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 Simon Bailey My mum hates football. She loves racing, athletics, tennis, snooker, rugby, just not football. But within her dislike of football is her loathing of anything Manchester United. Even as a dedicated non supporter of football, my mum, I am proud to say, is an ABU. Anyone but united. Whilst they were capturing …
Special advanced notice: although much of the commentary consists of mindless gibberish there is a bit of serious stuff part way through, which is all true. You have to guess which bit it is. Part the First: The Evil Empire Bolton Wanderers, known as Notlob, make the Evil Empire look like a troupe of ballet …
Read More “How to speak Notlobian and what a man in the Isle of Man has to do with this match”
To recap and explain (or vice versa) Football 1.0 started when Preston North End were thrown out of the FA Cup in 1884 after a complaint from Upton Park FC that Preston had been paying their players. As a direct result of this Preston got together with other northern clubs and formed the Football League …
Read More “Welcome to Football 3.0 and bid farewell to the old regime.”
This is it: the big day. The very big day. The biggest day of biggest days of all biggest days. For today is the day (the exact day, the very exact day, the precise day). And already it has been celebrated by the most extraordinarily bizarre and eccentric radio broadcast about football ever. Which is …
Read More “Laugh? I nearly died. John Aldridge on Liverpool, Jacko Jones on Arsenal.”
Well hi diddley dee do! I have just spent 2.5 years screaming about the insanity of football in the EPL and how it will all end in tears, and what do you know? It is all ending in tears! (Apart from those down the pub where it all ends in beers). There is so much …
Read More “Every EPL club going bust except Arsenal. Extra, extra, read all about it.”
Clubs can have financial problems. Clubs can have people problems. Club can have squad problems. And clubs can have supporters who have fallen out of love with the board. We see it all the time. And I mean all the time, because at the moment on the Making the Arsenal blog (www.blog.woolwicharsenal.co.uk) I’m covering Arsenal’s …
H Redknapp has publicly stated that he does not feel himself responsible for any of the events subsequent to his departure at West Ham, Portsmouth or Southampton. My question in this piece is dead simple. Is this view reasonable, or she he be held responsible in relation to his second spell at Portsmouth? Portsmouth is …
Read More “How far is H Redknapp to blame for Portsmouth’s demise?”
Let me make it clear that this is not a tirade against Fran Media. If he goes, or if he has already gone, then I will be sorry, but I’ll understand. It is what agents do to young players. Get games every week, grass is always greener, all that stuff. But if he is going, …
So the match of the decade (see my last piece) has been postponed. Instead I wonder if we might debate something that was raised on the site this week…. What will happen to the clubs that die as a result of financial mismanagement? It is a topic that should be close to our hearts …
As a starting point, take Manchester IOU who are thinking about a £600m bond issue to try and sort out their debts. First thing to note here is that you don’t do this sort of thing if everything is fit and dandy. So we might ask, why issue bonds? The scheme is designed to move …
Read More “Club owners, club morals, club debt; how Arsenal are different.”
Warning: contains dead bodies, mild peril, partial nudity, swearing, irony and occasional violence. “West Ham are in dire straits,” said Billy the Dog, as I approached the allotment and offered him a pint of sweet sherry. “That Mark Knoffler has lost it, the new glacier tax is hitting them hard, and their bid to host …
Read More “West Ham v Arsenal. Score, teams, and what happens afterwards”
Arsenal – We have money available, but with the news that we have apparently signed the Brazilian forward 16 year old Wellington Silva for £3.5m and seemingly we are about to buy a second young lad from the same country, that might be it. There is still all the talk that we need a new …
Read More “The complete guide to who will buy whom this month”
We’ve been talking a bit about motivating your players and demoralising them in an earlier post. I then replied with an earlier post that was earlier than this post but not as early as the post I called an earlier post in the last paragraph. I thought was enough – two posts in one day. …
Read More “Portsmouth go bust just before they play The Arsenal.”
Yesterday I took a look at Liverpool. Now about Manchester City. They have joined Leeds United and Chelsea in imposing tough restrictions on who can get near the club – following the revelations about how they sacked Mark Hughes. (Leeds ban papers who report on the legal battles of K Bates, or report on the …
Read More “Manchester City and Mancini. A match made in hell.”
It has taken me a long time but finally I have found something to like about Rafael Benítez. When he answered the question about how he rated the ref and said, “the referee was perfect” I really did smile for the first time ever in a Benitez interview. It reminded me of Stephen Fry’s famous …
Read More “Are you Leeds United in disguise? The crisis at Liverpool and why Arsenal are different”
By Simon Bailey Ho, Ho, Ho, Merrrry Christmas. Lest we forget, tis the season to be jolly and all that, and now that the public holiday of enforced jollity and happiness is upon us, i feel compelled to write about why supporting Arsenal is like having christmas every day. Seeing as how I have no …
Redknapp to be charged with defrauding Revenue and Customs Untold Arsenal predicts EXACTLY the right score yet again!!! Oh where to begin? The is the second Tottenham manager in recent history to have had a little contretemps with the authorities while holding that esteemed office. In 1987 David Pleat was cautioned concerning kerb crawling (the …
Read More “Arry charged with tax evasion; Untold predicts the exact score YET AGAIN”
Thursday 10 December and everyone else is probably talking about last night’s brilliant performance by the under 10s in Greece. So, what with this being UNTOLD ARSENAL and all, I thought I would attack the issue from another angle. The headline above was a question raised by a writer in our correspondence column, and I …
Read More “Why so pro-Wenger and why the blind support for project youth?”
This article deals a little bit about Arsenal/Chelsea (well it gives the score), with the arrogance and re-writing of history by at least one man in Liverpool, with the latest on Notts C and Sven, and any other bits and pieces I think about on the way. In short, it is a saturday morning and …
I wonder if it is something in the water in Liverpool, or some sort of genetic inability to get things right, or maybe they are just careless, but however you look at it, Everton is a downright and absolute mess. On 21 January 2009 I reported (as did some other people) that Liverpool Council had …
Read More “Everton: no plans, no profit, no future. Compare and contrast with Arsenal”
So here we are – for the second time in a couple of days an Arsenal player has been injured playing in a pathetic pointless international. VP is out, and now Gibbs. Will it ever end? So it seems an appropriate time to consider one of the two organisations that seek to destroy our enjoyment: …
The Sheffield Wednesday manager recently said that it is “inevitable” an EPL club is going to go bust. The man from the Wednesday’s prediction is that a club will go down to the Championship and will then go bust because they can’t afford to keep paying the players. I would not be surprised if someone …
Two snippettas of news (I know there is no such word, but it is gone 10.30pm in the UK and the gas fire has been on for a couple of hours and I couldn’t go jiving because I pulled a muscle jumping up and down in the Ems on wednesday night, so I am allowed …
Read More “Football finance – breaking, smashing, creaking, snapping and crunching news.”
I’m rather chuffed that this site made the financial state of football a central talking point long before it became an everyday topic of chit chat. So it behoves me to give an update – not least because we now have a director on the edge of having to make a bid. In this piece …
Read More “Finance: Kroenke, banks, fraud, corrpution, football…”
In terms of English clubs that are facing financial disasters we are used to discussing WHU, Liverpool Beachballs and Manchester U. To that list we can now add Portsmouth. Their new owner in September turned out not to be the billionaire Sheik Yermoney but a guy who borrowed £50 off a bookie’s runner and …
