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 Tony Attwood Last night, me and the Arsenal team went to Luton Airport. Unfortunately we didn’t bump into each other but of course we might have done, and in these days of football journalism even a 1% chance is worthy of a headline claiming it happened. I was there to meet Mandy who was …
Norwich v Arsenal 29 November 2015 – The Match Officials by Andrew Crawshaw One new referee reviews to add in to the Table of Shame which now looks like this :- Wrong Important Decisions Favouring Arsenal Favouring Opponents 2nd Yellow Cards 0 14 Red Cards 0 7 Penalties 1 11 Goals 0 4 Total 1 …
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By Tony Attwood On Thursday 26 November the sports editor of the Guardian ordered his staff out of the pub and told them to write articles under the heading Premier League: the race for the title (and Europe) A thrillingly open Premier League season has left more than half the teams chasing big prizes. We …
Read More “When opinion is formed without evidence it can get screamingly side-splittingly funny”
……….Don McMahon “The big sticks they carry are in reality tiny twigs and the dead horse they try and beat is, in actual fact, a magnificent stallion that is beginning to kick their collective arses and will rise above them all come May.” Arsenal are now in a crisis of sorts, having lost to …
. MY EXTREME FANTASY FOOTBALL TEAM . . From The Brickfields Gunners Blog . . Do you remember that great old football ad from Nike where the devil ‘s team took on the stars of world football? No? Here quickly watch it and get up to speed. ‘After Chelsea’s poor start to the …
by Tony Attwood Why is it that football clubs make such easy pickings for criminals? We’ve often noted clubs from Portsmouth to Rangers and the way they have been destroyed from within and you might wonder if the Football League and Scottish League shouldn’t by now be alert to the tricks that crooks play within …
By Tony Attwood Following my occasional jaunts around statistics in terms of how well expensive players do when they are brought into a team, and how many players are injured, I thought it might be interesting to look at the team committing the most fouls in the Premier League. I’m interested in this because my …
Read More “Which is the dirtiest team in the Premier League, who are the dirtiest players?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone. This is a story from the Daily Football Blog, which is identical in style, design, format and attitude, to the Football Columnist blog which is identical in style, design, format and attitude to Gooners Den, which is … (ok you get the idea) The headline as they present the story is… …
Tim Charlesworth In the last few weeks, I have been desperately trying to persuade myself that we are not in an injury crisis. A genuine injury crisis is the sort of thing that destroys title challenges. A few minor muscular injuries are not a disaster. Over a season, you are bound to get a …
By Tony Attwood Arsenal have a mega injury crisis. We know that because it is in all the papers. But the Daily Mail today publishes a piece bemoaning the fate of poor Joel Campbell who, Adam Shergold writes, “produced one of his best performances in the red shirt as the Gunners won handsomely by …
By Tony Attwood Arsène Wenger has revealed that the response of Uefa to his criticism of the way they handle doping has been to send 10 anti-doping officers to Arsenal’s training ground last Friday to carry out random checks on his players. And who would expect otherwise? Target Zagreb? Ask why Olympiacos F.C. are still …
Read More “Arsenal play a team whose player failed a drug test. So what is Uefa’s reaction?”
This preview is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Adam Brogden by Joe Let’s start with a rather bizarre story about continuity. Or lack of it. You see, nobody knows for sure how old GNK (“GNK” stands for “Građanski nogometni klub” or “Bourgeois football club“) Dinamo Zagreb actually is. If you take the current official story …
Read More “Arsenal v Dinamo Zagreb; there are matters lurking beneath”
By Danny Karbassiyoon Danny Karbassiyoon is an ex-Arsenal player who went on to become Arsenal’s scout in North and Central America. Danny’s autobiography, Danny Karbassiyoon – what’s it like? will be published by Untold Arsenal in the next couple of months. Before receiving a phone call from Arsenal’s Chief Scout with an offer to join …
Predictions By Mashwar Well, for the last six months I have been reading all about predictions on who is coming in at Arsenal and who is going out and what do we require most as if all the writers of these sizzling articles are phenomenal mind readers and can read all Arsene Wenger thoughts (may …
By Tony Attwood Of course defeats get me down. They always have, ever since I was a child supporting a very weak Arsenal team indeed. But I learned, as I moved out of childhood, that you can’t let these things get at you. I can’t do anything about Arsenal’s performance; indeed I’m not sure …
Read More “There has to be some good news somewhere. Ah, here it is”
By Bulldog Drummond. . So we go into this game with quite a record. Top of the ratings according to WhoScored.com R Team Shots pg Discipline Possession% PassSuccess% Rating 1 Arsenal 16.1 682 55.7 83.8 7.15 2 Manchester City 17.6 772 57.0 84.6 7.07 3 Chelsea 14.8 734 54.1 83.2 7.06 4 Manchester United …
Read More “Oh no, it’s Pulis away. Push-knock-kick-shove-foul-push-kick-shove.”
West Bromwich Albion v Arsenal Saturday 21 November 2015 – The Match Officials by Andrew Crawshaw First here is the updated Table of Shame following the referee reviews of the Everton and Swansea games Referee Review: Arsenal – Everton : the dead sparrow review Lee Mason in charge for this one. 58% overall weighted …
Read More “WBA v Arsenal 21 November 2015 – The Match Officials. Beware the assistant refs!”
Watch Arsenal for Free! Arsenal U21 v Stoke U21 Meadow Park Borehamwood Friday 20 November 19:00 by Andrew Crawshaw The U21s get their league campaign going again on Friday evening with a match against Stoke at the Borehamwood ground. Kick-off is 19:00 and entry to the ground is free. OK you aren’t going to see …
by Tony Attwood Remember Portsmouth FC? Won the FA Cup in 2008, and were runners up in 2010. Went through a lot of owners with their own unique brand of governance. Now playing in the fourth division, after a seemingly endless series of owners did the dirty on the club. Oh and there was …
. ByDon McMahon Unless you have actually seen terrorism and the extremist mentality that fostered it, it is hard to comprehend. Having lived and worked in the Middle East and seen the everyday Muslim, versus the tiny minority of fanatics, it comes as no surprise that one of the terrorists’ aims was to generate and …
Read More “Football: a powerful force for good in the world”
By Vintage Gooner Who owns Arsenal and how is it governed? Although many fans would answer that Arsenal belongs to us, the truth is that we fans are just consumers of goods and services from the club we love. We are very important to the club but this gives us no element of ownership. Good …
By Tony Attwood What is the difference between being ruled by the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and being ruled by Fifa? Well Fifa don’t arrange or allow the execution of many people, nor do they send them off to Siberia. But they do steal other people’s money, are utterly corrupt and have …
Read More “Life under Fifa: the misery of living under the yoke of incompetent tyranny”
By Tony Attwood The emergence of Iceland as a footballing nation capable of getting to the European Championship finals made me wonder how they had done it. Or rather, I wondered if the notion I put forward in 2010 (and which has now regularly been copied by others) as to why England do so badly …
Read More “How come tiny and modest sized nations achieve so much more in football than England?”
Mathieu Flamini – Levulinic Acid King by Andrew Crawshaw There have been a number of reports recently in the Press that our Mathieu is doing extremely well for himself outside the world of football. In 2008 he founded a company, GF Biochemicals, in Italy with a friend Pasquale Granata. This has been kept very …
By Tony Attwood So just another interlull week in terms of football news (although of course certainly not in terms of anything else). Using the lovely archaic language that the press indulge in these days, Cesc Fábregas’ statement that Chelsea’s season is fucked was described by one over-extended journalist as a “foul mouthed rant”. An interesting …
