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 […]
The third round of games in a World Cup makes decisions. It does it quick – sixteen games in four days – and it does it without pity. The wheat is separated from the chaff and before the first game in the second phase teams will be home, managers will have left and the World […]
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 […]
Before the game the rumours give us a team of Green, Johnson, King, Terry, A Cole, Lennon, Lampard, Gerrard, Milner, Heskey and Rooney and as I mull that I wonder how we have got to the stage of rumoured teams – any number of people including myself are gnashing teeth at the idea of lacking […]
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. […]