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 In the article Is Arsenal a dysfunctional club as Mislintat suggests? I tried to look at what Sven Mislintat had said about Arsenal after his departure. He came to the club as an acclaimed talent spotter and recruiter, but left after 14 months full of very bitter talk about Arsenal and how, …
Read More “Is Arsenal’s transfer policy a hopeless mess as Mislintat has said?”
by Tony Attwood The Daily Mail recently admitted in a headline that “The media play a massive role in the perceptions of players… it is subliminal”. That was a pretty important statement, but it took the Guardian to come out with the unwholesome reality with its headline: Groundbreaking report reveals racial bias in English football …
Read More “The racist bias in football reporting and its implication for all commentary”
By Tony Attwood It all began in March when the Daily Mail ran the headline “FA set to make £20m loss”. That wouldn’t have worried too many people – after all an organisation the size of the FA might make occasional losses one year and then pick up the next year. And we know that …
Read More “FA to lose yet more money in a year of losing money”
By Tony Attwood Before during and after the quarter final match involving Arsenal, Talk Sport which had the licence to broadcast the radio commentary for the game could have mentioned that a win for Arsenal would keep them at the top of the semi-final appearances table. They might have noted that Arsenal have won the …
Read More “Even by their own awful standards, yesterday’s radio commentary was dire”
By Tony Attwood It’s funny; we’ve been alerting the media for years and years that there is something seriously wrong with the standard, consistency and secrecy of refereeing in England, and they have refused to take note. But today, in a match in which Arsenal snatched victory in injury time, the one national broadcaster in …
Read More ““Disgraceful;” “The worst refereeing performance I have ever seen”. TalkSport”
By Bulldog Drummond. There’s an amusing preview to this match on the BBC website in which “Lawro” says “Sheffield United do not look like they have got a goal in them at the moment” and then goes on to predict a scoreline of 1-1 with Sheffield winning on penalties. Rather quaintly Lawro (not his real …
Read More “Sheffield Untidy v Arsenal – the lineup, the injuries and the chitterchatter”
By Bulldog Drummond. The early news is that David Luiz is obviously available having taken a two match ban and we know that Cedric Soares is fit. Tierney seems to be ok, but Torreira isn’t match fit. Leno, Chambers, Pablo Mari and Gabriel Martinelli are all out for the rest of the season. What psychological …
Read More “Sheffield United v Arsenal; FA Cup 5, but no replay if it’s a draw.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone It is many of long month since I have ventured towards the Toppled Bollard public house – denizen of the dead beat deadwood and the basically dead, who act as so-called “football journalists” to the world at large. But called upon to show my nephew Percy Passage from ‘tup norf (ie …
Read More “As the curfew is lifted, the Toppled Bollard centre for creative writing, re-opens”
By Tony Attwood Of course one can’t begrudge Liverpool fans from having their celebrations for the last couple of nights. True, they might have spread the virus somewhat, but it will only be between themselves, and those people all chose to gather in a group after the club celebrated their thirty year trip to win …
Read More “So just how long will it take Liverpool to catch up with Arsenal?”
By Tony Attwood “‘An absolute mess’: Inside Arsenal, a ‘dysfunctional’ club desperate for a reset.” So reads the headline to an article in the Independent website. And it continues, “The very structure of the club is in question with problems mounting for head coach Mikel Arteta as he bids to return them to where they …
Read More “Is Arsenal a dysfunctional club as Mislintat suggests?”
By Tony Attwood You may recall the hatred piled upon David Luiz because of two errors that led to goals. And the view expressed that it showed how awful Arsenal were not only in taking him on but also playing him. But if you read English blogs and newspaper columns you might have read that …
Read More “Player errors that lead to a goal; it is not quite what you might expect”
By Bulldog Drummond As you may expect our record against Southampton across the years is not bad, but we did have a bit of a blip in 2014 to 2016 losing four out of seven games. Date Game Res Score Competition 23 Sep 2014 Arsenal v Southampton L 1-2 League Cup 03 Dec 2014 Arsenal …
Read More “Southampton v Arsenal: things are not looking so good.”
By Bulldog Drummond These are not the best of times for Southampton at home or Arsenal away. Indeed in terms of Southampton at home we are looking at the bottom of the league. Club P W D L F A GD Pts 16 Aston Villa 15 5 3 7 19 26 -7 18 17 AFC Bournemouth …
By Tony Attwood As I tried to show in the last article, the media is being incredibly selective in its reporting of what seem to me to be the key footballing issues of the day. My article on this issue (When it comes to Arsenal we are being totally misled) is of course still on …
Read More “How Arsenal can tackle football’s Ministry of Truth and get back to the Champs League”
By Tony Attwood Just imagine for a moment that you were a football journalist and there were several issues in football that it was simply not done to talk about. And by “not done” I don’t mean that you were told not to present articles on these subjects, but rather it was just taken as …
Read More “When it comes to Arsenal we are being totally misled”
By Tony Attwood Aside from running Untold Arsenal, I also run a non-football blog – Untold Dylan – which (as you might guess) covers the music and writings of the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. Normally I keep the central topic of Untold Arsenal and Untold Dylan separate without much difficulty. One is about a north London …
by Tony Attwood It might seem a long time ago, but there was a time when every week – often several times a week – when we were told that Arsenal got more injuries than any other team. Indeed more than that, we were told that Arsenal’s injuries were self-inflicted, caused by the prehistoric training …
Read More “Arsenal back at the top of the injury list. But why?”
by Tony Attwood Imagine a criminal justice system in which people who commit a crime get a wrap over the knuckles but get to keep the benefits of their crime. We might think that is not much of a system, because in the end the crime is rewarded. But it seems to be what is …
Read More “Now we can see exactly what a club must do to win the Premier League”
By Tony Attwood And so it has begun. The Express is running a story in which it talks about the need to get rid of Mikel Arteta as manager. This might seem a bit early to run, but as is often noted by criminologists that crimes tend to be committed by people who regularly commit …
Read More “What is it that the recent serial League winners in England have in common?”
By Tony Attwood For reasons which have never quite become clear to me I receive notifications from an app known as AFC live on my phone. And being the sort of service it is, immediately upon the conclusion of the Brighton v Arsenal game the arguing started among other subscribers about what should be done. …
Read More “If Arsenal want to win the League they should break the financial fair play rules”
By Tony Attwood Changing the manager rarely works at Arsenal Nothing is ever certain in football, and there certainly is no way to guarantee success, but it does appear that having an expectation of an immediate upturn in form following the appointment of a new manager (at Arsenal or any other club), is generally going …
Read More “What can Arsenal realistically expect from Arteta’s first season?”
By Bulldog Drummond According to the Daily Mail, the PGMO is “baffled by the explanation from Hawk-Eye after their technology failed to spot a ball going over the line in the recent Sheffield United game. However the claim is that the technology did not malfunction. Hawk-Eye said the Goal Decision System’s seven cameras were obscured …
by Bulldog Drummond Brighton have been on a very poor run since the start of the year, and although they might have been expected to lose to Chelsea, a home cup defeat to Sheffield Wednesday, and home draws with Aston Villa and Watford show a decline in confidence as well as form. Date Game Res …
Read More “Brighton v Arsenal: what past results and form tell us about this afternoon”
By Tony Attwood The headline in the Daily Mail announces, “Saudi Arabia should have no role in the future of UK sport’: Newcastle’s proposed £300m takeover must be BLOCKED, MP tells government over breaches of international piracy laws.” Maybe so, maybe not. But whatever happened to an MP saying, “England should have no role to …
Read More “MP stance on football should fill us all with disgust”
The Slavery Files Sepp Blatter hit with new corruption charges as Fifa condone slave labour If all lives matter, if slavery is unacceptable, what is the FA doing about Qatar? Uefa has suggested that the transfer window should close on October 5 and not at the end of August as planned, because of the coronavirus …
Read More “Transfer chart reaches 110 played tipped to be coming to Arsenal!”
