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 A tackle from a Manchester City player is 83% more likely to get called as a yellow card offence than a tackle by a Chelsea player. While most of us will, I suspect, be quite happy with the way things are going for Arsenal, and certainly relieved that the maniac journalists and …
Read More “Tackles, fouls and yellows: why are Man City and Arsenal being punished so much?”
By Tony Attwood Last weekend the Arsenal programme for the match against Watford contained a chart of how various Arsenal managers had done in their first 100 games as a manager. The chart was not complete but nevertheless saved me a fair amount of time in calculating the figures. I’ve completed it, including adding in …
Read More “Mikel Arteta, Arsene Wenger and George Graham: the first 100 games compared.”
By Tony Attwood Sacking a Premier League club manager is expensive, and dangerous, and doesn’t always work. In fact it doesn’t normally work. In fact, it rarely works. But is generally expensive Fortunately for Arsenal, the board are now made of sterner stuff than before, and there was never any real chance that Arteta would …
Read More “Why do clubs sack managers when it normally does no good?”
by Andrew Crawshaw Our Women flew to Denmark yesterday prior to the third of their six Champions League games. They play the Danish Champions Köge both this Wednesday and also at Borehamwood next Wednesday, 17 November. Köge is a small town about 45 minutes south of Copenhagen and their team became the Danish Champions for …
Read More “Arsenal Women v HB Köge – Champions League preview; it’s live on Arsenal.com”
By Tony Attwood I’ve no doubt that the recent run of results comes about from the tactical revolution that Mikel Arteta has introduced, and the changes made to the team. By bringing in players who were able to adjust to that tactical revolution and develop the style of football he wants the club to play, …
Read More “How mileage affects results, and why sacking the boss is not helpful”
By Tony Attwood The headline in the Guardian reads “Women’s Super League: talking points from the weekend’s action“. Below that there are pictures of three players: one from each of Manchester City, Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur. After that the article starts… “Manchester City are starting to get back on track, Jessie Fleming is in flying …
Read More “Why is all the reporting of Arsenal so incredibly negative?”
By Tony Attwood Untold likes to investigate tackles, fouls and yellow cards. Watford as we know from this coverage are a high fouling team. In fact before this weekend’s game they had committed 19 more fouls than any other team in the league. Yet even that simple stat could not have prepared anyone for what …
Read More “Arsenal v Watford: Watford create all-time PL record of 19 fouls in one match”
By Bulldog Drummond As we saw in the last piece, Arsenal are now top of the league when measured across the last six games, but in case you missed it I’ll run it again… Pos Team P W D L F A GD Pts 1 Arsenal 6 4 2 0 11 4 7 14 …
Read More “Arsenal v Watford: the sillyness and the teams selected by the media”
By Bulldog Drummond Arsenal beating Watford: six great videos from across the years Who Scored confirms that a lot of Watford players missing, including Kabasele, Etebo, Sema, Baah, Sierralta, and Femenia. They also note that Emmanuel Dennis is back available after serving a one-match ban in the Premier League last weekend. He will reclaim his …
Read More “Arsenal v Watford: have Arsenal “finally got going” (the media awakens)”
By Bulldog Drummond Arsenal have played Watford 32 times in the clubs’ history, with Arsenal winning 18 and Watford 12 – a higher number than you might expect at first sight. Watford are not a club for trophy collectors, but a club for those who live in or were brought up in the town in …
Read More “Arsenal v Watford: past games and a nice video from 2020.”
By Bulldog Drummond Arsenal are seven points and ten places above Watford in the league at the moment, and yet both clubs have scored the same number of goals – 12 each. Watford however have let in five more than Arsenal. Team P W D L F A GD Pts 6 Arsenal 10 5 2 …
Read More “Arsenal v Watford. Arsenal top of the league across the last six games”
By Tony Attwood Yet another story the press won’t report because it undermines their entire thesis that refereeing is accurate, and PL referees are the best in the world. However because as ever, no one else will spill the beans, we’ll be the ones to kick the can over (or words to that effect, although …
Read More “Home and away results have NOT returned to the old normal this season”
by Tony Attwood As you may have read in the media, some West Ham United supporters have been caught singing an antisemitic song towards a Jewish man on a plane being used by some fans to travel to Belgium. The club has of course denounced its fans saying, “West Ham United is appalled by the …
Read More “West Ham fans abuse Jewish man on plane travelling to European game.”
By Bulldog Drummond It is fascinating to see how the media cope with Arsenal when their standard stock of “Arsenal crisis” and “Arsenal chaos” stories have run out. As things stand they can’t even claim that we have a major set of injury worries for the game against Watford, since only one club lies below …
Read More “Arsenal prepare for Watford: the team that foul more than any other in the league.”
By Tony Attwood Three defeats in the opening four league and cup games, followed by nine in league and cup without defeat. Quite a contrast. Given that we have the 10th worst attack in the league and the ninth-worst defence, sitting sixth in the table seems quite a clever ploy – especially given the sort …
Read More “How Arsenal avoided the apocalypse and came good this season”
By Tony Attwood For several years on Untold we played a game of predicting the winners of various leagues around Europe at the start of the season. And mostly we got it right. The point wasn’t to show how clever we think we are (although that is always fun), but to show how easy it …
Read More “Arsenal preparing for another step up the league table this weekend.”
By Sir Hardly Anyone Much has been made of the fact that Conte wins things – particularly noting that he came to Chelsea, rescued them from oblivion and then continued his journey into frontiers new. And the implication is that he will finally give Tottenham their third title. However, knowing of course that football journalists …
Read More “Will Antonio Conte win the league for Tottenham? An Arsenal perspective.”
By Tony Attwood For our next look at the statistics no one else wants to publish (tackles, fouls and yellow cards) we are now looking at the top six clubs (listed below in order) and seeing how their stats compare. We’ve also included Tottenham (so we can see if their new manager makes a difference) …
Read More “How some teams get penalised so much more than others by the refs”
By Sir Hardly Anyone We’ve noted so many times how the media love to knock Arsenal, that for most journalists anti-Arsenal stories are now part of the bedrock of England’s football journalism. Poor management, bad decisions by Edu, good players let go, poor players kept, distant ownership, fans in revolt. If the media have …
Read More “Make the most of it: the media supports Arsenal for a few days”
Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini have finally been charged with fraud by Swiss prosecutors over a payment of about £1.35m to Platini, and both now will go on trial. The media in Britain is reporting this a little, but interestingly they have omitted one very salient point from the case in their reports, owing to …
Read More “Blatter and Platini charged with fraud, as English media again miss the point”
By Tony Attwood Inevitably Unai Emery has said that he “doesn’t know anything about rumoured interest from Newcastle” and that’s probably true, because the whole thing about Mr Emery heading to Newcastle is quite likely to be a load of old cobblers. But it remains a fact that Mr Emery has a poor reputation among …
Read More “Newcastle in for Unai Emery, media going round in circles.”
By Tony Attwood We first picked up on Fifa’s plans for handling loans in a different way back in 2018 with the article Fifa are considering banning loans as they target Chelsea and Juventus. But we’d been pondering the issue for years before that. And now, tucked away, out of sight of any readers in …
Read More “Finally Fifa really is starting to make inroads into the great player loan scandal.”
By Tony Attwood On Untold Arsenal, we’ve often talked about often Tottenham love changing managers, as an alternative to winning trophies. But I wondered what lies beneath Tottenham’s desire to sack their managers quite so often. So I went a-looking. Certainly sacking managers doesn’t normally bring more success. True, Tottenham have outdone us in terms …
Read More “Why do Tottenham keep sacking their managers? Seven answers.”
Beware, this article contains numbers By Tony Attwood We now have just over a quarter of the games of the league season gone, and we’ve moved up to sixth, but how does that compare with recent past seasons? And come to that what does that say about being on track to regain our so much …
Read More “After 10 games there are reasons to believe Arsenal will finish 4th this season”
by Tony Attwood In the last piece I took a look at how Arsenal managed to move out of a poor first third of the season and deliver the second-best results in the league through the last two-thirds of the season. To round that line of thought off I want to look at the big …
Read More “How football journalists and their blogging allies fail to understand what is going on.”
