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 Tony Attwood The story of football in China really is something to behold. It goes like this: The Chinese government realised a while back that most sports at which the Chinese excel are individual sports like table tennis, rather than team sports like football. But they realised that for the economy of China …
Read More “How even the Chinese football revolution became a chance to knock Arsenal”
By Tony Attwood In an earlier article I was pointing out that the first eight games of the season don’t provide any sort of accurate prediction as to what will happen during the rest of the season. Quite simply there are far too many variables in Premier League football, for eight games to be much …
Read More “How negativists don’t just avoid stats, they misuse them too”
By Tony Attwood It is a central assumption on the part of journalists and bloggers that they can look at Arsenal’s current form and tell us what changes are needed to make the club more successful. And this is based on… well, presumably their superior knowledge; the knowledge that the highly paid team of directors …
Read More “How the first 8 games predicts the outcome of the league across the last 6 years”
By Sir Hardly Anyone So here we are third in the league, the top team in the southern half of the country, one point behind last season’s champions. You might, if you were perhaps a believer that there are Arsenal fans who support their team, who like their team, who actually want their team to …
By Dr Billy (the dog) McGraw We have had so many years of the media chattering about the extra money clubs are earning from TV rights it is hard to remember that the actual earnings of English clubs from TV next year will be down. And that came before beIN Media started talking about reducing …
Read More “If TV football rights payments crash as predicted, who will gain?”
by Tony Attwood Does where a team stands after eight games actually tell us anything much about how the season will turn out in the end? It may feel like it doesn, but in fact if we judge by last season after eight games, and consider that as a predictor of where the clubs would …
Read More “How the table after 8 games shows where Arsenal will end the season”
By Tony Attwood When Arsenal declared its 25 man squad at the start of the season, and we saw there were only 20 men in it, and we noticed that some of those 20 players were still likely to be transferred out, some of us had a few worries for the forthcoming season. 20 senior …
Read More “How Arsenal sneaked 29 players into its list of 25 team members”
By Tony Attwood Last week there was a headline produced by The Boot Room which read “‘Deadwood’, ‘Lazy and inconsistent’: Many Arsenal fans react as £35k-a-week man struggles against Liege.” And I wondered how the writer of this vignette would have felt if he or she had been referred to in a headline by his …
Read More “How the criticism of Arsenal players rolls on and on until they are forced to leave”
By Dr Billy “the Dog” McGraw, head of psychiatry at the University College Hospital of the North Circular Road “Spurs have embarrassed English football in a way Arsenal never did’. That statement came from Adrian Durham of talkSPORT; an extremely rare bit of Arsenal supporting and Tottenham knocking. and it is interesting because this sort …
Read More “It’s not Tottenham’s fault that things go wrong. It’s the reporting that’s bent.”
By Tony Attwood It wasn’t great at Arsenal Stadium yesterday, and at times it was rather frustrating, but we won. So from having been not even London’s top team, as the Guardian utterly wrongly called us, we are now one point behind Manchester City, a time widely tipped to win the league. And yes I …
by Bulldog Drummond Here’s the current top six in the league at 6pm Saturday. Team P W D L F A GD Pts 1 Liverpool 8 8 0 0 20 6 14 24 2 Manchester City 7 5 1 1 27 7 20 16 3 Leicester City 8 4 2 2 14 7 7 14 …
Read More “Arsenal v AFC Bournemouth – lineup, results, analysis, prediction.”
By Dr Billy the Dog McGraw, head of psychiatry at the University College Hospital of the North Circular Road. A little note on our trade marked rivals first, before moving on to the big story of media manipulation of a type so bonkers even I, with my PhD in Certain Things, was surprised… Liverpool(™) have …
Read More “Liverpool(™) charged again, Sky declare there is no Tottenham crisis”
By Tony Attwood It is not that usual for the BBC to get totally carried away with a story that shows Arsenal in a good light, but they certainly have done that with their reporting of Martinelli. Just consider the opening of their piece… “As Manchester United were labouring to a goalless draw at AZ …
Read More “Gabriel Teodoro Martinelli Silva: Yes yes yes yes yes!”
By Tony Attwood It is a perfect example of how the toxic blogs and newspaper sites build up their eternal story of mangerial incompetence – bringing on Aubameyang for the last ten minutes when Martinelli had been having a corker of a game. What an idiot that manager is. Get him out now!!! But David …
Read More “Why Aubameyang came on for the last ten minutes on Thursday”
By Tony Attwood Europa nights tend to be fairly relaxed at Arsenal stadium – at least at this stage of the competition. We expect to win, and we expect to see goals, and quite often we get what we expect. Not always of course, but sometimes, and the good games are the games to remember. …
Read More “This is what we came here for: a wonderful night at Arsenal”
by Bulldog Drummond Standard Liège are on a run: five straight wins as we can see below, although perhaps that has been a little helped by having played the last four games at home. Indeed their last defeat was on 1 September with a 1-0 away loss to Anderlecht. Here are the games… Date Comp …
Read More “Arsenal v Standard Liège: the team and the defensive decisions”
by Tony Attwood Jonathan Wilson in the Guardian on 1 October wrote a diatribe against Manchester United, in which he proclaimed that the game between Man U and Arsenal was of little consequence. The heading was “Manchester United v Arsenal felt and looked like a mid-table game.” Now if you have been reading my rambles …
Read More “Arsenal: Not even the best team in London? Well, today and historically, we are.”
By Tony Attwood It was quite a Tuesday evening. We drove to Peterborough for our first visit since 2003, and just as at the start of that wonderful season, we lost 1-0. And although this may not turn out to be another wonderful season, last night overall was rather fine. It was a young under …
Read More “Losing to Posh last night made insignificant when compared to the Tiny Totts”
By Tony Attwood Tonight we play the second game of the Leasing.com trophy in which Arsenal play their under 21 team (with the option of a couple of older players in the side) away to Peterborough United. It is a desperately sad reflection on the state of management of Arsenal.com that as I write this …
Read More “Peterborough United v Arsenal this evening: the match preview”
By Tony Attwood You will know that Arsenal have been drawn against Liverpool in the League Cup, and you may have heard that Liverpool have been charged with playing an ineligible player in the previous round. As a result of that indictment a number of media sources have started to say that Liverpool could be …
Read More “Will Liverpool really be thrown out of the League Cup?”
