These days are rare. In league football every season the top teams are guaranteed at least two games against each other – Liverpool and Everton, Bayern Munchen and 1860 – they play with a metronomic regularity. They are the touch stones of a season. In international football though it is chance and not eventuality which [...]
One which beats Germany, obviously, but in the last two weeks the England team has been questioned and answered those questions on the field with a good performance that deserved more than the 1-0. The adjectives directed at England after the win over Slovenia were muted in comparison to those tagged to the team when [...]
The World Cup is the biggest event on the planet and that the pressure has got to some of the players is perhaps understandable. Until Jesus returns – not Navas but the Biblical one – there will be nothing that has so many pairs of eyes on it. That the pressure gets to some players [...]
Before the days of frustration seemed to overwhelm English football in the mid-1990s when the clichés of losing to the Germans and overpaid players under performing started to loom large in the popular mindset there were two World Cups in which are said to have excelled. I recall them as halcyon days myself. Whatever I [...]
Injury has become the metronome of the run up to the World Cup. Famously it was David Beckham who had the nation praying for a small bone in his foot to heal but latterly every nation has a Beckham – England’s include the man himself ruled out and his partner in deadly play Michael Owen. [...]