Erling Haaland gives Edu the green light: it’s on for Arsenal

By Sir Hardly Anyone “Erling Haaland gives Edu green light for new £58m Arsenal signing after fresh transfer update” according to a headline in Football London. Now FoLo in their funny way are actually not telling us Arsenal are going to sign Haaland, but we can show that this is a false negative and he …

Why can a newspaper criticise refs in Africa, but not refs in the PL?

By Tony Attwood You may well have read or heard about the referee Janny Sikazwe who made a mistake over his time keeping and blew for full time after 85 minutes during an Africa Cup of Nations game between Mali and Tunisia.  He was then taken to hospital suffering from heatstroke.   Comments are also made …

The accusation that Arsenal cheated its way into football: and the answer

In response to the article Tackles, fouls, yellow cards, injuries and illness. How Tottenham and Arsenal compare an email came in from Nicklas Skott in which he said, “Why bother about this when you have cheated your way in to football. This club stinks abd now we get to see it again.” Given that several …

Tackles, fouls, yellow cards, injuries and illness. How Tottenham and Arsenal compare

By Bulldog Drummond The Guardian is reporting that Tottenham are annoyed at the postponement of the game today saying  that “Tottenham have been left furious… believing rules regarding Coronavirus-related postponements have been manipulated to create “unintended consequences”.” The Guardian adds that “Arsenal would have been without at least 15 first-teamers for their visit to Tottenham …

The debate over Arsenal’s postponement of today’s game raises key issue

by Tony Attwood If you have had a read of some of the commentaries on this site about Arsenal’s request for a postponement of the planned match for today against Tottenham you might notice several points that link the commentaries together. First, although the articles on, for example, the Liverpool postponement carried a fair amount …

Tottenham v Arsenal is off, but here’s the team we would have put out

By Tony Attwood  (Updated at 1507) Tomorrow’s game at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has been postponed after the Premier League accepted Arsenal’s request to postpone the match due to their depleted squad.  Although the Daily Mirror never once suggested that Liverpool’s postponement of their League cup game was controversial, this one apparently is. Mind you …

Reading the Guardian while waiting on news of the Arsenal game tomorrow

By Tony Attwood At the moment of writing, we are waiting for any news about tomorrow’s match and whether it is on or not, which is a little frustrating since this is normally the moment that we are doing all the regular preview bits.   But thank you in the meanwhile to everyone who has dropped …

Arsenal ask for postponment, but will the club get equal treatment?

By Tony Attwood ————– Today is the anniversary of the first north London derby.  What impact did it have on football? ————– Following Liverpool’s request for a match postponement for a group of players who seemingly tested positive one day and negative the next (the chances of which are so unlikely it is hard to …

What Would Count As Success For Arsenal This Season?

Arsenal is one of the most successful clubs in English football with 13 league titles and a record 14 FA cups. They are also one of the most popular teams on social media, boasting over 5 million followers on Facebook alone. With all this success though, there have been some low points for Arsenal as …

Why suspicions about the integrity of football are always growing

By Tony Attwood Here’s a basic question: is everything that is done in the name of football in England ok and above board?  Or are there grounds for suggesting something is wrong? As far as I know there are only two sites on the internet that regularly suggest the latter.  One is Football is Fixed, …

Arsenal have had twice as many red cards in the league as Tottenham this season

By Tony Attwood One might have thought that after last night the media could have toned it down a bit and given Arsenal some real praise.  Or if they wanted to knock Liverpool, maybe (even it is very late) returned to the miracle of the false positive that let them a) pull out of the …

12 man Liverpool totally fail against 10 man Arsenal.

“There’s so much fight in this team and it showed today. We dug deep and got the result we needed … It’s not easy to play like that, especially against a team like Liverpool … It was tough, you have to concentrate all game. It’s nice to defend like that asa as defender and keep a clean …

Liverpool False Positives v Arsenal: the Arsenal team

By Tony Attwood One of the great problems with this transfer malarky – especially in the short January window – and doubly especially when there is an international tournament going on at the same time – and extra especially when there is a pandemic blowing and your opposition have just come up with a world …

With covid testing in football, it’s now a case of two out of three. Liverpool v Arsenal

By Bulldog Drummond There is an article in the Guardian about how soulless and hopeless everything to do with PSG feels.  It includes the paragraph… “A 37-year-old Qatari billionaire buys a football club with an unlimited budget to attract the world’s best players to one of its greatest cities. Over the course of a decade …

Footballers and their unexpected covid test results ahead of the match

By Dr Billy “The Dog” McGraw of the Deparment of Statistical Anomolies at the University College Hospital of the North Circular Road. The Liverpool manager, Mr Klopp, has revealed that Trent Alexander-Arnold was the only Liverpool player to actually test positive for Covid. And yet the game last Thursday was called off – according to …

Liverpool v Arsenal: who has the virus, who is in Africa, who is injured, who is ill?

By Bulldog Drummond Injury lists are of course getting increasingly meaningless, since club injury lists can show maybe four or five players out, and then the next thing we know the club is claiming that it can’t play the game because of the number of players who are unavailable allegedly with covid infection. In fact …

Liverpool v Arsenal; Arsenal’s first signing and first prognostications of the game

by Bulldog Drummond Arsenal’s first signing of the window was not one of the famous foreigners whose names are bandied incessantly by those not in the know, but rather another youngster – at least according to the Daily Mail.  And they call it not a signing by a “poaching” – a word that suggests something …

Just how big is the football, money laundering, match fixing issue? What the papers say.

By Tony Attwood My article Switzerland, Fifa and the crooks. Have they all been involved in anything else? had only been on line for 15 minutes before I started receiving links from interested readers in Europe, pointing me to more and more articles about the extraordinary engagement of the Mafia in Switzerland. Of course, I …

Which teams in the Premier League are overachiving and ready for a fall?

By Tony Attwood The media is full of Arsenal being the team that has won the FA Cup more times than anyone else, and have just been knocked out by a Championship side, and that in itself seems interesting.  Why wait until we have been knocked out of the cup to remind readers that we …

Switzerland, Fifa and the crooks. Have they all been involved in anything else?

By Tony Attwood As you will know if you have been a regular reader of Untold for a while, we have been most interested in the comings and going at Fifa – the sort of things that are not generally reported in the British media – for reasons best known to themselves. Much of this …

Arteta’s next huge challenge: cut Arsenal’s recovery time after each defeat

By Tony Attwood Going out of the FA Cup is always a disappointment, and doubly so yesterday because it looked like a competition which, given Arsenal’s pedigree as all-time record winners, the club might have had a chance of taking the FA Cup once more. But there is an extra danger beyond that defeat, and …

What’s more important; the FA Cup or fourth?

By Tony Attwood Quite obviously we’d all like to see Arsenal continue in the FA Cup.  We are the record winners, and even if Manchester United were to win the Cup this year (they play their third-round tie tomorrow) we’d still be the club with the most FA Cup wins. But here’s another question: at …

Forest v Arsenal. The Arsenal team and 4 players predicted to leave for Newcastle

  Last year, 30 teenagers were murdered in London – the highest number in a single year since records began. “No More Red” is the campaign to support young people in our communities. https://arsn.al/NoMoreRed   By Bulldog Drummond Nottingham F v Arsenal: Different lives in different leagues Forest v The Arsenal. Home and away form …

Forest v Arsenal. Are we utterly utterly desperate for a striker?

By Bulldog Drummond As I have mentioned before, we have the fifth best attack in the league and the seventh best defence.  But it looks like we are losing Nketiah, Aubameyang and Lacazette at some time or another, so buying another striker seems a good idea. But, again as noted before, in the meanwhile we …

Forest v The Arsenal: Injuries in the PL are getting utterly out of control

By Bulldog Drummond Injury and absence levels among the Premier League clubs are getting out of control.  Here is the latest list of players missing across the Premier League as of lunchtime today. Leicester City: 17 Newcastle United: 12 Watford: 12 Liverpool: 11 Norwich City: 11 Brentford: 10 Leeds United: 10 Southampton: 10 Chelsea: 9 …