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 [...]
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 [...]
If the world laughed at the New York Post’s headline of USA Win 1-1 then one wonders what it will make of the booing, the dressing room invasions and the paraphrasing of Churchill that has come following England’s failure to beat Algeria? Perhaps it was Wayne Rooney’s questioning of the booing as not being loyal [...]
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 [...]