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 Despite my own personal world cup boycott I do keep an eye on it of course. The reason why I do this is because a world cup can have a big impact on the next season. Just ask Liverpool… But of course when clubs are going to miss players from playing Fufa …
Read More “Who is still alive, who is already injured and who can still get injured?”
By Tony Attwood I was struck this morning by an article in the Independent under the headline “Alexis Sanchez transfer latest: Arsenal and Liverpool to step up battle for Barcelona striker”. It includes this statement: “Arsene Wenger, who has been scouting players while watching the World Cup in Brazil, is desperate to add to the …
Read More ““Wenger is desperate to add to the Gunners’ strike force””
By Walter Broeckx If ever there is one Arsenal player and one team that we didn’t expect to find in the World Cup quarter finals, bribed by Fufa, oops sorry should have been organised by Fifa, it is Costa Rica and Joel Campbell. Los Ticos as their nickname is were in the group of England, …
Read More “So what can we make of Joel Campbell based on his world cup appearances?”
By Tony Attwood All of these have appeared in the last 12 hours. If we sign them all, there’s going to be a problem fitting them in. 1. Closing in on: Arsenal are closing in on Chile forward Alexis Sanchez and France’s defensive midfielder Morgan Schneiderlin, 2. Set to: Arsenal are set to sign Feyenoord …
Read More “Top 10 Arsenal transfer slogans and the players behind them”
by Tony Attwood, with ref review data from Walter Broeckx Howard Webb is a name you will read many times on Untold Arsenal. I’ve no idea how many times we’ve dealt with him, but surely it must be in the hundreds, since we started. And here he is again, doing a game, and with one …
Read More “When can we criticise referee Webb? In Brazil, never!”
By Tony Attwood Arsenal and Liverpool have both suffered controversies over the years although I think it is fair to say Arsenal have never had to deal with the sort of problem issues that Liverpool have had to face. The greatest controversy for Arsenal is the fact that Arsenal the first League club in English football to …
Read More “How would Arsenal behave if it were faced with Liverpool’s problems?”
By Tony Attwood Everywhere football cashes in. Set up a blog and print your club’s fixture list for the season and you’ll get a letter telling you that you have broken copyright law and owe the Premier League a lot of cash. (Don’t worry, Untold didn’t, and hasn’t). As a result no one who pays …
By Walter Broeckx As I mentioned before I do my own personal world cup boycott. My plan is to not look at the matches. And now after some 2 weeks of the tournament I can say that I haven’t watched a complete match. And I survived! My wife is much happier with that also. The …
By Tony Attwood Most of the publicity about Suarez’ biting has been about punishing him. But there is another dimension – a much more important dimension. That is the issue of protecting players from being bitten by him. As I said last time around, I felt there was evidence that Suárez was not getting psychological help. …
Read More “It is not about Suárez: it is about protecting the players he plays against”
By Tony Attwood The Balotelli transfer has seemed very odd from the off. Hardly likely to be true, and yet not your typical vapour transfer. So what’s been going on? A vapour transfer is one that is invented by a club in order to throw other clubs off the track, allowing the first club to …
Read More “Arsenal’s summer transfers: how Puma got involved and other moves.”
By Walter Broeckx Clean it up, clean it up, clean up the ghetto. That was a song from the seventies I think, that came to my mind when I saw Suarez going out for dinner to the Italian restaurant of Chiellini. Alas Chiellini is not an Italian restaurant but an Italian football player so how …
The power of the world cup sweepstake By Blacksheep As you may know I work in a British university where I teach history (the history crime to be precise). As you also know I am quite interested in football – mostly Arsenal but also non-league and lower league as well. In fact I’d probably stop …
What would we be thinking now, if Arsenal had bought Suarez last summer? By Tony Attwood It was back in August 2012 that Untold first raised the issue of the Vapour Transfer and the Phantom Transfers – transfers that were never going to happen but were invented by clubs in order to throw agents, other …
By Tony Attwood. It ain’t all bad in football just now. Here’s some things we’ve noticed along the way which have been good. 1. No one much seems to have heard of Fat Sam of West Ham at the World Cup. Buses are parked in the bus parked not on the pitch. Quite a few …
Read More “The Lad Done Great. The Untold Awards for Good Things in the WC so far”
By Tony Attwood This is a very strange pre-season. A very un-Arsenal pre-season. We have on occasion been off the mark so fast we sign players before the transfer window opens. Remember Carl Jenkinson (8 June) Aaron Ramsey (13 June), Overmars, Petit and Grimandi (all 17 June) Gio van Bronckhorst (19 June) Vermaelen (19 June), …
Read More “They’re not saying no to Arsenal, Arsenal is saying no to them”
By Tony Attwood Everyone’s got an explanation for yet another England failure. Here’s one: there are no English players of merit in the Premier League is a favourite today. Everyone’s got facts that they don’t want to bring into the argument. The fact that there are no Dutch players of merit in the Eredivise is …
By Walter Broeckx With the world cup under way and with England out and Belgium in maybe it is time to have another look at an article that appeared a few weeks ago in The Guardian. They tried to go a bit deeper in the reason why the Belgium national team was more successful than …
By Tony Attwood Week after week we’ve complained that the FA and the Premier League refuse to investigate the possibility of match fixing, even when there is a raft of evidence to suggest something is going very wrong with some matches. Now we find that The Football Association is failing to investigate match-fixing allegations even …
Read More “FA refuse to investigate match fixing, even with evidence handed over on a plate”
A view of world cup commentators from an Arsenal perspective. By Rob Lackey I travel a lot, consequently I usually watch games with foreign commentary or often listen in the car to 5 live. 5 Live can truly suck when it comes to football commentary, but often excels in almost all other areas. I was …
Read More “Say what you see Pat Nevin, say what you don’t Danny Mills”
By Walter Broeckx This is the final article in our series is about the centre forward. The number one man to hold this position is of course Olivier Giroud. Giroud is one of the favourite targets of the AAA. In his first season he scored 13 goals and had 7 assists in total so a …
Read More “The Season’s Impressions: attacking 5. A word from the chairman”
By Blacksheep And did those feet in Säo Paulo…a few thoughts on the World Cup from an Arsenal perspective Here we are then, just entering the second weekend of Brazil 2014 and already one of the favorites for the tournament are out as are England’s hopes of this being ‘our year’ (again). Now I’m aware …
By Tony Attwood A while back I did a review of who we might have back in harness by the start of the new season. Now that we know that England and Spain are dropping out at the end of the group stages we can get a slightly better feel of who might be available, …
Read More “Who is going to be available for the game against Palace?”
By Tony Attwood As you can imagine the English media is packed with enquiries as to what went wrong for England at the world cup. But what is interesting is that there is a near total consensus on the interesting questions that really mustn’t be asked. Questions that are considered to be quite inappropriate to …
Read More “All the questions you mustn’t ask about England and the world cup”
By Tony Attwood I have often commented that the job that journalists and commentators have, is not to describe football matches, but to tell the readers, viewers and listeners what to think. And maybe many people still follow what they say – including those who will phone into the phone-ins and argue with the pundit …
Read More “Pundits now merge with journalists in being treated with suitable contempt”
By Tony Attwood and a cat named Origami. Yep – there always is one rumour that turns out to be right – although quite often it doesn’t turn up until the very last moment. In between there are the phantom transfers, the vapour transfers and all the other transfers as agents and clubs seek to …
Read More “The one transfer rumour that turns out to be true”
