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 Dr Billy the Dog McGraw, senior consultant in the psychological study of football support, University Hospital of the North Circular Road. I was struck by the comments made by two hedgehogs on a blog that was quoted on Untold the other day, in which the writers said they were thankful that Giroud was not …
Read More “Deposing the king of detrimental simplisitude. Arsenal vs Piers Morgan”
By Tony Attwood There was a lovely comment on the Independent web site recently that said that “In recent years the FA has finally woken up to the reality that amateur 11-a-side adult football, left unaided, is withering away, despite the boom in popularity of the televised professional version.” Has it? Woken up, I mean. …
Read More “The FA: from 90 Minute Noah to McDonalds via 3G George, Ukip and Marmite”
By Tony Attwood Way back in 1893 a major scandal broke in the British press concerning the amount of money that the nation was spending on football. . The St James Gazette ran the story that in England the populace was spending twice as much per year on the game as it was on the …
Read More “It is the sheer size of football gambling that gives English football a problem”
Arsenal at the AlKass by Andrew Crawshaw An Arsenal U17 team, managed by Jan Van Loon, have been competing in the AlKass tournament in Qatar. This has attracted very little attention even on the official Arsenal.com website so I thought I would share some highlights with Untold. AlKass is a Qatari sports channel, which has …
Read More “Arsenal at the AlKass; this month’s tournament you may have missed”
“Form like this could make Giroud an Arsenal legend” So it says in the Daily Telegraph today, and I wondered where they got that notion from. Surely not Untold. For since the S Robson, P Morgan, the black flaggers and the anti-arsenal Arsenal in general started attacking Arsenal, we have been comparing Olivier Giroud with …
Read More “Giroud: good enough for Arsenal? Cazorla leaving for Madrid!”
By Bulldog Drummond So, with 5000 articles done, it seems I lead us off into the sixth millennium (and yes I know literally millennium means not just any old thousand, but a thousand years, but points are there to be stretched and anyway I don’t think that there is a word meaning 1000 editions). But …
Read More “Into the sixth millennium: Arsenal v Middlesbrough FA Cup preview”
By Tony Attwood So yes, we have written and published 5000 articles on Untold Arsenal since we started this rather eccentric and somewhat different publication back on 14 January 2008. Our first piece, rather portentously, was called Arsenal witness the end of football and we plodded along writing maybe five articles a week. These days you …
Read More “This is the 5000th edition of Untold. What have we achieved?”
By Tony Attwood So as we are just having a little break from the day to day stuff of the League, I thought I’d try a fantasy list of my own, in terms of how each club is fixed at present covering this list of goodies Refereeing Injuries Biggest advantages Biggest disadvantages Squad & Experience …
Read More “Where will it all end? A guide to which PL teams are prospering and why”
FA Cup 5th Round – Arsenal v Middlesbrough The Match Officials Here is a complete list of the officials for all of the FA Cup games over this (extended) weekend. We are game 2. 1 Crystal Palace FC v Liverpool FC Saturday 14 Feb (5.30pm) Referee Robert Madley Assistant Referees John Brooks & Harry Lennard …
Read More “FA Cup 5th Round – Arsenal v Middlesbrough The Match Officials”
By Tony Attwood The Observer, which is in the same newspaper group as the Guardian, publishes a weekly column, Said and Done which makes fun of Fifa, football managers, players and the ladies who hang around with players by running sequences of events – what they said and what they did. A typical piece from …
Read More “Football Betrayed: Guardian use the same trick as the trolls”
A view from Brighton on the last game. As we approach the fifth round of the FA Cup, we’re turning back to the last round for a moment to look at an issue we missed in the build up to that match – the owner of Brighton. Brighton has been stuck in the lower reaches of …
By Tony Attwood Alexis Sánchez seems to be ok despite the attack on his legs by M Upson, once of Arsenal, in the Leicester game. He might still be rested on sunday against Middlesbrough but there’s no long term injury. Aaron Ramsey however has yet another hamstring injury. He could be out for anything to …
Read More “This week: Sánchez, Ramsey, finances, Mu-Mu, nursery clubs”
By Tony Attwood Have Arsenal sunk lower than we thought?” That was the screaming healing in the Daily Telegraph yesterday. To be fair the article below it suggested nothing of the kind. In fact it didn’t suggest much at all. But it show just how close the Telegraph, once a serious newspaper, has slipped as …
Read More “Mike Jones & Co: a fine example of how Type III match fixing looks”
Arsenal v Leicester City 10 February 2015 – The Match Officials by Andrew Crawshaw Here is the wrong Important Decisions Table updated following Walter’s review of the Aston Villa game. Overall this was the best refereeing performance Arsenal have seen this year getting Mr Taylor an 85% overall weighting – mind that is the standard …
Read More “Arsenal v Leicester City 10 February 2015 – The Match Officials”
by Tony Attwood Yesterday around 50 people died attempting to enter a football match in Egypt. But you’ll be hard pressed to find much detail in the media this morning – even on the endlessly updated websites of the mainsteam press. With football, it seems, in England at least, we have shut off our …
Read More “When absolute tragedy overwhelms what do the press say?”
By Tony Attwood “I totally respect the Premier League as a successful business that generates an enormous amount of income and brings some of the best players in the world to these shores,” said the shadow sports minister in the UK, Clive Efford, recently. “But the way the finances are sucked in perpetuates a culture …
Read More “Right, transfer window over, lets start the Arsenal bashing”
By Tony Attwood On Friday last week the bids for the future rights for football on TV were opened. And yet result and announcement was there none. Partly this is because the old days of Lord Sugar are over. The story is that at the time of the first entry of Sky he telephoned Sky …
Read More “Yet more money is about to pour into football. So what will happen?”
Its a funny old game. Mr Usmanov, the richest man in Russia and the second biggest shareholder in Arsenal has just loaned the Russian FA nearly £4m so that they can pay that old art collector Fabio Capello (whose collection is said to be worth £10m+) his back wages. Mr U said, “I think the situation …
Read More “World football in a bit of a tizz; Mr Usmanov steps in.”
Spurs v Arsenal 07 February 2015 – The Match Officials by Andrew Crawshaw Firstly following Walter’s reviews of Mssrs. Moss (Arsenal v Stoke) and Dean (City v Arsenal) here is the updated Table of Shame Wrong Important Decisions Favouring Arsenal Favouring Opponents 2nd Yellow Cards 0 14 Red Cards 3 13 Penalties 3 14 Goals …
EXPLANATION OF ZONAL MARKING SYSTEM. By Bob Macdonald I am qualified Uefa grade ‘A’ coach, and have vast experience both coaching and managing at a fairly high level. My observations are in fact no more than that, and I would be the last person to suggest I know more than the next person. However I …
Read More “Few people who criticise Zonal Marking actually understand what it means”
On the anniversary of one of the most bizarre referee performances of all time, I thought I’d look at whether the media has changed its stance of late. . By Tony Attwood . A lot of the problem about the debate concerning referees is the very curious way the media follow it up. . For …
Read More “Chelsea complain, Man U complain. But hush, don’t talk about refs.”
By Tony Attwood To some people all Arsenal did in the transfer window was bought Krystian Bielik and Gabriel Paulista. Maybe – but what is the result? According to TransferMarket.co.uk it means we have a squad that is worth £343.02m. Some players have increased in value since we bought them (Ospina is now worth £6.16m …
Read More “The value of each squad, the transfer fee oddities and multiple loans.”
By Tony Attwood I’ll come to the dodgy and indeed the very very dodgy in a moment, but first, a headline from the Daily Telegraph. “Arsene Wenger failed to land a single player before the window shut – despite links to a host of stars across Europe.” Yes, well, considering that Mr Wenger had already …
Read More “All the dodgy doings you might have missed on deadline day”
By Tony Attwood Every day we get comments on Untold which criticise either one or more Arsenal players, or our manager, or the management team. As I have said many, many times before, we will publish such commentaries, but only when backed up by some logic, stats or reasoned argument. Just calling someone at Arsenal …
By Tony Attwood It struck me as Blacksheep and I walked back from the game to Archway underground station, what a warped vision of football is created by the arrant nonsense that is pumped out by so many blogs and the newspapers each day, with their endless story that the only thing that matters is the …
Read More “Villa’s problem, Arsenal’s six injuries and the cost of January transfers”
