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 Tim Charlesworth I am starting to reflect on how lucky I am in life. I am blessed with a wonderful family, living in a world without war (my bit of it anyway), my health, the privilege of education, living in an age of prosperity, absent of pestilence, famine etc. This is not usually …
By Tony Attwood You might remember the old tales that Arsenal were never serious contenders for winning the league because they didn’t beat enough of the other teams in the top four. In this argument beating other top four clubs was defined as a clear indicator of the club’s power and progress. This year’s …
By Tony Attwood Investors are being urged to put money into building networks of football coaching academies across the country. That opening sentence may have taken you by surprise. Unfortunately this is not in England, where investment in grassroots football is now in total terminal decline due to FA bankruptcy and government starvation of …
Read More “How football could be part of the solution of a nation’s ills.”
By Tony Attwood At 1653 GMT yesterday Jason Burt, the Deputy Football Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph (an English newspaper) published a story on the paper’s web site with the headline How did Arsenal escape with a draw at Tottenham and does Arsene Wenger have a discipline problem? It was a totally pro-Tottenham piece of …
By Tony Attwood As you will know if you are a regular Untolder, Walter normally does a post match report, generally within about 15 seconds of the match ending. But Walter is today becoming a TV star, being called upon to work for Belgium TV, so what with me not being at the game in …
Read More “The Tiny Totts v Arsenal. As it happened, and indeed as it didn’t. And stuff like that.”
The following is a press release from Arsenal Independent Supporters’ Association, of which I am a member, and which I am happy to pass on. Tony. ———— Ahead of the coming weekend’s North London Derby, organisations representing supporters of both Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal are making an unprecedented move to speak with one voice …
Read More “Arsenal and Tottenham supporters share a rare moment of unity”
By Tony Attwood The Sun ran it first. The Big Clubs around Europe are planning to break away. A new Euro League. Shock horror. Evil money grabbing swine. Etc etc, you know how it goes. Or maybe they were just talking about the International Champions Cup series, the pre-season competition in which clubs fly to …
by Blacksheep Pressure drop – we’re feeling it One of my favourite genres of music is Jamaican ska and reggae and one of the best exponents of this I’ve had the privilege to see live are Toots and Maytals. Arguably their breakthrough song was Pressure Drop, recorded in 1969. The Clash have covered this, and …
By Tony Attwood Earlier today Untold received a comment which began, “This site is pathetic, the moment someone dares to have an opinion that is different from yours you jump on them like spoilt little children!” There was nothing special about this comment – we get a few of them a day, with a range …
Read More “So here we are at Article 6000 on Untold Arsenal. What have we learned so far?”
By Tony Attwood If you are a regular reader of Untold you’ll know about my interest in the way that football is portrayed in the media. While of course like every other supporter of Arsenal I wanted a stunning victory on Sunday and was disappointed, there is one tiny crumb of comfort from the …
Read More “Why the next Arsenal manager has to be the best the club has ever had.”
Jilted John, the lightbulb moment, & the football risk assessment (Part1) By Proud Kev I recently replaced a lightbulb in my office. The one I fitted was round old fashioned bayonet fitting type which gave off a lovely, bright 100 watt glow. I found it in an unopened box in my garage at home. It was …
Read More “Jilted John, the lightbulb moment & the football risk assessment (Part1)”
. By Bulldog Drummond It’s been a few days of the media falling over themselves in an attempt to examine Arsenal’s accounts. Typical was the statement in the Telegraph that “Despite the large reserves [£159m], the club did make a relatively small loss of £3.4 million for the six month financial period until Nov …
By Tony Attwood Gianni Infantino has moved from being the General Secretary of Uefa, a position he has held since October 2009, to being President of the most corrupt sports organisation that the world has ever seen: Fifa. He was associated with Financial Fair Play, and has seen the expansion of Euro 2016 to 24 teams …
Read More “Fifa survives, Infantino wins. Arsenal make a loss.”
By Tony Attwood As people interested in football, we have a choice. We can Support our club no matter what Support the club but grumble about the way things are currently going Get angry and say I’m not supporting this club if they don’t change their ways Get angry and go and support another club …
By Tony Attwood Go back a couple of years and, while everyone who wanted to understand, fully understood the corruption that existed in Fifa, Uefa and world football, virtually no one wanted to do much about it. The height of such rebellion as there was, came with the English FA gallantly saying that they would …
Read More “We could look back in the future and see that today was the day Fifa was destroyed.”
By Tony Attwood One of the things about the very, very, very, very (repeat 200 times) rich is that they get surrounded by employees who benefit from their largesse. As a result, people tend to say yes a lot, and as the excruciatingly rich person starts doing bonkers things, the yes men say yes. And …
Read More “The strange cases of Lord Copper, Dr Carneiro, Mr Abranomvich, and the high court judge.”
By Tony Attwood The news that Alex Oxlade Chamberlain is possibly facing a long lay off after his injury against Barcelona, raises once again the issue of injuries, and it was both frustrating and amusing (in different ways) to see a correspondent this morning rant about everything including our multiple injuries. As we’ve shown …
Read More “More evidence that transfers and large squads are not the route to success”
. By Tony Attwood If you’ve been following us today, you may recall that this morning I wrote about the fact that yesterday’s match vs Barcelona was dominated in the stadium by the rampant booing and jeering of the referee (who is Turkish), who to those of us inside the stadium, was wandering down his …
Read More “Warping reality: How the media reworking of the real world evolved after the game”
By Tony Attwood A short while ago the press were full of praise for the Liverpool crowd – or at least the members of the crowd who got up and left the ground on the 77th minute, in protest against the proposed rise in the price of entrance to games. Much was made of the …
Barcelona – things to look out for. By Tim Charlesworth We’re all rather wracked with anxiety about tonight’s game. I find a nice way to deal with football tension is to think about some aspects of the game to look out for (other than the ‘who scores the most goals’ question). Matches like this define …
By Bulldog Drummond We’ve said it before, but it is worth saying again. Look at the Spanish league table. The top four go into the Champs League, 5th and 6th go into Europa. And what do you know – Sevilla in fifth are closer to relegation than they are to catching Barcelona. Which …
Read More “The tactics we can use against Barcelona, and what to wish for if it don’t work.”
By Bulldog Drummond. If you have read my match previews from time to time you’ll know that I sometimes quote Whoscored.com – an interesting source of statistics. Unfortunately today that site doesn’t seem to like my login and thus I’m being barred from seeing some of the more exciting bits of the site. So instead …
Read More “Do you have faith in Fifa? And Arsenal v Barcelona, player by player.”
By Tai Emeka Obasi Life As An Arsenal Fan. Being an Arsenal fan, I’ve concluded, is never a coincidence. It’s rather a design, which has a lot of bearing in all endeavours of anyone privileged enough to be deeply associated with the London-based outfit. If this assertion may be considered an overstatement prior to Arsene …
. By Tony Attwood. . There is something curious going on at Manchester City. The club is, as we all know, rich beyond the dreams of all rich clubs. It not only has a ground that it got from the taxpayer free of charge in return for a promise from its sponsor to fly …
Read More “The curious problem of Man City’s squad, and Arsenal’s resolute answer”
By Tony Attwood There has been, on the internet, You Tube footage of armed US soliders marching down streets in American cities. It is presented as evidence that President Obama and his cohort are indeed doing what many have said, and let’s face it, what many actually believe: the administration is about to wage war …
Read More “Creating the football myth, and how American troops are being used against Texas”
