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 Andrew Crawshaw As I said in my preview Spurs would have felt good at reaching this stage of the Ladies FA Cup having beaten Brighton (newly promoted to the WSL2) in the fourth round. Spurs currently play in the third tier of Ladies Football – the FA Women’s Premier League South against teams including …
Read More “Arsenal Ladies 10 Tottenham Ladies 0; FA Cup fifth round – a good end to a bad week”
By Tony Attwood Since our two reviews of referee decisions across the first 160 Premier League games of this season, complete with the links to video evidence the PGMO (the highly secret organisation that runs refereeing using the approach that led to the Italian refereeing scandal of 2006) has been preparing to make a riposte. When we …
By Tony Attwood This is not the first time Arsenal has suffered from relentless attacks from the mass media, and the “broken phone” metaphor seems to be utterly apt for the regular fights that have beset Arsenal over the years. In fact it seems to happen every ten years or so, which in a way …
Read More “Arsenal and the broken phone. Welcome to the 12th round of 125 years of fighting.”
by Andrew Crawshaw This weekend I watched a football team who rely on playing football on the ground, with skillful players who know each other well and are normally free scoring be beaten by three goals to one by a team who in general were nowhere near so skillful. How did this happen? The less …
Read More ““How do you beat a team who are better than you? – a lament to the passing of football.”
by Blacksheep Sitting here listening to Liverpool !! vs Citeh on the BBC whilst reading Untold reminds me that I’ve been trying to think of an article to write for the site weeks without inspiration. Like Tony and Walter, and most if not all of those that write for Untold, I am an Arsenal supporter …
by Tony Attwood Perhaps the biggest problem for all single issue campaigns of the Wenger Out type is what they do after they have got their way. There is a second biggest problem, but I’ll come to that in a moment. I like to try and keep problems in an orderly queue. The movement that …
Read More “The biggest problem will only hit Arsenal after Mr Wenger leaves”
By Walter Broeckx The Ox recovered from his injury that forced him off early against Lincoln and he remained in the team. No Özil however not on the bench as he had been reported to have a hamstring problem. A player that has recovered from his illness was Welbeck and he started in the team. …
By Bulldog Drummond The question on everyone’s lips is would you support Arsenal if Pulis were made manager? Actually it isn’t on everyone’s lips as I just made that up. But I find it an interesting ponderable (a new word it seems, but I reckon there needs to be an opposite of imponderable.) Would I …
Read More “WBA v Arsenal: would you support Arsenal if Pulis were made manager?”
By Tony Attwood Every weekend the journalists who have spent a little too much time in the saloon bar the night before and haven’t come up with a semi-decent invention to parade before the fake football news department of the paper for whom they work, generally slink away and cook up their “Ten things to …
Read More “Ten things to watch out for this weekend in the match at West Brom.”
By Bulldog Drummond West Brom under Pulis have pulled themselves up the league somewhat, and have maintained their position in the last few weeks… (stats from Statto.com as always). Game Date Opposition Venue Result Pos Pts 22 21.01.2017 Sunderland home W2-0 8 32 23 31.01.2017 Middlesbrough away D1-1 8 33 24 04.02.2017 Stoke City home …
Earlier this week Untold presented its review of referee performances in the first 160 weekend games in the Premier League this season. That is 42% of all the games played this season – an analysis level far higher than one would see in virtually any other statistical and analytical enquiry. That introductory report links …
by Andrew Crawshaw After the FA Cup Quarter Finals last weekend the Premier League returns to what passes for normality with a full programme of 10 games this weekend. Arsenal start things off with an away trip to West Bromwich Albion and an early 12:30 start. Interestingly Liverpool have Michael Oliver in charge of their …
Read More “West Brom v Arsenal Sat 18 March 2017 – The Match Officials”
by Tony Attwood Last season Paul Merson wrote an article for the Daily Express in which he said that Arsene Wenger must be sacked if the Tiny Totts or Leicester win the Premier League. It was a most curious piece in that it seemed to imply that all the clubs near the top of the table …
by Andrew Crawshaw The Arsenal Ladies start their competitive season this coming Sunday with an FA Cup Fifth round match against Spurs. The match is at Borehamwood and kicks off at 14:00. The full draw is :- Manchester City v Reading Notts County v Yeovil Town Liverpool v Everton Arsenal v Spurs Sunderland v Aston …
Read More “The Arsenal Ladies Update and Preview of their FA Cup Match on Sunday”
By Tony Attwood Of course we need to be clear here: referees have been protected by the media for years because of the fact that the media will always put their own self-interest ahead of the need to report reality. Thus ever since the 1970s TV has been in the business of promoting football as …
By Sir Hardly Anyone M.Sc, PhD, (Burk). It has been a breathless few days on Planet Earth what with yesterday being pi day (March 14 – 3.14 if you see what these maths bods mean.) And indeed breathless on Planet Arsenal too, and again for a mathematical reason – in this case expotentialism. In order …
Read More “New manager negotiatons, players to return, injury boost; record beaking deal”
by Andrew Crawshaw One of the requirements of the Premier League 2 competition is that some matches must be played at the clubs main stadium rather than at a training ground or secondary stadium. The match between Arsenal and Manchester City played on Monday night (13th March) was held at the Emirates with the lower …
Read More “Premier League 2 – Arsenal v Manchester City the Match Report”
By Sir Hardly Anyone For the past year or two the media has filled up blank spots on its web sites with a range of articles that began with “Three things we learned this week”, and then not to be outdone by a rival became “Five things we learned this week” which soon mutated into …
Read More “Nine and a half things we learned from the media this week”
A summary of the research by the Referee Review team 160 games researched in detail It is commonplace for occasional visitors to Untold to write sarcastic comments about referees and our views thereon. The view, usually expressed very simply, and occasionally rather rudely, says “you always blame the refs when it is obvious to anyone …
By Tony Attwood Of course having a bent foreign referee overseeing a match full of foreigners in a foreign place with a crowd made up of foreigners isn’t exactly big time news in England. Rather the scenes of BT Sprout commentators being ordered by the producer to get up and leap about, (instead of wonder …
Read More “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Barcelona/PSG was the moment football finally changed.”
By Tony Attwood Just a couple of days back I raised the notion that maybe, just maybe, the football media was taking the first tiny, tiny steps towards recognising one of the the core problems in football: that they not only have viewpoints they also set the agenda. They decide what is an “issue” in …
by Tony Attwood Imagine you are paid to report football stories and likely rumours. Not weird made up tales but stuff that could well be true. Now imagine that you were doing this job 18 months ago and your boss said, “I want you to write a piece about who will win the domestic trophies …
By Tony Attwood I was talking to friends on the way back from the game, about their experience of the match in the family enclosure. They’d got tickets for three adults and four children in the lower tier, clock end, positioned next to the Lincoln supporters, and I was rather sorry to hear that it …
Read More “Stewarding must be a rotten job, but that’s not an excuse for not doing it properly”
By Tony Attwood Ewan Murray is the Guardian and Observer’s golf correspondent, with added responsibility for overseeing coverage of Scottish football. Ewan’s outside interests revolve around his own substandard golf game and Vladimir Romanov’s stewardship of Heart of Midlothian. So by and large he is not the man you would put at the top of …
Read More “The only question that remains is, was the ref bought or was he just incompetent.”
By Walter Broeckx As Ospina had a little injury from the Bayern game when the assistant missed a blatant offside and he had to go out to the corner flag to prevent another Bayern goal we got Cech for this match in goal from the start. On left back we had Gibbs who came in …
