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
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, …
by Tony Attwood Arsenal, as we all know, get the most injuries of any club playing in the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy. We know this because S Robson esquire and a guy who once coached Wales have told us over and over and over again. Now we are about to find out how …
Read More “Daily Telegraph reveals the true cost of injuries … or maybe not.”
by Tony Attwood There is an article in the Metro which is drawing a lot of attention. It opens… “As rumours continue to swirl surrounding Alexis Sanchez’s future, Arsene Wenger has been very clear that the Chilean [Alexis] is not for sale. But there’s a problem. He has taken that stance on countless occasions in …
Read More “Did Wenger really promise that Henry would not leave, and then sell him?”
By Tony Attwood We’ve now had four games in which Arsenal have been involved, which is enough time to give us an idea as to where the journalists are going to take the issue of Arsenal on TV, in the newspapers, and in the various bloggettas that newspapers have now set up to try and …
Read More “The five things we have learned about this season’s reporting of Arsenal, so far”
by Tony Attwood Arsenal now have two players out on loan with Marc Bola having gone to Bristol Rovers following the announcement of Takuma Asano’s continuation at Stuttgart. In terms of number of loans out Chelsea are in a league of their own. They already have 13 players out on loan already, and may beat …
By Walter Broeckx Arsenal : Ospina, Maitland-Niles, Mertesacker, Monreal, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Ramsey, Xhaka, Bramall, Ozil, Iwobi, Lacazette Arsenal substitutes: Martinez, Bielik, Koscielny, Kolasinac, Coquelin, Elneny, Nelson, Malen, Nketiah, Giroud, Welbeck Chelsea with a long ball and as Maitland-Niles is beaten Per has to stretch out one of his long legs to prevent further danger. Chelsea with …
By Bulldog Drummond 足球 (That’s football in Chinese) Chelsea’s pre-season has been rather different from that of Arsenal, in that aside from a match against Fulham held in secret (Chelsea reportedly won 8-2) they have not had a pre-season on the pitch. As we will see below they have had a pre-season in the office …
Read More “Arsenal v Chelsea – not really a friendly. The teams, and the transfers”
By Bulldog Drummond The media will always present games against Chelsea as a foregone conclusion: a Chelsea win – even though Arsenal have won the tie more often than Chelsea. “Ah,” they say (for they like saying “ah”) “that’s because of the 1930s. If you take recent results you will see Chelsea are way ahead.” …
Read More “Arsenal v Chelsea: the preliminaries, the food poisoning, the stories”
By Tony Attwood Arsenal used graduates from their academy more than any other Premier League side last season, a study by the Press Association has found – with the graduates taking part in a tiny fraction under one fifth of the Premier League minutes played. 6,628 of Arsenal’s total Premier League minutes – which to …
Read More “Arsenal’s use of academy players; club transfer comparisons; use of teenagers.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Certainly things have slowed down of late, and one can only assume that the volume of journalist alcohol consumption has risen past the level where even semi-coherent thought might burst through and find itself on the blog page or even in print. But there are six new names on the …
By Walter Broeckx Bye bye Wojciech Szczesny. So it seems. I’ve seen a video of you entering what appears to be the place where you would do your medical to join Juventus. I must be honest and say you that I will miss you. Even though you have been in Italy for 2 years I …
By Tony Attwood I must say I think Arsenal.com and via them the club as a whole did us all rather poorly over the match against Bayern. Licensed to an obscure channel through which one had to pay for a month’s football to watch one’s match, and know that they will put the credit card …
By Walter Broeckx Arsenal : Cech, Bielik, Mertesacker, Monreal, Maitland-Niles, Coquelin, Xhaka, Kolasinac, Ozil, Welbeck, Lacazette Arsenal substitutes: Giroud, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Iwobi, Martinez, Elneny, Malen, Nketiah, Walcott, Bramall, Nelson, Ramsey. A last minute change in the starting formation as Per was sick prior to the game and so we had Elneny in his place in the team. That …
By Bulldog Drummond Bayern have played one friendly so far this summer – against Erlangen Bruck, a team that plays in the Landesliga Bayern-Nordost, the sixth tier of German football. Erlangen Bruck has a ground capacity of 1000, and they lost 9-1 to Bayern. As far as I can see other than that, this is …
Read More “Arsenal v Bayern Munich in Shanghai. The teams, the mind games, the TV options.”
By Rowley Birkin MBE Before we begin, allow me if I may to introduce a new element in the annals of Untold. The “Bonkers notion of the Week”. This appears on the ESPN website and reads thus Perhaps Wenger sees Lacazette playing behind Giroud — especially if Alexis Sanchez does end up leaving the club — …
