Last night I spent the evening in the company of a number of old friends who constitute football journalists and football-educated “civvies” and, as one would expect three days before the start of the season, the conversation was predictable. We gather about the same time every year to thrash out our hopes, dreams and, more [...]
It seems that Joachim Loew’s Germany squad cannot get any lower after another possibly key player limped out of the World Cup squad for South Africa this week. Replacing Chelsea’s Michael Ballack who limped out of the FA Cup final after a challenge from Portsmouth’s Kevin-Prince Boateng has proved a tricky affair.
Chelsea are just a few games from an historic double for the club, but the concensus of opinion is that they are a poor winner of a broken league weakened by the financial crisis of the last few years. What does this mean for the near future of English football. Is it heading backwards?
A late free tip on tonight’s Europa Cup second leg tie between Fulham and Wolfsburg in the Volkswagen Arena…
We used to have the big four, which now seems to have morphed into the big eight (or is it just three now). Anyway, the gaps started to form with the inception of the Premier League in 1992. Since then, the aftershocks have affected football in England to the nth degree. But where is the gap now, and what does this disjointed atmosphere mean for the future of the game. Sean Smith reports…
After the scourge of a brutal winter comes the gamblers scourge of unpredictable pitches. It looked like the usual rant of a madman when Sir Alex Ferguson suggested that the turgid pitch had “killed Wayne Rooney”, but he may have a point. The problems with the Wembley pitch are well documented, but elsewhere in England – as the permafrost threatened to lift across the country – an unprecedented number of managers claimed the pitch as a factor in iffy results. There were grumblings at Peterborough in The Championship as the poor surface did nothing to help a home side that prefers to play it on the deck, but the worst pitching – inevitably – further down the leagues.
So we have three teams within three points of each other at the top of the Premier League, and the bookies are undecided as to who is going in it. Chelsea (61 points) and Man Utd (60 points) are impossible to split at 6/4, while Arsenal (58 points) are a little bit bigger on 11/4. Exciting stuff, eh? And, here’s the thing: it’s going to get a lot more exciting because the outsider is going to rip right through the field and win.
