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 A bit of idle curiosity arose after reading a piece telling me that a good start to the season is essential for any team wanting to win the league, as I wasn’t sure that this was the case last season. Indeed a quick flip back to 1 October 2016 – a date …
Read More “A powerful start to the new season is vital. Or maybe not”
by Ian Brookes I was at the Emirates Cup this weekend with my 2 sons and has been the recent tradition, I treated them to a new shirt for the season. Of the 3 on offer both opted for the Home kit in short sleeve with Lacazette and number 9 on the back. The cost …
By Tony Attwood Very very little transfer action by the clubs that ended up in the top ten during the past couple of weeks. Top spenders are still Manchester City with £217m spent followed by Man U who have overtaken Chelsea into second position having spent £146m. Chelsea third with £126m. Everton have now …
By the Very Bold, Sir Hardly Anyone. Actually I didn’t mean to be in bold, it just happened, so I paid Tony £1m for it to stay like that. Typesetting correction fees have escalated in the past year apparently, and although I expressed surprise, he did tell me that they are index linked to transfer …
By Tony Attwood So say Arsène Wenger, reaching the same conclusion as we did. When you let a country own a club, all chaos is bound to cut loose. Likewise when you let a country like Qatar hold the World Cup then all chaos is bound to cut loose. When that country then suffers a …
By Sir Hardly Anyone It is surely the biggest indictment so far of the millions of pages of rumours spread across thousands of bloggettas and newspapers that virtually no one picked up in advance on the loan of Emiliano Martinez to Getafe CF, before it happened. All those inside stories from people really in the know …
Read More “Arsenal make shock goalkeeper move; rumour mongers left looking extremely silly”
by Tony Attwood Reading the always interesting “A cultured left foot” blog this morning in relation to the decision by Kroenke to bring his big game hunting channel to the UK, I came across the sentence “The reality is that while the MOTV incident brings football into disrepute, nothing will be done.” And yes, I …
By Sir Hardly Anyone There are seven new players on Arsenal’s transfer list this week taking the grand total to 89 players who are said to be joining Arsenal this summer. Last year it was 114 and we have got 31 days left to find the missing 26 players that will make this the all …
Read More “Seven players not previously announced to join Arsenal and a jolly jape.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone According to the Daily Mail, Arsenal’s “summer clear-out” has been “delayed with players refusing to take pay cuts to join new clubs.” So at last, we have our Arsenal summer crisis. The players won’t leave!!! Well, at least it is original. Anyway the headline grabbing news is that, “Arsenal are …
Read More “Arsenal in crisis as players refuse to transfer to other clubs even when asked nicely”
By Walter Broeckx With the Emirates Cup finished one could say that the fun part of the preseason is over. Mind you I don’t know if the players will have found this part the “fun part”. I can imagine them more thinking in terms of the terrible part. With all the running they have to …
Read More “Judging the young guns after pre-season: who will make it, who will quietly fade away.”
By Tony Attwood This little piece contains brief details about five things that I think are indeed wrong with football, but which most people in the media seem to find ok – except when it involves knocking Arsenal of course. 1: Drugs in football? Who cares? Drugs testing is treated as irrelevant nonsense in football, …
Read More “The five factors that reveal there’s something very wrong with football (and Arsenal)”
By Ian Brookes Towards the back end of the 1990/91 season Arsenal announced the launch of a new Debenture Bond scheme. The idea of the scheme was to assist in the funding of the development of the North Bank following the Taylor Report post Hillsborough. The Bonds were known as “A” and “B”. An A …
Read More “The strange history of the Arsenal Debenture Bonds, and how they operate today”
. Seven Transfers Arsenal are said to be involved in, and the changes noticed in the pre-transfer talk. . By Sir Hardly Anyone The notion of a transfer index which charts all the players said by the media to be coming to or going from Arsenal, was of course set up to show how stupid …
Read More “Dramatic change in approach to transfers appears to be affecting the market”
By Walter Broeckx Arsenal starting lineup: Cech, Koscielny, Elneny, Monreal, Bellerin, Ramsey, Willock, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Ozil, Welbeck, Lacazette Koscielny with a header after a corner but the Sevilla keeper can stop it from going over the line. Sevilla counter and Arsenal defenders have to be alert to cut out a possible dangerous shot. A good infiltration …
Arsenal 5 Benfica 2. By Tony Attwood In the UK the Arsenal v Benfica match was shown on Quest – a TV channel I have not previously associated with football. Or come to that anything. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever watched it before. But what a stunning revolution it was. No pundits full …
By Bulldog Drummond Trying to get the teams right is tough enough at the best of times, and Blacksheep (whose phone always seems to get the teams before anyone else in the pub before the match) does take special delight in the way that the Untold team predictor service is somewhat less viable as a …
Read More “Arsenal v Benfica, the teams, the options, the future, and the bits we made up”
By Walter Broeckx Ever since the stadium move around 2006 we had a bit of an argument amongst supporters about spending money. The fact that around that period Chelsea first was spending money as if there is no tomorrow and then were followed by Manchester City a few years later, made it all more difficult. …
By Tony Attwood The latest from the source, (which is to say Arsenal) is that Gabriel is still a few weeks away from returning to training, Jack Wilshere is much closer to returning , there’s no date for Santi yet but he is “getting better every day”, and no one else is injured. Except that the …
Read More “Injury updates, who’s in favour, Alexis is ill, Elneny’s position, last night’s victory”
by Sir Hardly Anyone. For the first time ever I have seen a bloggetta run a transfer rumour with the headline “Nobody believes it”. The source is Talkingbaws – which is a new one on me – and it runs like this. Real Mad are going to buy Kylian Mbappé, just to show that they can. …
Read More “Alexis wants pay cut to force move; Bale coming to Arsenal; tonight’s team news”
by Andrew Crawshaw The ‘million dollar’ quote is from the Borehamwood FC Chairman following the completion of the installation of the ‘Desso’ pitch at the ground Arsenal will be using for its PL2 and Ladies fixtures for at least the next 10 years. In this article, as a preview to both the opening of the …
Read More “What makes a pitch worth ‘a million dollars’? Arsenal’s deal secures its second stadium.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone It is as if someone in football has read my name and instead of seeing it as, well, not to put too fine a point on it, my name, they have taken it as what they should be doing in terms of signing players. And in fact in the past week …
Read More “Has Arsenal come to a dead stop in terms of transfers: indeed has everyone else?”
by Andrew Crawshaw The annual pre-season friendly match between (non-league) Borehamwood FC and Arsenal takes place on Thursday evening with a 19:30 kick-off. It is expected that the Arsenal team will comprise a mixture of U18 and U23 players, but with the Emirates Cup matches at the weekend, I suspect the team sheet will probably …
Read More “Borehamwood v Arsenal – Thursday 27 July pre-season friendly preview”
by Tony Attwood OK, if you have been paying attention you’ll know that over the last couple of days we’ve been exploring the British press and the way in which when it comes to football it has embraced fake news as real. Part of my argument is that this effect is achieved in three ways: …
Read More “Fans are being duped day after day. What they discuss in Europe but never in the UK.”
By Tony Attwood Try this headline for size Preseason shows Arsenal committed to back three but need attack options Now this pre-season involved travelling around the world, playing in ludicrous humidity, food poisoning, and our top scorer from last season not present, plus a match in which the authorities refused (for a while) to …
Read More “The one-liners that are killing football: what journalists say about Arsenal and others”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Before I go on, you might recall our little commentary about a story in the Metro about players Mr Wenger said he wasn’t selling, and then sold. Well, it has cropped up again on Sportskeeda – only to ensure that they are not doing for breaching copyright in the original article, …
