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 Walter Broeckx “We need to replace the quality and to do so we may need to look elsewhere,” says Keith Hackett. That is the header of an article that you can find if you click on this link. Sorry for leading you to an outside website if you want to click on the link. …
Read More “Does Keith Hackett read Untold? The scandal of PL refereeing Part 1”
By Tony Attwood In recent years I’ve been at the AGM of Arsenal, but this year other commitments made it impossible – so I’ve been picking up the news feeds as we go. But please do note this is not a first hand record, and in the past I have found that what actually happened …
Referee : Martin Atkinson Match : Chelsea – Arsenal This surely is one of the most bizarre performances I have seen from a ref. It brings back memories of the days when Riley was doing matches at Old Trafford and one game in particular. And I don’t know if I have to follow …
Read More “Untold’s Unacceptable Referee Review: Chelsea – Arsenal”
By Tony Attwood The football pages of the press are full of it. It being the cost of watching Arsenal. I suggested just how false part of the Guardian reporting of season ticket prices was, in my last article. Now let’s consider the Telegraph, who say… “Arsenal are charging almost 10 times more for their …
Read More “So why can’t Arsenal be like Barcelona or Bayern?”
By Tony Attwood Even by its own uneven standards the Guardian today has exceeded itself. Under the headline “Cheapest tickets in the English game have risen by 13% since 2011” the daily paper then has a picture of the Emirates Stadium under which is the statement “Arsenal charge £97 for their top-priced match day …
By Tony Attwood The essence of refereeing in England is secrecy. Occasional statistics are given out which suggest that referees get almost every decision right all the time, but there’s nothing to back these claims up, and not much else made available. There’s no web site about the work of premier league refs, there’s no …
Read More “Every reason why referees and their associations should not be secretive”
By Walter Broeckx I remember when we talked about the book Animal Farm from George Orwell there was this great quote: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. I was wondering if this also applied to players in the PL. Are all players in the PL treated equally by the …
By Tony Attwood Arsène Wenger has apparently said that Olivier Giroud could return to the squad ahead of schedule, following his injury in the match with Everton. But supposing he does… Do we use Danny Welbeck in the number 9 slot, or Giroud, or have them alternating, or use both at once. In fact Mr …
Read More “How many centre forwards can you play in the team at once?”
By Walter Broeckx So far it hasn’t really been a good international break for Arsenal. With the news coming out of the German training camp about the injury that Özil has suffered in the match against Chelsea being the worst of course. Of course this is not an injury he got from playing for Germany, …
By Tony Attwood We all know who we signed this summer.,, Mathieu Debuchy Alexis Sanchez David Ospina Calum Chambers Danny Welbeck Not a bad haul. Some were raved over from the off, like Alexis, some had a load of manufactured abuse from make-believe supporters egged on by Sky, such as Danny Welbeck. But all turned …
Read More “Arsenal’s two old-timers who look like new transfers”
By Tony Attwood Last night I watched the TV movie Castles in the Sky. It tells the story of how radar was invented and what a huge impact it had on the ultimate victory of the allies in the second world war. It also contained a lesson for the FA and journalists alike for at …
Read More “Reforming English football: ideas, plans and theories”
By Tony Attwood In 2010 I wrote a piece that I have subsequently referred to several times, since I am rather pleased with it. It was a piece about why England do so badly at international football. The article looked at the number of players, the number of players playing in their homeland, the …
By Tony Attwood Who would you trust the most out of this group when it comes to providing facilities for children’s football and for the amateur adult game? The Football Association Local Councils Private contractors who are paid by local councils to run sports provision. The rest of us (because we are all in the …
Read More “Reforming English football: Greg Dyke wants your money”
By Tony Attwood When Robert Pirès speaks I do pay attention, just as I do when Thierry Henry says something, or indeed Dennis Bergkamp. They have played elsewhere and indeed two continue to play elsewhere, but their hearts are always at Arsenal. Wonderful players with extraordinary insights into the game, in my view, and always …
By Tony Attwood When the concept of Financial Fair Play was laid out it was self-evident that the issue of finance in football had a central core (self-sustainability) and two issues – debt and loss making. Uefa chose to look at loss making first, because it was the more insidious of the two issues standing …
Read More “Champions League seeding changes and discussions being on FFP Part 2”
By Walter Broeckx I think that apart from the more brainless football supporters not many take pundits seriously. But as the more brainless are also more active in sending emails the opinion of a pundit usually makes its way through their ranks and then we can also see some of them coming to Untold to …
By Walter Broeckx First let me say I am not a doctor. But I am a person who likes to know how things come about. And so whenever I got an injury myself from doing sports I wanted to know from my doctors the how, why, what, where from it. And kept it in mind. …
Read More “The search to see exactly how Özil was injured and who was responsible.”
By Tony AttwoodIn case you have not come across them before Red Action is the group that works with Arsenal to improve the atmosphere at Arsenal games and naturally they have an interest in the problem of flares.As you’ll know, Arsenal are now under investigation from Uefa for the flare incidents at the match …
Read More “Red Action, FSF and the police speak on the menace of flares”
By Tony Attwood So now we know. Mesut Özil is out for about three months with a partial knee ligament tear. The great dream of Sanchez, Walcott, Ramsey, Welbeck and Özil all in one team – the dream of stillness and speed – has taken another knock. Will we ever see it I wonder? The …
By Walter Broeckx If you look at the number of points and the position in the league table I can understand that some people are not completely happy. But as in most things in life it is about perspective. And not just about the now moment. The season still has a long way to go. …
Read More “Which team had the toughest start to the season?”
TROLLS, HYENAS AND VERMIN by Don McMahon Following our loss to Chelsea, which imho was a close run thing….I felt it appropriate to anticipate the reactions of our AAA minions. There is a phenomena in cognitive psychology which tries to explain how mankind’s morbid focus on small and often irrelevant negatives dominates many ordinary people’s …
By Walter Broeckx Just as the leaves will fall off the trees each autumn you can be assured that every start of a new season Arsenal players are like rabbits in the woods in the hunting season. When the hunting season starts the hunters can go in the woods and kill rabbits or whatever they shoot …
by Tony Attwood When I fist started watching football back in the Bronze Age, we didn’t have a transfer window. Clubs could transfer whomsoever they liked, as long as they were British or Irish, whenever they liked, all the way up to around six weeks before the end of the season. You couldn’t buy players …
Read More “What do you do when the transfer window is cracked?”
By Tony Attwood One of the most amazing things this season is to see how quickly fans of various clubs can turn on their club’s management. That is interesting in itself, but there is more. For I have had confirmed something I have suspected for a long time: that bad news draws fans to blogs …
Referee : Michael Oliver First let me say that this together with Everton – Liverpool and Sunderland-Newcastle is one of the difficult games to do. Final score overall was 72% which isn’t completely bad but certainly not great at all. When we put weight on the decisions it drops to 65% and then we …
