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 And the big question is – how will you occupy yourself in June (other than by watching Copa America)? Here are the dates. 30 May: FA Cup Final 3/4 July: Copa America 3rd/4th, and final 15 July: Asia Trophy (Stoke, Everton, Arsenal, Singapore) – two games 18 July: Asia Trophy: (ditto) – …
Read More “The big worry: did the summer holiday plans clash with the Emirates Cup?”
By Tony Attwood Consider this league table, if you will… Pos Team Pld W D L GF GA GD Pts Europe 1 Manchester United 38 25 8 5 74 34 +40 83 Champions League Group stage 2 Arsenal 38 23 9 6 85 42 +43 78 3 Newcastle United 38 21 6 11 63 48 +15 …
Read More “Arsenal: what comes next? If it is the same as last time, it could be fun…”
By Bulldog Drummond . So here we go again. London v Cornwall. And just for fun here’s something from the old days… . Sir Alex Ferguson said once Manchester United had played the better football in one of the battles. Arsène Wenger said in reply when a journalist mentioned it, “Everyone believes he has …
Read More “Man U v Arsenal: everything you want to know and some things you don’t”
Manchester United v Arsenal 17 May 2015 – The Match Officials By Andrew Crawshaw First the ‘Table of Shame’ and as Walter hasn’t published any more Referee Reviews it remains the same as last week Wrong Important Decisions Favouring Arsenal Favouring Opponents 2nd Yellow Cards 0 19 Red Cards 4 16 Penalties 4 18 Goals …
Read More “Man U v Arsenal, the world famous ref preview. Well, the ref preview.”
By Tony Attwood Towards the end of 2014 Untold ran a series of articles under the general heading of “Football Betrayed” in which I tried to put forward the notion that there are a lot of at best unexplained, and at worst down right corrupt practices in football, which football journalists simply fail to address. …
Read More “Confusion, laziness or attempt to mislead? Why we need rigour in football journalism”
By Tony Attwood . So there we have it. According to one press report we have “won the race to sign Luton Town’s 11-year-old Charlie Patino at a cost of £10,000 in compensation.” . So this is where we now are: the signing of a child just out of primary school is VERY BIG …
Read More “Our new super short-trousered signing, and and injury worries”
The Untold Banner Tony and I have come up with a shortlist of FOUR slogans for the banner and so now we need you lot to vote on them. You can access the survey here https://eSurv.org?s=LNMMHK_e6094efa Please vote just once and for ONE slogan only Once we have agreed the slogan I will sort the …
By Tony Attwood Now here’s a funny one. Or rather a funny addition to a funny one. When Thomas Vermaelen played for Arsenal I thought he was a Good Thing (to use the technical term). He played 110 league games for us and everything about him looked good. But then he got a long term injury, …
Read More “Barca could owe Arsenal £3m, and other funny tales”
By Tony Attwood Arsenal cannot afford another timid transfer window – they need to get ruthless That’s from today’s Telegraph and refers to an article by Jeremy Wilson in the paper. And before we go into the detail it is worth asking, was the purchase of Ozil and the purchase of Alexis “timid”? And that …
Read More “Who will Arsenal buy and how will they do it? Two different views.”
By Tony Attwood If you are a regular reader you’ll know that I sometimes have a little snigger about the way the daily press in England pick up on our stories occasionally and then do a re-write of them – either covering the same ground, or being persuaded to set out an alternative vision by …
Read More “So exactly who has been Arsenal’s best keeper of late?”
By Tony Attwood How fast can you know that a player or manager is no good? Today the Telegraph has the headline “Has Guardiola finally been found out?” That implies that he has been tricking everyone all this time in some ill-defined way. He’s got three Spanish titles and two Champions League trophies, and he’s …
Read More “How to judge Arsenal: a touch of context, analysis and knowledge can help”
By Tony Attwood Enfield have lost their appeal against a points deducation which keeps them out of the play offs from their division. The appeal against an FA decision was organised by the FA, run by FA people, for the FA by the FA. The guilty party in the affair was at all stages and …
Read More “Enfield punished for FA total cock up; press happy to cover up the mess”
Chelsea and QPR have used different routes to get around FFP regulations. But are they going to succeed? By Tony Attwood Remember FFP? You might, but it seems the Premier League doesn’t. We should have known about the Premier League’s Financial Fair Play regulations a year ago, and still not a word. Indeed the only …
Read More “FFP: Uefa seems to have given up, but maybe the League will be more resolute.”
By Tony Attwood In the closing minutes last night a fellow Arsenal supporter sitting just behind me shouted out “You’re fucking useless Sanchez”. I felt the point he made lost something by a lack of detail and logical argument. But there it was. His opinion. But it was perhaps this comment that led to my opening a …
Read More “No new central defender; Wenger is rubbish, everything is rubbish.”
By Bulldog Drummond. Shock horror disaster!!! Danny Welbeck has scored three goals in four Barclays Premier League games against Swansea City, and he is out injured!!! Oh no!!! (I think I am getting the hang of this jouno hysteria). But of course Arsène Wenger knows exactly what’s what. “I’m ready to change but we had …
Read More “Arsenal v Swansea: the teams, the score, the detail. In fact everything.”
by Tony Attwood Tottery Downs is a wild and wonderful place somewhere in the vicinity of north London. It is a place wherein teams of a certain ilk find themselves talking about taking a step up, joining the Champions League, and other such wild, wild, dreams, while in reality the dear old team is as …
The Untold Banner: a brief(ing) update by Blacksheep Having suggested the idea of putting a banner up in the Emirates to mark our appreciation of M. Wenger I must admit to being overwhelmed by the number of positive responses and offers of hard cash from Untold readers. This is going to take some organizing but …
By Tony Attwood It has been clear since the earliest days of its existence that the FA is run by a bunch of dodos. But now that assessment looks to be challenged, for it is clearly an insult to dodos. Dodos must have been the cream of the intelligentsia compared to the FA. What has …
Read More “The grossest FA cock up of them all. I promise you won’t believe this.”
ANGER MANAGEMENT ARSENAL – Don McMahon One of the most ubquitous characteristics of the aaa and their media masters is a level of anger that does not correspond with any reality or actual circumstances at AFC. The black scarf movement, the Wenger out brigade, the vitrolic aaa and the media taking umbrage at the slightest …
By Tony Attwood That headline is, I confess at once, misleading. And one should not use misleading headlines. I know that because I wrote it in an article last week about selling via the post and email.* But it is a headline that we used to see all the time. I’m not sure Untold has …
By Tony Attwood This morning on my way to work I voted in the UK’s general election for an MP to sit in Parliament for the town in which I live, and I also voted in the election for local councillors to serve in my part of town. Unfortunately I couldn’t vote for Blacksheep, for …
By Tony Attwood We have often referred back to the match fixing scandals in Italy; I thought that maybe to add to the picture we ought to cover match fixing in some other countries too. And I thought I’d start with Greece, where the affair in 2011 was originally called The Koriopolis. But in case …
Read More “Match fixing in Greece, Olympiacos and next season’s Champs League”
By Tony Attwood This year St Totters Day was the biggest I can ever remember, with even the national media jumping on the bandwagon. Indeed if you want a flavour of what other Arsenal fans got up to on the great day this year take a look at St Tots Day from the Independent. This means of …
Read More “Why we need the young non-international playing players”
By Tony Attwood I can’t recall a new season starting so early, but that is how it seems. We’ve still got to establish the order of the top four, play Man U, Sunderland and WBA in the league, and sort out the FA Cup. And yet all the talk is of next season. No real …
Read More “We’ve got the 100, had St Tot and got into Europe. So now what?”
By Tony Attwood All clubs have style. It is reflected in the way the players are encouraged to present themselves, the way the club reveres its past, the way the club considers its fans, even the way the club considers the people who live in houses round about. In such an analysis there are some …
