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 Although the media didn’t note it at the time, because they never note anything that is not sanctioned by PGMO, the introduction of VAR gave us one of the more amusing moments from PGMO’s history. It was Sky Sports, one of the most solid upholders of PGMO’s god-like status, who in a …
Read More “Revealed: PL referees are not 98% accurate but actually just 75% accurate”
by Tony Attwood If you want to encourage people to attack a specific group there is one simple way to do it. You make the group secret and select, while you make it clear that group has power. At once people become resentful and angry. They feel excluded, and start blaming the secret group for …
Read More “Abuse of players and referees is in part at least, PGMO’s own fault.”
By Tony Attwood Of course when I wrote my little series on refereeing (links at the end of this piece) about the way in which discussion of referees and their activities is non-existent I had no idea that Mike Dean was about the get death threats. Obviously I am as appalled as anyone about …
Read More “If PGMO don’t act now, someone is going to get seriously hurt.”
By Tony Attwood On this site we have often pondered the relationship between transfer expenditure and trophies won, and regularly reached the conclusion that the two are not as directly linked as some fans and most journalists and bloggers like to think. Indeed in the seasons before the virus came along football transfers (most of …
Read More “How much does Arsenal need to spend to win more trophies?”
By Tony Attwood Previously in this series: Are the referees and the media really out to get Arsenal, or am I just imagining it? How discussions about refereeing are deliberately stifled by the media Referees: the odd statistics that are simply never revealed or discussed How we have been utterly misled about football: part 4 …
Read More “Hiding the problem of refereeing is destroying the credibility of the Premier League”
By Tony Attwood This is part four of the series on Arsenal, referees and the media. The earlier parts are: Are the referees and the media really out to get Arsenal, or am I just imagining it? How discussions about refereeing are deliberately stifled by the media Referees: the odd statistics that are simply never …
Read More “How we have been utterly misled about football: part 4”
By Tony Attwood This is part three of the series on Arsenal, referees and the media. The earlier parts are: Are the referees and the media really out to get Arsenal, or am I just imagining it? How discussions about refereeing are deliberately stifled by the media And interestingly as I came to post this …
Read More “Referees: the odd statistics that are simply never revealed or discussed”
By Tony Attwood This article continues from Are the referees and the media really out to get Arsenal, or am I just imagining it? I concluded that earlier piece by making the point that news is invariably selected by news outlets to fit an existing agenda. Which raises the question, is there a conscious …
Read More “How discussions about refereeing are deliberately stifled by the media”
By Tony Attwood This is part one of our series on gaslighting 2: How discussions about refereeing are deliberately stifled by the media 3: Referees: the odd statistics that are simply never revealed or discussed 4: How we have been utterly misled about football: part 4 5: Hiding the problem of refereeing is destroying the …
Read More “Are the referees and the media really out to get Arsenal, or am I just imagining it?”
By Tony Attwood When Mr Wenger left Arsenal in May 2018, we were sixth, with a points per game for that season of 1.66. When Mr Emery left Arsenal he points per game had sunk to 1.38 and we were 8th. Today the points per game for this season is 1.34 and we are 10th, …
Read More “Changing managers, buying players: what works? An Arsenal/Chelsea comparison”
By Bulldog Drummond In the old days the journalists would always write, “the games are coming thick and fast for Arsenal”, and they would write that every time we had a mid-week game as well as a weekend match. Strangely back in the 1920s when clubs used to play on Christmas Day, Boxing Day, a …
By Bulldog Drummond Our review of the referee performances this year with Arsenal and Aston Villa, and our review of the home and away performances of the club, and the review of recent games, all suggest the two sides are evenly matched. We’ve also noted that the most common result in the Premier League this …
Read More “Aston Villa v Arsenal: what we need is another run of successive victories”
By Bulldog Drummond Back in the days of Arsene Wenger the media used to give attention to injury totals in order to “prove” that he was the cause of Arsenal’s high level of injuries. This was of course completely untrue, and we discovered several sets of data that were completely faked in order to “prove” …
Read More “Aston Villa v Arsenal: “We’re trying to manage Tierney”; Arsenal 5% advantage”
By Bulldog Drummond For a few weeks at the start of the season Arsenal and Aston Villa were high flying clubs, but that quickly slipped away. Villa have now played a uniquely low level of home games but when it comes to comparing Villa’s home form with Arsenal’s away form, the parallels are obvious, …
Read More “Aston Villa v Arsenal: statistics point to a balanced game.”
By Tony Attwood As has been the case for a few seasons now, each of the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League clubs that has made it to the round of 32 is allowed to register a maximum of three new eligible players. Since 2018/19, however, it no longer matters if those players have …
Read More “Arsenal Europa Squad, the strange technicalities, and why we can’t play at home”
By Tony Attwood For a club to succeed over time it needs to build a positive reputation. In fact it has to build several positive reputations. The club needs its fans, its players and all its support staff to believe in the club and feel that it is travelling in the right direction. And it …
Read More “How the daily media assault on Arsenal is seriously damaging the club”
by Tony Attwood There are crises, and there are crises. Most crises in football are simply ignored by the media refusing to talk about them, and instead making up transfer stories that never happen. The long running crisis in English Premier League refereeing is kept hidden in this way. The crisis that is the FA …
Read More “A change of tune from the inventors of transfers.”
By Tony Attwood Arsenal now are top of the red card league, with five red cards this season. No other club has five. Four clubs have had three, six clubs have had none. Arsenal were also top of the red card league last season, where they had five all season. But although the media …
Read More “Why do Arsenal get so many red cards and why can’t Liverpool sign new players?”
by Bulldog Drummond With Alexandre Lacazette having scored in each of his last three Premier League away appearances and Arsenal having an extra buoyancy we enter this match with a certain level of enthusiasm as you may have seen in our earlier little pieces… Wolverhampton v Arsenal; playing style, penalties and bed linen The window …
Read More “Wolves v Arsenal, the team, plus media bitterness as they try to cover their errors”
By Bulldog Drummond Isn’t it odd, how one little blog, focused on numbers, can point something out, and then it changes! It was way, way, way back in the distant and very dim past that Wolverhampton once did the double over Arsenal. It wasn’t a very impressive double but it was a double. …
Read More “Wolverhampton v Arsenal; playing style, penalties and bed linen”
By Sir Hardly Anyone In the end the one thing that was missing was the apology. From anyone. In particular from the hundreds of blogs, websites, broadcasters and newspapers that told us of all the players Arsenal were going to sign, and in almost every case they were wrong. Just in case you want a …
Read More “The window ends, one thing missing, the game against Wolverhampton”
By Bulldog Drummond In the last article it was shown that of late Wolverhampton have got themselves into a real spot of trouble. Tracking their league results from the start of December onward we see Date Game Res Score 06 Dec 2020 Liverpool v Wolverhampton Wanderers L 4-0 12 Dec 2020 Wolverhampton Wanderers v Aston …
Read More “Wolverhampton v Arsenal: what recent results and home/away tell us and transfer news”
By Sir Hardly Anyone It has been a desperately awful transfer window for the inventors of tittle and tattle not just because they have as ever got it mostly hopelessly wrong, but because much of the time they haven’t even got it at all, with the number of rumours being way down on the norm. …
Read More “Deadline day transfers: 14 Arsenal last minute deals”
By Tony Attwood As surely everyone knows, football is in financial meltdown, and is surviving only because incredibly wealthy individuals, and in some cases countries, are ploughing money into clubs to keep them alive. Matters were pretty bad before the pandemic, but now, with income dramatically reduced debts have got out of control. Interestingly no …
Read More “Just how huge are the debts of the big football clubs?”
By Tony Attwood When I say “so few” in the headline above, I have to admit I am not sure if there are any non-white referees or assistants working in the Premier League. Maybe that speaks to my lack of observational powers, or maybe I have just come to accept the fact that footballers come …
Read More “Why do PGMO employ so few (if any) non-white referees in the Premier League?”
