Sweet Nothings

Can it really be four years since the carnival of football that was the Brazil 2014 World Cup extravaganza? (Yes.) That tournament will be remembered for a cracking group stage full of expansive, attacking football that petered out - with one hilarious exception - into a mealy-mouthed defence-fest during the knockout stages. This negative trend continued into the newly-expanded Euros, whose new faces weren't good enough to play on the front foot but could shut up shop well enough to frustrate the decent teams (and England) and bore the arse off neutral spectators. So what will Russia 2018 bring, besides unprecedented corruption levels? (lol jk) The change in draw format to divide the pots by ranking has largely done away with the usual Group of Death/Big Team Cakewalk scenario, and with some intriguing debutants and a few absent stalwarts (ItaLOL, the NetherLOLs, the US of lAme, etc) we might get a bit more balance and/or novelty value. Here come the group previews! We al...

Even in today’s state of constant managerial flux, Southampton’s recent sacking of Claude Puel seemed somewhat harsh. An 8th placed finish and a cup final appearance is surely a decent return for a club which has become football’s equivalent of a used car showroom each summer (Saido Mané and Victor Wanyama being last season’s nice little earners). And if that league position is slightly misleading – miles away from Everton in 7th, only 6 points clear of Watford in 17th – the Ben Stiller dad-alike Puel could point to further mitigating circumstances in the form of injuries to Charlie Austin and Virgil van Dijk, and Jose Fonte’s ill-judged departure in January to a club where he will very much not be playing Champions League football. In days gone by, before 24 hour rolling news and breaking TwitFace updates, we marvelled at tales of Athletico Madrid’s exotically-named chairman Jesus Gil y Gil bringing new meaning to the phrase ‘manager of the month’ as he put another hapless ap...

Although World Cup fever has been somewhat tainted by the shock discovery that the bidding for the Qatar 2022 edition may not have been entirely above board, the show must go on and so here is my exclusive, highly-informed preview: Group A Brazil, Croatia, Mexico, Cameroon It ’ s hard to think of this group as anything other than a gentle warm-up for the hosts. The Croats have some useful attacking talents in Luka Modric and Mario Mandzukic, but they’ve never come close to replicating their third place finish of 1998. Us Englanders being hopelessly blinkered, we often view fellow European nations in relation to ourselves, and although they’ve been known to beat us on occasion (thanks for that, Mr MacLaren), Croatia basically sit as one of those B-level European teams who we tend to get drawn with in qualifying fairly regularly, yet rarely do they look like a significant threat to our hopes. Unlucky, lads. Mexico are like clockwork - generally quali...

In this first post-Fergie season, it wasn’t terribly surprising that Manchester United continued to dominate the headlines, albeit not in the manner to which they were accustomed. Although in some ways a shame that they didn’t put up a great fight to defend their crown, it’s so often the case in sport that great champions don’t just slowly fade away, their declines instead being sudden (check) and total (which now rather depends on Mr van Gaal). It’s interesting that journalists chose David Moyes’s clearout of the club’s backroom staff as one of the biggest sticks to beat him with. After all, most managers bring their own people with them to new clubs. Either the likes of Mike Phelan and future-ex-Fulham-boss Rene Meulensteen were gods amongst men, or United are a textbook example of all that’s gone wrong with football - a toxic bubble where Fergie was God, and players and fans alike are bloated with self-important, preconceived notions of the club’s ‘way’. Moyes was th...

Another article now appearing in Late Tackle magazine : To the unconverted, American team sports might as well be from another planet – fiendishly complex and stat-obsessed, yet simultaneously ultra-tedious, with adverts every other minute to ensure games last for aeons. But although some of those accusations are hard to deny, the NFL – now the granddaddy of US sports – is ultra-competitive and genuinely unpredictable. Remember the heady days when the unfancied likes of Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest could win the old first division (yes kids, football did exist before the Premier League)? Such tales still happen, only in a different sort of ‘football’, played across the pond, on a field named after a type of grill and in full body armour, which can best be described as rugby with huge shiny knobs on. Here are some reasons why. Any of the below are even less likely to happen here than a witty bon mot from Michael Owen, but one can certainly dream. The draft A...

I wrote this piece a while ago, then due to life events in their various forms getting in the way it was never 'properly' submitted and thus I have no idea if it ever made it to print. Anyway, here it is (dated though it now is): It’s fair to say David Moyes hasn’t had a dream start at Old Trafford. Whether it’s entirely fair to lay all the blame for Manchester United’s underperformance this season at his door, the reality is that the reigning Premier League champions look like a long shot to even qualify for next season’s Champions’ League. This would be quite the comedown for anyone, but especially so for United’s success-obsessed supporters. And so, as is the modern custom, certain fans are already calling for Moyes’s head. Managers never used to change this much. How we used to laugh at the continentals and their high-speed coaching merry-go-rounds! And yet, now English fans are used to such phenomena as seven firings in one eight-day period, which happened...

This is an article I submitted to a football magazine a while back. Haven't heard any more from them so I'm guessing they weren't interested, but I figured somebody might want to read it... EDIT: It has now been published and is available in the latest issue of Late Tackle magazine, available - as they say - at all good newsagents and several bad ones. Next stop: Fleet Street (the metaphorical one obviously). ------------------------------------------------------ Fantasy football’s warping of our natural instincts is well-documented. You can find yourself cheering on even the game’s most heinous villains when their every touch in the opposition’s half brings the promise of precious points – even when they’re playing your own team. The even murkier side of this phenomenon is much less discussed, however – what becomes of the poor souls for whom FF dominates their football-following lives and yet, somehow, results in utter failure? Spending inadvisable amounts ...

Let's rewind to the beginning of the 2011-12 season: the general feeling amongst the pundits was that Wolves had made a couple of good signings which would improve the squad and help them achieve a respectable mid-table/bottom half Premiership position. April 2012: Wolves are relegated with three games still to play, boasting nine straight defeats in nine home matches and, despite our CEO's pointed comment of "This is no job for a novice" after sacking the previous manager, an utterly out of his depth novice in charge. Where, as the old cliche goes, did it all go wrong? Firstly, it's worth tentatively suggesting that the UK sports media are not entirely objective and unbiased, and  that Wolves-related coverage at that point might possibly, due to Mick McCarthy's genial nature and sometime membership of punditry's old boys' club, have been a tad rose-tinted. That being said, predictions of us comfortably solidifying our big league status wer...