Southampton v Arsenal the teams and final preview

By Bulldog Drummond The review of recent events, and the league table for 2015 to date appears in the first part of the Southampton Arsenal review.   The referee preview also is here. . Now moving on… . The team is most likely to be Giroud Campbell Ozil Walcott Ramsey Flamini Monreal Koscielny Mertersacker Bellerin …

Arsenal v Southampton. Arsenal top the year’s league and other interesting stuff.

By Bulldog Drummond Could it be that football is not only taking note of our desire to video refereeing, but also for evidence based commentary? After so many years of attempts to tell us what we will think in the future (as per “Arsenal fans will be angry if…” it seems hard to believe, and …

Southampton v Arsenal 26 December 2015 – The Match Officials

Southampton v Arsenal 26 December 2015 – The Match Officials by Andrew Crawshaw   The Table of Shame – valid to matchweek 14 Wrong Important Decisions Favouring Arsenal Favouring Opponents 2nd Yellow Cards 0 19 Red Cards 1 9 Penalties 1 14 Goals 0 4 Total 2 46 Possible Cost in Points 0 11 Before …

FFP is alive and kicking (a bit); Kolo is a good guy; and Happy Christmas

By Tony Attwood After the Premier League’s own version of Financial Fair Play was left in its box, never to have the wrapping paper undone, Uefa crumbled from its ideals of bringing football finance under control, and the Football League let QPR off the hook with a fine that didn’t even make the owner blink, …

The worst Arsenal game ever 2 – after the event

In the last article Tim Charlesworth discussed the Birmingham v Arsenal game of 23 February 2008 – surely most fans’ nomination for the “worst Arsenal game ever”. In this piece Tim continues by looking at the aftermath. The devastation was total.  Arsenal’s title challenge unravelled over the next few weeks, and we finished third.  As the 2015/16 …

The worst Arsenal game ever? A look back to the game that defined an era, and a referee

By Tim Charlesworth I was sorry to hear that Cesc Fabregas was booed by Chelsea fans last weekend.  He may well have deserved it, but the incident reminded me of something sad.  Cesc has not, and never will, realise his full potential.  I suspect that, like many players who started young, his career may tail …

Laughing when the press turn on another club is ok, but they’ll be after us again soon.

By Tony Attwood We’ve had a torrid ten years at the hands of the press, so maybe it is about time they stopped. I reckon it started at the end of the Unbeaten Season – something that shook the media to the core after they had spent five months (after the possibility of an unbeaten …

Why the notion that Arsenal will never have a better chance than now is utter rubbish.

By Tony Attwood They’ve all been down the pub.  They’ve all supped their glasses of whatever it is that tickles their fancy, and they’ve all agreed: It is now or never for Mr Wenger.  This is his great chance to win the league, not because Arsenal are good, but because everyone else is rubbish. Yep, …

PALPITATIONS AND TREMORS IN NORTH LONDON; beware the temptation to twiddle the dial

    By Kim   The other day a friend of mine rang me out of the blue, his voice was trembling with rage, at first I couldn’t understand what was going on.  Had something happened to him; his family; friends…? oh God this is the kind of call I dread.  He was uncharacteristically incoherent …

Where on earth have the anti-Arsenal Arsenal “fans” gone?

  By Tony Attwood Slowly but surely, the wattage of support (if support can be measured in wattage) has risen.  Before the game the club now often plays with the lights flashing them on and off in fancy sequences, the sound levels are up and there is a really positive feel about the place. No …

Arsenal v Man C; the Untold preview with all the facts that you never knew you needed to know.

By Bulldog Drummond Part one of the preview is here. Now onto what we might (in a state of revolutionary fervour) call “part two”. It seems only yesterday that every match against one of the so-called big teams in the League was preluded by a run-down of a big defeat of Arsenal.   Defeats at Man …

Arsenal v Man City: the preliminaries.

By Bulldog Drummond We have taken just 11 points out of the last 18 in the league.  That doesn’t sound so good.  Although we’ve won the last two games.  That sounds better.  But Man City are having greater trouble.  They’ve actually got ten points out of the last 18, including being beaten by Liverpool! Put …

Klopp is not making much of an impression at Liverpool, and financially it looks tight.

By Tony Attwood Speaking with their regular authority on such matters on September 15 the Daily Express announced the “Liverpool owners will not sack Brendan Rodgers”.  And no they didn’t do it then – they did it on 4 October, and immediately the Daily Star said, “Replacing Brendan Rodgers with Jurgen Klopp will not solve …

Arsenal v Man City 21 December 2015 – The Match Officials. “For a FIFA accredited referee he really isn’t up to scratch.”

  by Andrew Crawshaw   Following Walter and Usama’s review of the Norwich Game Ref Review : Norwich – Arsenal – these acts of thuggery must be stopped Here is the updated Table of Shame Wrong Important Decisions Favouring Arsenal Favouring Opponents 2nd Yellow Cards 0 19 Red Cards 1 9 Penalties 1 14 Goals …

Total sensation Exclusive. Arsenal sign top star player from Agrabah. The magic will start now.

By Sir Hardly Anyone Although it is not a topic normally covered on Untold Arsenal I thought I would mention that almost one-third of Republican primary voters believe the US should bomb the kingdom of Agrabah, according to a report released in the US by Public Policy Polling on Friday. This is bad news for …

The value of last summer’s signings, club by club. You might be surprised at the benefit – and lack of it.

By Tony Attwood You’ll know by now that it’s my view that the notion that you have to buy players to make a success of a club is thoroughly misleading.   But still the bloggettas and their friends in the media love to hype up purchasing as the route to success. How much evidence they …

Arsenal v Manchester City: the most screamingly silly (and wrong) previews of all

By Tony Attwood I know Untold doesn’t normally do pre-match stuff until the day of the game, but these snippets from the media suggest one or two old timers have been having a bit of a jolly before rushing back to the company computer to put up their latest thoughts. And I don’t mean the …

Why is football biased towards the North West of England?

By Tim Charlesworth Proudkev recently wrote an interesting article highlighting that a disproportionate number of referees are from the Manchester area. I think this article touches on a much wider point. It is not just refereeing that is biased, but the whole of football in England. I’m not sure that there is a conspiracy here …

What everyone said about Mourinho…. before they changed their minds.

By Walter Broeckx With the sacking of Mourinho and as one of our readers linked to an article on the BBC below a previous article I thought it would be interesting to have a look at what some of their experts said at the start of the season. Somewhere at the start of the season …

Blatter and Platini at the end of the road; but we don’t give up on the awful FA

By Tony Attwood The latest word on Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini is that they are likely to receive suspensions of at least seven years from football related activity in the hearings happening Thursday (Blatter) and Friday (Platini). The specific issue that will cause the ban is the £1.3m payment made to Platini by Fifa in …

Will Scunthorpe knock Chelsea out of the cup? The real reason for the decline and fall of Mourinho’s team.

By Tony Attwood. Last year it was Chelsea 2 Bradford City 4.  It could have been the biggest headline of the century, but the media were not ready to put the boot in at that time, as the identification of underlying problems or accurately predicting problems to come is not exactly their thing.  It is …

You can never quite count Arsenal out

You can never quite count Arsenal out. The team overcame its struggles in the Champions League to play one of its best games of the year against a tough Olympiacos side and keep its dreams of European silverware alive. Olivier Giroud put in a terrific performance, notching his first hat-trick as a Gunner while continuing …

The screamingest stupidest craziest football transfer story of the year

By Sir Hardly Anyone I’ve been covering the ravings of the bloggettas since the end of the last transfer window, and I thought I had seen it all.   But now the dailyfootballblog.com has come up with this Deal Agreed : Club To Announce Signing Of £25m La Liga Star On January 1 – Fans …

Where will the current top teams in the Premier League finish at the end of the season?

By Tony Attwood It is all getting a bit desperate at the Independent this morning as it uses up a whole article on the fact that someone running Arsenal’s official Twitter account pressed the send  button three times over the same tweet – making out of that mistake (the sort of cock up that happens …

Guns and bullets, carjackings and football: scouting for Arsenal.

  By Danny Karbassiyoon. Danny Karbassiyoon is a former professional footballer who was forced to retire at 22 due to recurring knee injuries. Soon after hanging up his boots, he was hired as a scout for Arsenal and spent 7 years scouting the Americas full time before recently moving back to London. Despite his short-lived …