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 Bulldog Drummond This is a difficult game to predict using our favoured home and away statistics, because Tottenham’s form has been affected by their sojourn at Wembley. Now back at Newhl anything could happen. Their home form might dip, as generally happens when teams move stadia (and this is effectively a move, given the …
Read More “Arsenal v Tottenham: recent games and trophies won by each club this century”
By Bulldog Drumond There have been 30 Premier League games so far this season. But only 10 of them have been home wins. That is, rather obviously, 33% of matches that have ended in home wins. Last season it was 48%. And what makes this quite interesting is that this is a sudden change after …
Read More “Why are supercomputers getting their predictions wrong and how to outsmart them”
By Tony Attwood There are four possible reasons I can see why Laca has not started each match so far this season: First, by having one of our three forwards coming on fresh in the second half we can catch out the defence as they tire. Second, the three forwards have not practiced enough together …
By Tony Attwood As you may recall, this is the 100th year since Arsenal joined the top division in English football. And as a reminder, if you are stuck in the alternative universe which suggests that Arsenal fixed their way into the top league, we have the full, (and rather strangely correct) story, and explanations …
Read More “100 years in the top league; how the season opened”
By Tony Attwood The impact of a new stadium on a club has been one of my favourite themes across the years of Untold, not least because I think it is one of those little analyses that we came up with first – and which of course everyone else has ignored ever since. But we …
Read More “How are Tottenham reacting to their new stadium and what happens next?”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Like dinosaurs raging across the primeval swamps our nation’s scribblers daily produce so many silly headlines (not to mention stories), that it is getting hard to pick out the most insane, although at Untold Towers we really did quite like this one from the Daily and Sunday Express website. This appeared …
Read More “The most screamingly silly misleading headline about Arsenal of the week”
By Tony Attwood The visit to the Sixfields Stadium in Northampton proved to be a disappointment in terms of the result – we lost 4-3 on penalties after a 1-1 draw. But it was an interesting experience with a decent away support occupying one end of the ground with 600 of us there, making ourselves …
Read More “Arsenal under 21 lose on penalties to Northampton (video)”
by Tony Attwood For those of us living in the East Midlands the EFL trophy can be a welcome chance to take a look at Arsenal’s under 21s. I recall a rather fun evening out at Coventry City last season where we met both Tony Adams and Per Mertesaker (pictures all round). And we’re off …
Read More “Northampton v Arsenal tonight in the EFL Trophy. All the details.”
by Tony Attwood England has a long tradition of abuse. King Henry VIII was a fan; he had a bear baiting pit built in Whitehall so he could attend. Queen Elizabeth I enjoyed it too, and when she went around the country the locals were sure to put on a bear baiting display for her. …
Read More “Those who make the biggest fuss about abuse at games are themselves part of the problem”
By Tony Attwood After a summer in which we were told by the blogs and newspapers that every single player in Arsenal’s first team squad was leaving, we’ve found that, not surprisingly, that was not true. Now I know this might come as a bit of a shock – that something predicted so strongly by …
Read More “Mr Emery tells players they can leave. And he’s not the only one with a problem”
By Tony Attwood Last year on 4 August we published Andrew’s analysis of European football which showed the correlation between winning the league and having the most valuable squad in the league. Following this Untold predicted who would win six European leagues, and we got them right. Those leagues were the Premier League in England, and …
Read More “Last year we predicted six league winners correctly. Can we do it again.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone In the previous article the point was made that the Guardian report of yesterday’s game was ludicrously negative. But of course it is not just them that takes this approach to Arsenal. On Match of the Day Gary Lineker was critical of Arsenal players in the match against Liverpool. Is that …
By Tony Attwood Newspapers and websites love to present themselves as the neutral reporters of events. The world is out there, they suggest; they merely tell their readers about it. But in fact newspapers and websites are the opposite: they are the manipulators of reality, manipulating the stories they tell in order to maximise their …
Read More “The utterly manipulative way in which one paper reported Liverpool v Arsenal”
By Bulldog Drummond There was an excellent article in Goonernews recently which made the point that “Liverpool have not lost at home in 40 matches in the Premier League. You have to go all the way back to April 2017 when they succumbed to Crystal Palace in the league.” The article also points out that Liverpool “have …
Read More “Arsenal injury news and team selection ahead of Liverpool”
By Tony Attwood Just in case we don’t get a chance to say this again for an Arsenal match – here we have the top club against the second in the league.. Liverpool’s results thus far have been fairly impressive as we would expect from the team that ran Manchester City close last season… Date …
Read More “Liverpool v Arsenal. Liverpool’s doings and the recent past.”
By Tony Attwood I was interested to see how much interest my little piece Why the media are desperate to see Liverpool thump Arsenal next weekend attracted and I thought the comments on that piece were really interesting. And having read the comments another thought struck me. I am generally quite a positive person, and despite …
Commentary by Tony Attwood, analysis by Nitram I mentioned in a recent article that PL statistics include virtually everything you can imagine except fouls. Which is rather odd given the importance of the award of fouls by referees can be in a match. Which made me wonder why this is the case. Why, when the …
Read More “The fouls analysis: how Liverpool and Arsenal are treated by referees”
by Tony Attwood So, looking back at the opening of other seasons… 2018/19: The opening two games resulted in two defeats and Arsenal were 17th. We ended the league in 5th, 1 point off 4th place. 2017/18 We started with a 4-3 home win over Leicester followed by a 1-0 away defeat to Stoke. We …
Read More “Does the start of the season predict anything? Here are the facts.”
by Tony Attwood All statistics that are taken after just a couple of matches in a season need to be handled with some caution, and one cannot draw absolute conclusions from them, but nonetheless figures this early in the season, taken in comparison with recent seasons, can be indicators of how things will go. Yellow …
Read More “How Arsenal are being targeted by referees this season: the stats”
By Tony Attwood According to the rampantly anti-Arsenal website Football.London, “Arsenal undersold Alex Iwobi by almost £19million… according to new data published by a UK-based investment company.” That investment company is Carteret Analytics, who, FoLo says, believe Iwobi had a value close to £46.3m – but Arsenal were willing to deal with Everton for only …
Read More “How Arsenal allegedly wasted millions by not demanding right price for one player”
By Tony Attwood At the end of 2018 we ran an article with the headline “How four clubs commit fouls with impunity, while others constantly get punished” It was a unique piece of research by Andrew Crawshaw which shone the light on the variations in the ways referees handle different clubs in different ways. I …
Read More “Arsenal already getting more yellow cards for far fewer tackles than other clubs”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Recently a Crystal Palace blog “ReadCrystalPalace” celebrated the way that Palace fans had turned on the Sun for generating fake after Andros Townsend called out the Sun newspaper for reporting fake news on a ‘sensational team meeting’. During the transfer window, Arsenal fans were insulted daily by stories of players for …
By Tony Attwood If ever proof were needed that the media really does like to knock Arsenal but finds it nigh on impossible to be positive about the club we only have to look at the coverage of Arsenal these last few weeks. By way of background we might remember that last season when Arsenal …
Read More “Why the media are desperate to see Liverpool thump Arsenal next weekend.”
By Tony Attwood This is one of the regular complaints from some bloggers, complaints which are then often taken up by journalists. Why does Arsenal recruit all these fabulous youngsters and then let them drift away? Various names are mentioned: Serge Gnabry, Jeff Reine-Adelaide Ismael Bennacer, Krystian Bielik are just the most recent. And …
Read More “Why do Arsenal let so many talented youngsters get away?”
By Tony Attwood I am very grateful to Untold reader Segun Lawson for his help in compiling of data for this piece on Arsenal’s finances and accounting procedures. The opinions however are mine. The story is this: Arsenal wanted to buy Tierney. Celtic were willing to sell, and there was the normal coming and going …
Read More “Why did Arsenal pay for Tierney upfront when the player was injured?”
