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 So far the number of players tipped to be coming to Arsenal this summer is 107, while the number actually signed seems to be lurking somewhere around zero. Everyone currently in the squad has been tipped to be leaving, mostly because of Arsenal incompetence in negotiating their contracts. Thus having created the …
Read More “Hibernian v Arsenal: no signings, everyone leaving so what team can we pick”
By Tony Attwood As a member of the Arsenal Independent Supporters Association, and through my work in running the Arsenal History Society I do get occasional snippets of information from the club which lead me to think that matters are very much travelling in the right direction. (By which of course I mean they are …
Read More “Arsenal transforms its attitude towards its fans with significant pre-season changes”
By Tony Attwood There is a story doing the rounds in the United States that members of the US Women’s National Soccer Team turned their backs on the country’s national anthem. Films of the event don’t exist because it didn’t happen, but it seems there are tens of thousands of tweets etc proclaiming this to …
Read More “How viral lies about Arsenal are amplified by the media on a daily basis”
By Tony Attwood Talk about propaganda the FA certainly have the mass media in England under its control, as the FA talk up a new programme to improve grassroots football. Not surprisingly no mention was made by the FA about the utter disaster and total cock up of its previous attempts to do anything about …
Read More “A perfect example of football propaganda and not much to do with reality.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone So we are only in early July and more players have been tipped to sign for Arsenal this summer than in any of the last six seasons when we have been carrying out this survey! Here’s the list, coming soon – which tipsters are working the hardest (or if you prefer, …
Read More “7 players tipped to join Arsenal for the first time meaning 107 transfers this summer”
What Are the Biggest Issues Facing Football Today? Football is the most popular sport in the world, with around half of the global population reported to follow the game to at least some extent! The joy of playing and/or watching football is hard to beat, but unfortunately there are several issues that threaten the future …
Read More “What Are the Biggest Issues Facing Football Today?”
Postscript to my update piece from earlier today. The venue for the Champions League round 1 mini by Andrew Crawshaw With the Women’s Team still firmly in close season you might be forgiven for thinking that not much is happening but there is quite a lot bubbling away under the surface. Firstly here is a …
“The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now.” That comment about the future of journalism was written in 1948, but could have made in relation to today’s reporting of football where all we have, straight statement. And that is not just bad writing, …
By Tony Attwood The Mirror newspaper has published the result of a survey in which it says, “Arsenal fans seem to have faith in most of their squad ahead of the 2021/22 season.” Now I would argue that is perfectly reasonable given the dramatic turn around in tactics and the extraordinarily powerful final two thirds …
Read More “Arsenal: “a disappointing end to what started as a promising campaign.””
By Tony Attwood Just imagine you are a football journalist and some way through the season your editor shouts [which is what he does because that is what editors do] that he wants an “Arsenal article.” Putting down your tipple of choice [because having a tipple of choice is de rigueur for journalists] you ask …
Read More “If this were you, and if this were Arsenal, what would you do?”
By Minser Double “To say it was a tough season for Arsenal and Arteta last season would be an understatement because he was probably lucky to survive it without being shown his P45.” That was HITC on 5 July. I don’t suppose HITC worries about its inaccuracies, after all they have already reported 42 players …
By Tony Attwood We’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about the defence at Arsenal of late for two reasons. The most important is that it has been the scene of the most extraordinary tactical reformation that I’ve seen in my time as an Arsenal supporter (a period which goes back to the Neolithic …
Read More “Arsenal’s problem of late? Shots, goals, and (last season) accuracy”
By Tony Attwood From the work I have done so far on the issue of the reduction in the number of tackles that many clubs have implemented over the last few years, it struck me that there should be some sort of link between tackles and goals conceded. And it occurred to me that it …
Read More “Amazingly, in 2020/1 the more clubs tackled, the more goals they let in!”
By Tony Attwood This story is four days old, and I’ve waited until now to run it because I wanted to see what the UK media would make of it. And the answer is, with one notable exception: nothing. For most English fans, the story is not there. But Reuters have run it and it …
Read More “Court orders Uefa to reverse sanctions against Super League and allow it to proceed”
By Sir Hardly Anyone The idea of many bloggers and journalists is that there is no real planning going on by Arsenal when it comes to transfers. All this business about having thousands of hours of video recordings which are analysed by computers and then people to find exactly the right player – that all …
Read More “Number of players tipped to be coming to Arsenal reaches 100! The full list.”
By Tony Attwood To summarise where we have got to… five years ago several clubs began finally to realise that there were two factors in each football match that they had not been taking into account in the past, but which if taken into account, could give them the edge. One was which referee they …
Read More “How Arsenal’s 40% decline in tackling over the past five years has sparked the revival”
By Tony Attwood In my reviews of this last season, I have made much of the fact that Arsenal cut their yellow card rate by almost half compared with the previous season, while cutting their tackling rate considerably. But I wanted to go further and see how Arsenal’s figures compared both to Arsenal’s past record …
Read More “How Arsenal learned from PGMO and so climbed the table after Christmas”
By Tony Attwood It was 31 December 2018 that we published Andrew Crawshaw’s groundbreaking article “How four clubs commit fouls with impunity, while others constantly get punished” Since then we’ve been looking constantly at the issue of fouls and the way referees treat Arsenal, and so it was probably inevitable that we’d be the people …
Read More “Shocking new referee statistics suggest outright bias against Arsenal”
By Tony Attwood “Arsenal have grand ambitions to strengthen Mikel Arteta’s squad this summer and technical director Edu is hoping to wrap up several new signings before the 2021/22 season begins.” And so Football.London are telling us that Arsenal have signalled their interest in signing Sassuolo midfielder Manuel Locatelli by tabling their first “official bid” …
Read More “Arsenal: from escaping the disaster through exciting plans”
by Tony Attwood I have often argued that talk of our needing a new defence is ludicrous as we had the third best defence in the league last season. So let’s look at the attack. This table is ordered by goals scored (marked in bold) and here we can see Arsenal were only three …
