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 Sir Hardly Anyone According to those who know these things, or at least those who claim that they know these things, this is going to be one hell of a transfer window for Arsenal, for not only are better players needed, Arsenal need to change the “weak, leaderless dressing-room culture” and stop recruiting players …
By Walter Broeckx After a painful defeat it is always difficult to keep perspective. Yes it was a bad result. We could point at some decisions from the ref not going our way that cost us. But I will leave the ref out of this. So no need to comment on that. What I find …
By Tony Attwood I read a comment on Untold after last night’s match in which a correspondent said that he had “not renewed my membership to the club” having been watching the club for 50 years. I am not sure what the “membership” is that he has, and since the renewal notices for red, silver …
Read More “In the end just changing the manager is rarely enough, unless you want to do it a lot.”
By Walter Broeckx No changes in the starting line up for Arsenal compared to our last match against West Ham United. On the bench we had a change with Coquelin returning in the place of Iwobi who had played with the U23. Arsenal team : Martinez, Bellerin, Mustafi, Gabriel, Monreal, Elneny, Xhaka, Walcott, Ozil, Alexis, …
By Bulldog Drummond Ahead of this match the Large One who manages Palace said, “When the bell starts ringing you know the time is running out” and who are we to argue with such finery? Now the factoids Crystal Palace have just two wins in league matches against Arsenal. Of the rest they drew nine …
Read More “The Palace v The Arsenal. The teams, the beach and associated items”
By Bulldog Drummond There is a phrase that the Telegraph is now dropping into anything that Arsene Wenger ever says, or anything that it imagines the club is doing. In each and every case they now claim that saying this or doing that “is likely to surprise many fans.” It’s a sort of instant knock …
By Bulldog Drummond In the build up to this match Arsène Wenger has been talking a little about Alex Oxlade Chamberlain and his importance to the club saying, “I personally think it’s vital that Chamberlain stays at Arsenal. We bought him when he was very young and built him up. He has a great mentality and a …
By Tony Attwood Although it is generally forgotten by commentators who come to Untold without reading about its background or history, one of the reasons that Untold was set up was that of being a campaigning site. For example, campaigning about the way in which the mass media reported refereeing – and about the refereeing …
Read More ““How bad is some of our refereeing in the PL? Simply awful.” Talksport, 9 April 2017.”
by Tony Attwood When Aleksander Ceferin became Uefa president he said his first job would be to reconsider plans to give more Champions League revenue to the larger clubs in Europe. It was a message more in keeping with Fifa’s self-generated headlines about reform than a serious attempt at real live change and so no …
Read More “Uefa and the Premier League get ready to fight it out”
By Billy McGuire There are many reasons not to like the FA. The fact that they take tax payers money, the fact that they are in cahoots with successive governments who will not act against them, the fact that are congenitally unable to reform themselves, the fact that they run the shambles that has been …
Read More ““Clubs have been advised not to investigate historical (sex) allegations at this stage””
by Andrew Crawshaw Before I look into our game I would like to welcome Chris Kavanagh to the Premier League as a new referee. He takes charge of the Saturday game between West Brom and Southampton. Chris was born in Lancashire but is affiliated to Cleveland (NE of England). So far this year he had …
By Tony Attwood In the last six games as you will know we have suffered three defeats, and gained a draw and taken two wins, and we are fifth. I just wondered how this compared to the last couple of seasons at this moment. Here is where we are at the moment. Full Home …
Read More “Arsenal after 29 games. Are we going backwards or staying the same?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Last summer we ran the Arsenal Transfer Index and recorded over 110 players who were coming to Arsenal in the transfer window. Of those only three actually made it – and they were only tipped at the last minute when the transfer was already under way. What this actually means …
Read More “The player being being tipped more than everyone else to come to Arsenal this summer.”
By Tony Attwood Imagine you had a son or daughter who was showing really great promise as a footballer. And imagine you were a lifelong supporter of Liverpool. Or Newcastle. Or Tottenham. You wouldn’t worry too much that it was 26 years, or 90 years or 56 years (as it has been for those three …
By Tony Attwood I have heard stadium protests against a referee before, but never on this scale. And it was utterly deserved for Martin Atkinson delivered the worst display of refereeing I have ever seen in a lifetime of going to football matches at grounds from Wood Green Town to Highbury, from Poole Town to …
Read More “Atkinson delivers the worst refereeing ever seen in the PL while State Aid fans fight”
By Bulldog Drummond Over recent years Arsenal have not done too badly against the team that used to be called West Ham, but which ultimately took advantage of the government’s misuse of tax payers money to take a stadium for its own, which they had not paid for. (And just to avoid any misunderstanding on …
By Bulldog Drummond Arsenal team news: Wenger facing goalkeeper crisis, star playmaker trains ahead of West Ham clash So screams one headline. Yes it’s an Arsenal match and so it is shock horror crisis time. It’s not a game its a CLASH. But Mr Wenger is not so easily swayed. “Football today is a lot …
Read More “Arsenal vs State Aid United. If it is Arsenal it must be a crisis”
by Gord A while back we had a note from a reader who suggested that it was not unreasonable to expect each year that Arsenal should win the title or at least be challenging for the title up to the last few weeks of the season. In reply Untold showed that such a situation had never …
Read More “A Millenia of the Pulis/Fat Sam – BundesLiga type EPL”
by Andrew Crawshaw For this game we have :- Referee – Martin Atkinson 45 years old from West Yorkshire and FIFA Accredited Assistant Referee 1 – Stephen Child from Kent and FIFA Accredited Assistant Referee 2 – Adam Nunn from Wiltshire Fourth Official – Stuart Attwell 33 Years old from Warwickshire This will be the …
By Professeur Jacques Liaison, Inventeur Bonjour mes chers Gooners. Allow me to introduce myself and an invention of mine that will change history once and for all. Let me first tell you what the invention is about. For those who have been married or in a long term relationship they will have found out that …
Read More “Radical French invention offers supporters chance to get their Arsenal back.”
by The Referee Review Team According to PGMO 98% of all decisions made by referees are correct. Unfortunately they don’t give us access to their data to enable us to verify the point. So we have to do our own research – which is what we did by analysing the first 160 games of the …
Read More “Only 18% of Premier League referees manage to get more major decisions right than wrong!”
by Tony Attwood The 75 or 80 people who marched around the Ems Stadium with their banners before the game yesterday blocking the way of some supporters who actually wanted to get into the stadium, looked thoroughly angry, and I must admit, I wondered why. An estimated 100,000 people marched in London last month during …
Read More “Should Arsenal’s next manager be British? Probably best not.”
By Walter Broeckx A lot of changes compared to our last match. Özil returned after missing with injury against WBA. Also no Ramsey and Oxlade-Chamberlain who are out with a calf and a hamstring injury. Coquelin returned to midfield and partnered Xhaka. Up front we had Welbeck and Alexis and Theo on the flanks. In …
By Bulldog Drummond According to the Guardian Pep Guardiola was asked if he thought that securing Champions League qualification for next season would be as great an achievement as winning a trophy, Guardiola replied, “Here, yes. Definitely.” It is interesting that there has been little backlash from the fans of Man City. And remember he …
By Bulldog Drummond It is all looking a bit gloomy in the injury league table, which probably explains why various websites have been desperately trying to cook up long term injury tables (without any proper analysis of the statistics) to show that Arsenal have the worst injury record of all time, or at least the …
Read More “Arsenal v Manchester City. Mr Wenger speaks on referee corruption”
