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 As you may have read in the media, some West Ham United supporters have been caught singing an antisemitic song towards a Jewish man on a plane being used by some fans to travel to Belgium. The club has of course denounced its fans saying, “West Ham United is appalled by the …
Read More “West Ham fans abuse Jewish man on plane travelling to European game.”
By Bulldog Drummond It is fascinating to see how the media cope with Arsenal when their standard stock of “Arsenal crisis” and “Arsenal chaos” stories have run out. As things stand they can’t even claim that we have a major set of injury worries for the game against Watford, since only one club lies below …
Read More “Arsenal prepare for Watford: the team that foul more than any other in the league.”
By Tony Attwood Three defeats in the opening four league and cup games, followed by nine in league and cup without defeat. Quite a contrast. Given that we have the 10th worst attack in the league and the ninth-worst defence, sitting sixth in the table seems quite a clever ploy – especially given the sort …
Read More “How Arsenal avoided the apocalypse and came good this season”
By Tony Attwood For several years on Untold we played a game of predicting the winners of various leagues around Europe at the start of the season. And mostly we got it right. The point wasn’t to show how clever we think we are (although that is always fun), but to show how easy it …
Read More “Arsenal preparing for another step up the league table this weekend.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Much has been made of the fact that Conte wins things – particularly noting that he came to Chelsea, rescued them from oblivion and then continued his journey into frontiers new. And the implication is that he will finally give Tottenham their third title. However, knowing of course that football journalists …
Read More “Will Antonio Conte win the league for Tottenham? An Arsenal perspective.”
By Tony Attwood For our next look at the statistics no one else wants to publish (tackles, fouls and yellow cards) we are now looking at the top six clubs (listed below in order) and seeing how their stats compare. We’ve also included Tottenham (so we can see if their new manager makes a difference) …
Read More “How some teams get penalised so much more than others by the refs”
By Sir Hardly Anyone We’ve noted so many times how the media love to knock Arsenal, that for most journalists anti-Arsenal stories are now part of the bedrock of England’s football journalism. Poor management, bad decisions by Edu, good players let go, poor players kept, distant ownership, fans in revolt. If the media have …
Read More “Make the most of it: the media supports Arsenal for a few days”
Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini have finally been charged with fraud by Swiss prosecutors over a payment of about £1.35m to Platini, and both now will go on trial. The media in Britain is reporting this a little, but interestingly they have omitted one very salient point from the case in their reports, owing to …
Read More “Blatter and Platini charged with fraud, as English media again miss the point”
By Tony Attwood Inevitably Unai Emery has said that he “doesn’t know anything about rumoured interest from Newcastle” and that’s probably true, because the whole thing about Mr Emery heading to Newcastle is quite likely to be a load of old cobblers. But it remains a fact that Mr Emery has a poor reputation among …
Read More “Newcastle in for Unai Emery, media going round in circles.”
By Tony Attwood We first picked up on Fifa’s plans for handling loans in a different way back in 2018 with the article Fifa are considering banning loans as they target Chelsea and Juventus. But we’d been pondering the issue for years before that. And now, tucked away, out of sight of any readers in …
Read More “Finally Fifa really is starting to make inroads into the great player loan scandal.”
By Tony Attwood On Untold Arsenal, we’ve often talked about often Tottenham love changing managers, as an alternative to winning trophies. But I wondered what lies beneath Tottenham’s desire to sack their managers quite so often. So I went a-looking. Certainly sacking managers doesn’t normally bring more success. True, Tottenham have outdone us in terms …
Read More “Why do Tottenham keep sacking their managers? Seven answers.”
Beware, this article contains numbers By Tony Attwood We now have just over a quarter of the games of the league season gone, and we’ve moved up to sixth, but how does that compare with recent past seasons? And come to that what does that say about being on track to regain our so much …
Read More “After 10 games there are reasons to believe Arsenal will finish 4th this season”
by Tony Attwood In the last piece I took a look at how Arsenal managed to move out of a poor first third of the season and deliver the second-best results in the league through the last two-thirds of the season. To round that line of thought off I want to look at the big …
Read More “How football journalists and their blogging allies fail to understand what is going on.”
By Tony Attwood If you are a person who shares Untold’s vision of reality, you are likely to be nodding with the satisfaction of knowing that our upward movement across the last nine games was anticipated. If not, you might be thinking, “It won’t last,” or even “Arteta out” (as in ‘Mikel Arteta out’ – …
Read More “Arsenal rise up the league: it’s time to crow and say “I told you so””
by Andrew Crawshaw The Women’s FA Cup reaches its 50th anniversary this year. It was first won in 1971 by Southampton who beat Scottish side Stewertom 4 – 1 in a game played at the Crystal Palace National Sports Arena (a 12 minute walk from my front door). Southampton went on to dominate the early …
Read More “Today: Arsenal Women v Brighton, FA Cup semi final. Live on BBC2 and worldwide”
by Andrew Crawshaw Many of our Women’s team have been globe trotting, playing for their home countries in a variety of World Championship Qualifiers or ‘friendly’ matches. Here is a quick round-up of how they all got on Thursday 21 October World Championship Group A – Ireland 0 – Sweden 1 Katie McCabe played the …
Read More “Arsenal Women – October 2021 Internationals – Round up”
By Bulldog Drummond So what we have learned thus far is that Jamie Vardy will play having missed Leicester’s League cup match and with a knee injury. But Ricardo Pereira and Ayoze Perez are doubts due to injury and illness, although not both at the same time. Ben White came off with an illness in …
Read More “Leicester v Arsenal: latest team speculation and a negativist’s prediction”
By Bulldog Drummond It is not just us – injuries are everywhere. It is as if the Doctors Union have suddenly said, “let them have it” and now they have it. Here is the table of the number of players out for each club, and it is quite different from those we have published so …
Read More “Injuries and illness for Arsenal and Leicester and a history of outrageous scores”
By Bulldog Drummond As our last article shows, the home and away form and the form across the last six matches and the distance players have travelled in the last week all point in one direction: an Arsenal win away to Leicester. But because this is Leicester, we must speak of Vardy. And speaking of …
Read More “Leicester City v Arsenal: what new trick have Leicester got waiting for us this time?”
by Tony Attwood We’ve got a busy weekend ahead with the men’s team playing at lunchtime on Saturday and the women’s team in the FA Cup semi-final on Sunday late afternoon. We’re covering both games of course over the next three days, and since the men go first, we’re starting with them and the extraordinarily …
Read More “Leicester City v Arsenal: the very weird and surprising facts”
By Tony Attwood Much has been made of the fact that Arsenal are not in Europe this year for the first time in a long time. Nothing has been made of the fact that Arsenal holds the UK record for the number of consecutive years in European competition, nor that Arsenal are second only to …
Read More “The major benefit for Arsenal that arises from not being in Europe”
By Tony Attwood NEW: Day by Day – An Arsenal video for (almost) every day of the year, in date order. It was the statistics from Leicester two seasons ago that first led us to look in detail at the way referees call “foul” and hand out yellow cards, so given that we are about to play Leicester …
Read More “Tackles, fouls and cards for the big clubs: Arsenal surviving, but Man U’s plan failing”
By Sir Hardly Anyone There is a huge amount of evidence emerging from Qatar the things have gone terribly wrong in the organisation of the world cup. And that it has gone wrong is, it seems down to two fundamental causes. First, there was not and still isn’t anyone on the ground who was capable …
Read More “How human rights have no place in a Fifa project.”
by Tony Attwood If you are a regular reader you will know that we have been pondering the issue of the relationship in the Premier League between tackles, fouls and yellow cards for a couple of years now. It started when we first analysed data and found that Leicester committed more tackles than any other …
Read More “How the media miss the key issue of the day by using just one book for all their stats”
By Tony Attwood If you have been reading Untold for a while you might have picked up on the fact that home games involve a 170 mile round trip for me, sometimes by car sometimes by train. Last night it was the train, and wouldn’t you know it, on the way back it appears someone …
Read More “An easy saunter into the quarter finals, with a surprise scorer”
