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 Bulldog Drummond That Arsenal Women beat Tottenham Women was not so much the main story. Nor was it that we stayed third in the league one point behind the leaders Chelsea that made the headlines yesterday. It was the crowd. At what I suppose we now have to call the Unsponsored Stadium there was …
Read More “Women’s league record crowd for Totts v Arsenal, but it could have been even greater”
By Tony Attwood As I mentioned in my last little piece, match fixing in English football is never mentioned in the media. This could be because it does not exist, or because there is an agreement never to talk about it. In the last piece I drew the comparison with the conspiracy theory that suggests …
Read More “Modern day match fixing in football: how it works”
By Tony Attwood Modern day match fixing This story that match fixing is arranged by gambling syndicates in the Far East is the everyday tale that the newspapers tell (when they bother with it at all), and is in fact an endless retelling of the tale that was put about by the footballing authorities in …
Read More “How the Premier League set up a system that allows match fixing to flourish”
By our reporter on the spot, Sir Hardly Anyone Following from his earlier announcement, and now speaking from his home in Deadhorse, Alaska, (pictured left) President Trump has revealed more of his plans for PGMO, the ultra secretive refereeing and match controlling association in England. To begin Mr President answered the question on everyone lips …
Read More “Donald Trump, now head of PGMO, gives speech on changes being made to refereeing”
By AKH Since the start of this season, a number of Arsenal observers have commented on the performance of the Premier league team. General observations have included that there has been little apparent creativity in front of goal, instead an approach that includes much running around and passing sideways and backwards; that passing out …
Read More “Is the notion of transparency a problem for Arsenal Supporters?”
by Sir Hardly Anyone Would you like to be a big time blogger bringing in a huge audience? Or maybe work for a national newspaper’s website, with tens of thousands of readers hanging on your every word? Actually it is dead easy and you can do this in five simple steps. 1: Think up a …
Read More “The lessons to be learned from the “Arsenal player shot in the eye” story”
By Walter Broeckx I have been calling for VAR for a long time. And I still want VAR in football. Even after recent events. Why? Because I know that refs make mistakes and I want to make sure that referees make as few mistakes as possible. And I want errors to be corrected. And I …
Read More “As the evidence shows, VAR is not the problem. The problem is PGMO”
by Tony Attwood I have hoped it might happen for a long time – that the sheer complexity of manipulating the news surround football would ultimately lead to the voluntary self-censorship of football commentary would fall over itself. And so it has proved. When PGMO resisted the introduction of VAR we wondered quite what they …
Read More “At last a national newspaper admits it – football is being manipulated.”
By Tony Attwood The headline in the Mail read Arsenal board give ultimatum to Unai Emery and it became one of the most read articles about Arsenal after it was published on Tuesday afternoon. Yet from the start there were pretty big hints as to the fact it was a fake as immediately under the …
Read More “Arsenal board DON’T give ultimatum to Emery. Original story a fantasy.”
By Tony Attwood Switzerland, as of course you will know, is not a member of the European Union. It applied once, but changed its mind, and decided to continue outside the union. As such it has no obligation to allow EU citizens or indeed citizens of any other country into Switzerland to play football, or …
Read More “No foreigners here. Switzerland starts the crack down in football”
By Sir Hardly Anyone The Daily Mirror has run an article with the headline “Every Arsenal manager candidate rated and slated as Unai Emery’s job remains under threat.” As usual the headline doesn’t have much to do with the article for as it gets going the article says, “Here we look at the managers Emery …
Read More “Upsetting the Arsenal cart: seeing just who has been Arsenal’s most effective manager”
By Tony Attwood One of my arguments against changing managers over and over is that there is never any certainty that the next manager will be any better than the last one. The focus is always on “get him out now” – as we have seen with both Mr Emery and before him Mr Wenger. …
Read More “Brendon Rodgers for Arsenal? Why go for someone worse than we’ve got?”
By Tony Attwood 1: The attempted robbery of Ozil and Kolasinac. I think it shocked every member of the team, Of course their hearts went out to their colleagues and friends, but there was more, because this made it clear that given the incredible increase in knife crime on Britain’s streets, following the dramatic cut …
Read More “The ten reasons why Arsenal’s campaign has gone wrong this season”
By Tony Attwood The German Football League has a motto: “Football, as it should be.” In its publicity materials it talks about the league being stable, reasonable and innovative. And in many ways the German footballing authorities have a very good reason for feeling rather pleased with themselves. By investing properly at grass roots level, …
Read More “Football in England: something seems to have gone terribly wrong”
By Bulldog Drummond The always entertaining (if extraordinarily eccentric and flat-earth like) Football is Fixed website seems quite sure that matters involving Leicester also involve match fixing. Sadly their policy of not telling us how they have reached such a conclusion makes it hard to spot any reasoning or logic in their drawing of conclusions …
Read More “Leicester v Arsenal: recent games, the team and yet more media bias”
By Bulldog Drummond So it is third against fifth, and we are the club in fifth. Team P W D L F A GD Pts 1 Liverpool 11 10 1 0 25 9 16 31 2 Manchester City 11 8 1 2 34 10 24 25 3 Leicester City 11 7 2 2 27 8 …
Read More “Leicester v Arsenal: not fixing our away form is the biggest problem”
Following the rejection of his plans to buy first Greenland and then the Isle of Wight, the American President has put in a bid for PGMO. Fortunately, Sir Hardly Anyone, our man on the spot, was on the spot. Here is his report of Mr Trump’s words in a press conference in Smackover, Arkensas. …
Read More “Donald Trump puts in bid to buy PGMO [report may not be 100% accurate]”
By Tony Attwood Today, with nearly 30% of the season gone, the league table is not a very enticing thing to look at from an Arsenal point of view. But if you are a regular reader here you may recall that from time to time I do like to have a look at how we …
Read More “Is this the closest we have been to relegation after 11 games?”
By Tony Attwood In the last two years of Arsene Wenger’s time at Arsenal there was a campaign by some supporters to get rid of him; a campaign amplified by the professional and amateur media to such a degree that it became the norm – the daily news story. There was an assumption among many …
Read More “Why no quality manager would touch Arsenal with a barge pole”
By Bulldog Drummond The big news about today’s game seems to be why it can’t be played on Thursday, and that’s because Braga, who play just down the road from Vitoria are playing in the Europa on Thursday, and we can’t play in the evening because the game can’t clash with the champs league. So …
Read More “Vitoria v Arsenal, Europa league, Wednesday afternoon. Teams etc.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Much of the fun of visiting the Toppled Bollard, (public house of choice for the London based journalists and bloggers), is the feeding of invented stories to half baked reporters, knowing these self-same bonkers comments will instantly turn up on blogs and in newspapers, and even on the radio, the following …
Read More “When each Arsenal story is a speculation published as the truth where can we go next?”
By Tony Attwood Reasons to be cheerful? At a time when… Some Arsenal supporters have recently behaved appallingly in my opinion, booing the captain, and writing articles which seem to have the premise that the manager is a dodo who is as good as gone and the only debate to be had is Mourinho or …
Read More “8 reasons to be really cheerful and positive as an Arsenal supporter”
By Tony Attwood It seemed to be all over the blogs and cheap-seats newspapers too: Mourinho was in a secret meeting with Arsenal top bosses. Football.London got so excited about it all that they even ran a computer program to find out how well Mourinho would do as Arsenal manager. Then Arsenal put out a …
Read More “Mourinho meeting Arsenal, and the stadium is still not paid for”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Let’s face it, with a crowd like that at Arsenal the next manager is going to have to be immediately successful, and either very popular with the crowd, or a person who does not care one jot what others think of him. For the situation, we have now is similar to …
Read More “There are only two viable candidates to replace Emery at Arsenal”
by Tony Attwood As Mourinho is the man that the media say is coming to Arsenal as the next manager, I thought I would look at Mourinho and his record with the clubs he has managed – and indeed look at what happened after he left (generally following a mega-falling out with the club). Because …
Read More “If Emery is forced out of Arsenal and Mourinho comes in, what happens next”
