Written for the Times Fanzine Fanzone onSeptember 03, 2008 England are back this coming weekend, returning from their summer sabbatical and their dire performance against the Czech Republic, and ready to attempt to squeeze six points out of Andorra and Croatia. During Euro 2008 everyone looked up to teams like Spain and Holland and down...
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A jealous look over Stanley Park reveals that Liverpool have been spending a lot more money than us – an oft-cited fact that adds yet another veneer of brilliance to David Moyes’ tenure at the top of the Everton tree. In under four years, manager Rafa Benitez has frittered away £146m (and recouped £70m) –...
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That England weren’t up to snuff in the Euro 2008 qualifiers isn’t rocket science and you don’t have to be the bastard love child of Hercule Poirot and Mystic Meg to realise this. Or maybe you do… To borrow from and distort Spinal Tap, all the press hype surrounds us like a turd tuxedo of...
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So, Fabio Capello it is then – in every pub, on every red-top tabloid, on every sofa, and on all football phone-ins in the land there has been a constant drone of people who have been blathering on about Fabio, his “wonderful CV”, his “defensive style”, his ropey relationship with David Beckham, and the...
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This piece was originally written for sportingo. Phil Neville and PFA chief Gordon Taylor both think that players are getting burn-out, which is a fatuous and hackneyed argument. Although today’s stars do play a lot of games, I don’t recall burn-out ever being a tangible reality; rather it is a invisible miasma, a ghostly threat...
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