinez, Maitland-Niles, Holding, Gabriel, Gibbs, Elneny, …
By Tony Attwood This morning we came up with our scientific prediction of the team: Oooooospina Debuchy Holding Gabriel Gibbs Elneny The Ox Adelaide Perez Akpom Willock So what has been going on since? The main story about Arsenal seems to be a re-run of last year, that Bellerin is about to leave. The alternative story …
Read More “Forest v Arsenal updates and Bellerin “has Barça DNA in his blood.””
By Tony Attwood When the transfer doorway creaked closed once again we published a table of the players in the 25 and the leading youth players who could also play. In the old days this was irrelevant with league cup matches when groups of youngsters some of us had hardly heard of appeared on the …
Read More “Nottingham Forest v Arsenal – the scientifically selected Arsenal line up.”
By Tony Attwood A lot of people got very exercised about the Arsenal need to buy another striker or three during the summer. We bought one, and in this weekend’s game he came on, on the 88th minute. Last season Giroud was our top scorer with 16 goals. So far in the league he …
By Tony Attwood Just back from London, following attendance at the wonderful wedding of Blacksheep and Dru – and for me an overnight stay at the Highbury Hotel on Seven Sisters. Looking at the results yesterday and catching up on the football I missed, what struck me very much (and my only evidence is Match …
By Bulldog Drummond This is part two of our preview – for the team and the earlier bits please click here. Hull City caretaker manager Mike Phelan has not got too carried away with his opening results, saying, “There is a bit of belief now and hopefully we can cement our place outside the bottom …
Read More “Hull v Arsenal – the great Hull / Arsenal competition, and an Untold wedding”
By Bulldog Drummond So the marauding Twatters have been busy this week, calling for the manager to go, and it was nice to see Untold fighting back with #CurseTheStar #CurseJackWilson. I await news of the demise of both the paper and the journalist. In August it was reported that Hull City could soon be yet another …
Read More “Hull v Arsenal: a guess at the team, injury news, bits and stuff…”
By Tony Attwood Over their past two editions both New Scientist and the Economist (two of the most respected and serious weekly magazines published in the UK) have both run editorial comments on the fact that we are now in the era of Post-Truth. In the era of Truth, the truth was the fundamental from …
NEWER AND LATEST MEDICAL CONDITIONS AND TREATMENTS DISCOVERIES By The Brickfields Gunners . “Be careful about reading health books. Some fine day you’ll die of a misprint.” – Markus Herz . After the success and great reception of the first article of the series here, titled Latest Medical Discoveries and Treatments for “them” at http://untold-arsenal.com/archives/55550#comment-889540, and …
Read More “NEWER AND LATEST MEDICAL CONDITIONS AND TREATMENTS DISCOVERIES”
By Tony Attwood One of the more unexpected things that comes with publishing this site is the regular stream of emails from people who claim that they have been reading for a long old time, but because we have published x or have mentioned y too often, they are stopping now. Unexpected because in my …
Read More “Hello hello. A tiny sighting of the return of Financial Fair Play. Let’s hope…”
