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 (whose claim for overtime is in the post) . FACT 1: Henrikh Mkhitaryan will not extend his contract at Borussia Dortmund, the club have confirmed. This certainly does seem to be a fact, in that every report that mentions this, confirms the point. He’s got one year left on the Dortmund contract, …
By Tony Attwood There are many people – I suspect it is a majority in England – who believe the world and what makes it work, can be understood by common sense. “The evidence of my own eyes” as one correspondent wrote recently on Untold. In this view you can look at anything in the …
Read More “Football in the shadows. Why the great game isn’t all that it seems.”
By Tony Attwood Premier League academy teams will be allowed to play in the EFL Trophy next season after plans to change what was once known as the Johnstone Paint Trophy were agreed. As part of the deal the PL has put up £1m to create a total prize fund of £1.95m, with bonuses awarded …
By Tony Attwood Granit Xhaka made more passes (116) and had more touches (130) than any other player in the first round of fixtures in the Euros. So what does that tell us about where he plays? And what does it tell us about who plays around him in the Arsenal team next season. The media, …
Read More “Revealed: next season’s line up: and it raises some question marks.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Sepp Blatter has suggested that some European draws were fixed by placing certain balls in the refrigerator before the draw, so that person pulling the balls out of the box or bag knows to pick a big name or small name club or country. A Uefa person reacted by saying, “Allegations …
By Tony Attwood The Arsenal Supporters Trust (of which I am not a member but was associated with – if that is the right term – when the Fanshare scheme was running) does a survey each year, and this year on reading its results through I find I have have a few doubts about its …
By Tony Attwood The alleged transfer of Jamie Vardy to Arsenal which emerged and then vanished again like a puff of cigarette smoke has taken another turn after the Daily Mail published pictures which shows Vardy carrying a supply of legal, but dubious, drugs. This comes at a time after Uefa turned its back on …
By Sir Hardly Anyone, As you will know we have discovered to our alarm that the invention of new Arsenal rumours has ground to a halt, with all the people who normally make up new rumours each day simply re-cycling old rumours. We desperately need new rumours to feed into the machine, otherwise the machine …
Read More “To all Arsenal fans: your club urgently needs your help. Now.”
By Tony Attwood How do you know if a club is making progress or not? Well, in one sense the answer is probably totally obvious. If the team came 14th one season and then third the next, we might see this as progress. But was it real progress? And is it sustainable? These are tough …
Read More “Are Arsenal making sustainable progress or are we standing still, or drifting back?”
By Tony Attwood I am not sure anyone has ever charted the ebb and flow of transfer rumours through the summer before – if they have I haven’t been able to find the analysis, which is why Untold has chosen to take this task on with the Arsenal Transfer Index. The Index aims to chart …
Read More “Arsenal transfer rumours take on a new and unexpected twist”
By Tony Attwood …weeping children in replica shirts stumble about with their frightened parents looking for nonexistent transport, peering down side streets, plotting escape routes from the sudden spurts and burps of violence that flared again through the night. The Métro was running, but not the stop near the stadium, and without any guidance on …
Read More “The English media and government are directly responsible for the violence in Marseille”
By Tony Attwood Of course if you enjoy football on Sky, the BBC, ITV or BT Sprout you’ll disagree with my headline, but I do find broadcast media’s commentary on football – be it live matches or in discussions or reviews of games – completely unrelated to my experience of football as an actual spectator …
By Tony Attwood We live in a world of blame. And not just any old blame, but instant blame. Blame for the last minute of the last game. Blame for violence. Blame for the economy. Blame for the fact I sneezed just as I was going to start writing – it must be the fields …
By Tony Attwood There is a lot of talk about what seems to be Vardy’s rejection of Arsenal. “Vardy ’80 per cent’ certain he will snub Arsenal” says the Independent. And to rub it in, “Arsenal transfer plans face disruption over Vardy delay” in another article in the same paper. Typical bloody Arsenal, …
Read More “Why is it that when Arsenal goes for a player something always goes wrong?”
By Tony Attwood If you occasionally read my ramblings on Untold you might know that I get just a little fed up with what journalists say about Arsenal, Arsenal management, Arsenal players, and Arsenal fans. Everyone can have an opinion of course, but when there is nothing but opinion and not a single back up …
Read More “Memo from editor: It’s the Euros. Make sure you knock Arsenal and its fans at every turn”
By Tony Attwood If you cast your mind back you may recall that before the “Wenger Out” and “Thanks for the memories but…” spell we had the “spend some fucking money” period. And it is clear that many people who comment on Arsenal’s finances, and do so with far more financial knowledge than I …
By Tony Attwood I am not enough of a cultural expert to know if it happens in other countries, but it long struck me that in England one of our prime pastimes is that of sneering and laughing at others. We highlight their errors, and if they are not making errors we give them errors, …
by Tony Attwood Normally speaking the World Anti-Doping Agency is considered to be the king-pins, the law makers, the absolute arbiters. They say a drug is a performance enhancer, and then it is. No argument, none of this “I just took it to relieve a headache and didn’t know” type of excuse. Take it and …
By Sir Hardly Anyone. Watching the responses of the bloggettas and the so-called professional journalists has been quite informative in the wake of the Vardy refusal to commit to Arsenal. In essence they divide into four camps… Camp 1: Here’s Caught Offside’s take which sums up this position – As if Jamie Vardy’s fence-riding the last few …
Read More “Apparently it wasn’t Vardy we were after at all. Here’s who we are actually getting…”
By Tony Attwood Now I want you to pay particular attention to this page because there will be a test at the end. My proposition is that it is never going to be possible to lift those people who are stuck in concrete thinking out of that position, without the media moving up a number of …
By Tony Attwood You might have expected the British media to have learned its lessons when it was caught out over the first round of American/Swiss arrests of Fifa executives. They covered the arrests of course, and allowed members of the FA and government to express horror and shock. But they never once posed the …
By Tony Attwood So, Vardy is another Higuain, the sort of transfer that everyone is so sure is on, that he actually signed a week ago, that it was kept secret, that he had a medical last weekend, but didn’t, that he was going to tell the club his decision on monday but didn’t. Either …
Read More “What we learned: Leicester can’t do sums, Vardy is getting a bit too big for his boots”
By Tony Attwood If you run a business and spend quite a bit of time dealing with other businesses, there is every chance that at some time or another you will have found yourself in an argument with an individual or a company that behaves utterly and totally unreasonably. They make a claim that is …
Read More “José Mourinho walks free from court as Chelsea apologise “unreservedly””
By Tony Attwood Of course you need a good goalscorer if you want to win the league. But do you need the best one there is? Having looked at whether changing the manager works, buying in big name players works, and whether injury levels affect the position in the table, I thought I’d see how …
Read More “Does having top league scorer help you win the league? Here’s the stats…”
By Tony Attwood In a widely reported recent interview, Arsenal’s CEO Ivan Gazidis said of Arsène Wengrer, “He has always put the long-term health of the club first. He wants to hand over a football club, whenever that it is, that is in great shape. He views that as a massively important part of his …
