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 Sir Hardly Anyone According to the Daily Mail Arsenal have opened talks with Real Madrid over loan deal for Martin Ødegaard – although that is not how the Mail spells it. But then they never have been very good in terms of foreign. And unfortunately although it is an article of a little over …
Read More “The clamour for another creative midfielder at Arsenal – but why ditch Smith Rowe?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone According to Football London Arsenal are “in the market” for a new goalkeeper this month with “Alex Runarsson available for a loan move away from the club.” That appears to be something of what we professional analysts call a “cock up” of the first order, with our second and third choice …
Read More “Who are Arsenal buying, and how will they fit into the “25”?”
by Tony Attwood In the table below which does not include last night’s games, the top two teams in each column are shown in bold. Looking at the table we can see that Arsenal are committing comparatively few tackles because they are being penalised so regularly with fouls. Almost 80% of Arsenal tackles are rewarded …
Read More “Premier League full stats table: Arsenal move towards abandoning tackling”
By Tony Attwood Perhaps because they were too busy talking Liverpool and Manchester United, perhaps because they didn’t know, or perhaps because PGMO told them not to mention it, but Sky Sports yesterday failed to discuss something rather curious and very concerning about Arsenal v Newcastle United last night. And that is that this was …
Read More “The statistics that prove referees have been unfairly targeting Arsenal”
by Tony Attwood We can’t get too carried away, but six without defeat is good in any season, especially when it is five wins and one draw. Sky sports really looked out of touch with their audience by broadcasting some sort of row between their studio team until just ten minutes before kick off, a …
Read More “A bad night for the media, a lovely night for Arsenal”
By Iver Neverbeen Connedlikethisbefore Back in the top ten Team P W D L F GA GD Pts 1 Manchester United 18 11 4 3 34 24 10 37 2 Manchester City 17 10 5 2 29 13 16 35 3 Leicester City 18 11 2 5 33 21 12 35 4 Liverpool 18 9 …
Read More “Just paid £10 to watch Arsenal on Now TV and its Man U and Liverpool”
by Bulldog Drummond The issues of the day are that Pablo Mari won’t play, and Martinelli might play, but possibly as a sub (to be used if the Newcastle defence is being resolute). As for Tierney (pictured left, but you knew that without me saying) he is allegedly not as badly injured as previously feared …
Read More “Arsenal v Newcastle: the Arsenal team for this evening”
By Bulldog Drummond The current injury rankings are not looking too bad, with us sitting happily in the lower reaches of the injury table once again. Here’s the totals of players out, by club… Southampton: 9 Brighton and Hove Albion: 9 Crystal Palace: 8 Newcastle United: 7 Sheffield United: 6 Fulham: 6 Liverpool: 6 West …
Read More “Arsenal v Newcastle: injuries and being beaten at home 4 times in a season”
By Bulldog Drummond Arsenal come into this game on the back of a decent run… just one goal against in five matches. Date Match Res Score Competition 26 Dec 2020 Arsenal v Chelsea W 3-1 Premier League 29 Dec 2020 Brighton and Hove Albion v Arsenal W 0-1 Premier League 02 Jan 2021 West Bromwich …
Read More “Arsenal v Newcastle. Can we beat the statistics?”
By Tony Attwood We are told that Richard Garlick, the Premier League’s director of football, will become the club’s director of football operations later this year. Mr Garlick is a sports law specialist, and qualified solicitor, who worked at West Brom for eight years from 2010. So the question is, what did they do in …
Read More “Bloated squad? Arsenal decide to add more garlick”
By Bulldog Drummond On the left is a pic of Lacazette, for the very simple reason that we need goals and he is currently our top goal scorer with nine. Aubameyang has six. Third come Nicolas Pépé with five, along with Eddie Nketiah. Lacazette also has the best conversion rate with 29%. Anyway, we all …
Read More “A football prediction system that works??? Let’s try with Arsenal Newcastle”
By Tony Attwood This season the Premier League has ventured into new territory by exploring the notion of having a significant growth in the number of players in squads who are deliberately left out of their clubs’ 25 player list. We are all familiar with Ozil and Sokratis, but there have been others: Phil Jones, …
Read More “Bernstein on the governance of football; it doesn’t quite ring true”
By Tony Attwood It struck me, while we were having our bit of fun concerning how often people call a team’s squad “bloated”, that I had never seen a comparison chart of the number of players that there are in each squad. Indeed even the full official list published by the Premier League doesn’t actually …
Read More “Bloated or shrunken? How many of the top six clubs have used all 25 places??”
By Sir Hardly Anyone It is being suggested that Arsenal are going to sign Manor Solomon from Shakhtar Donetsk this month. That story comes from HITC who say, “According to The Guardian, the Israel winger is on the Gunners’ shortlist of targets – something that his agent hardly denied by revealing ‘anything can happen’ a little …
Read More “Signing Manor Solomon; how the post-Brexit rules on transfers are working”
By Tony Attwood If you have been reading Untold for a while you will know that when the alliance of media journalists, bloggers and some fans turned against Arsene Wenger I argued that he should stay. The point was that journalists and bloggers love very simple “solutions” because they require no work on the part …
Read More “Then and now: just how far have Arsenal fallen in the past 10 years?”
By Bulldog Drummond We have already seen the Guardian suggesting that Partey and Gabriel will play a part in tonight’s game Sportsmole give us Leno; Bellerin, Holding, Mari, Tierney; Ceballos, Xhaka; Saka, Smith Rowe, Aubameyang; Lacazette which looks to me very much like a team that ought to beat Palace. Sky Sports won’t predict a …
by Bulldog Drummond The BBC is giving a prediction of a modest 2-0 win to Arsenal for this game, but they do also note that Lacazette could score for the fourth game in a row, which would indeed be rather jolly. But they do also note that in all the meetings between the two clubs …
Read More “Arsenal v Palace. Partey and Gabriel return for re-ignited Gunners”
by Bulldog Drummond The injury list as published yesterday showed Arsenal in the lower reaches and Palace right up near the top with their old chums Brighton and Hove. Brighton and Hove Albion: 9 Crystal Palace: 8 Southampton: 8 Leeds United: 6 Liverpool: 6 Manchester City: 6 Newcastle United: 6 Sheffield United: 6 Wolverhampton Wanderers: …
Read More “Unbloated Arsenal v Palace: injuries, predictions and games against the Palacials.”
By Tony Attwood It started with an article that turned up in The Athletic who asked “what is the latest news on Arsenal’s attempts to trim their bloated squad?” Then it spread like a virus to France with an article in France24 “Arteta says ‘priority’ in transfer window is to trim bloated squad”. Browsing I found …
Read More “Surely it is the journalists who are bloated not the Arsenal squad”
By Tony Attwood Crystal Palace have been in the Premier League for the past seven years – this being their eighth consecutive season in the competition. Which is quite an amazing improvement because for each of the previous three times they have been promoted into the top league, Palace have immediately gone straight back down. …
Read More “Arsenal v Palace facts and figures: two clubs totally balanced”
By Tony Attwood Slowly, very slowly, there are a few people in the media who are starting to consider the wider issue of the Kroenkes influence on Arsenal in recent years. The issue that is slowly, very slowly, being raised is, is the downturn in Arsenal’s fortunes of late due to poor management by Wenger, …
Read More “How Arsenal got into this mess, and the one thing they must now do.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone It has been widely reported that Rob Holding has signed a new long-term contract, which is really not surprising given that a) he is a regular in the team and b) he is a home grown player. For as we know while we have too many foreigners in the squad, we …
Read More “Arsenal to sell Willock or Nelson to buy Buendia, despite having no space for foreigners”
by Tony Attwood It’s taken a while, but now we have the headline ‘Arsenal should get Wenger back, he’d help land top targets’ That comes from Goal, but of course there is no chance of that happening – but nice to know that after all this time at least one of Mr Wenger’s merits has …
Read More “32 transfers so far in the window, but there will be more…”
By Tony Attwood On 5 October 2020, Arsenal announced that Matteo Guendouzi would be loaned out to Hertha BSC for the rest of the season, something I found incredibly disappointing. And the fact that the valuation of Guendouzi has now shot up to £29m shows that the valuation many of us had of the player …
Read More “Guendouzi is the perfect answer to thick and fast”
By Tony Attwood If you are a regular reader you will know that whereas when crowds were present, the home teams in the Premier League were likely to win games more often than the away team. Since games have been played without crowds present the reverse has been true. The explanation for this (as I’ve …
