Author Archive

Craig Bellamy's decision to return "home" to Cardiff City has been hailed as a throwback to the days when big-name players would step down a division to revive the fortunes of a provincial club. Memories of Dave Mackay being persuaded to join Second Di...
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A long, long European season has ended, giving us barely a couple of weeks to recharge our batteries and retune our engines for the World Cup. Mine's a pint of engine oil... Time then to list my top players of the European season, and compare them to the rankings my selections gained from our...
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Just the Champions League final to go before European club football wraps itself in a tight ball for the summer? Not a bit of it if you happen to follow a team wrapped up in the agonising process of the Football League play-offs. Saturday's somewhat...
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Using public transport in London often means you come into unwanted contact with the personal views of some of the capital's great thinkers. And so it proved on Wednesday evening when yet another crash of my rapidly ailing iPod left me unable to escape the inanities of others' conversations as we crawled along the...
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"Més que un club" is the motto of FC Barcelona, the self-appointed guardians of that rather tiresome cliche "the beautiful game". Roughly translated as "more than a club", the phrase is described by the club's official website as being "open-ended in meaning".It goes on thus: "It is perhaps this flexibility that makes it so...
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Last week, I was granted the privilege to vote in this year's Golden Foot Awards to follow my attendance at last year's ceremony. I will not reveal my nominees but, as a side question, I was also asked for my favourite footballers of all time.My answers? Eric Cantona, Johan Cruyff, Zinedine Zidane...
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"At Stamford Bridge, I don't expect anything other than people to be glad to have me back as we worked so well together. This time I will go back to a different dressing room, a different dugout and but I know normally Mourinho is lucky at Stamford Bridge."With typical self-reverence, Jose Mourinho tried his...
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Before Tuesday, the last time David Beckham was involved in a European game of such magnitude involving Manchester United, he made an exciting but by no means decisive late contribution to the 4-3 classic with Real Madrid in 2003 - scoring two goals fr...
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For at least seven days, ‘Staying Alive’ may soon be superseding the ‘Pompey Chimes’ at Fratton Park. Sympathy must go to the poor souls who find themselves within earshot of John ‘Portsmouth Football Club’ Westwood's attempts at emulating the Gibb brothers' falsetto.Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs seems to want to land the felling...
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Which route to take through the John Terry moral maze? Unless you have an admiration for highly-paid supposed role models behaving with the same devil-may-care attitude to monogamy as the courtiers of Caligula, it's fair to say he's been a very silly b...
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English football's unwanted American families again dominate our headlines and it is a delicious irony that the country's greatest footballing rivals share such similar problems.Around the time Tom Hicks Junior's email abuse of a member of a fans activists group forced him to resign from the board of Liverpool FC came news of...
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There are many dissenters of the transfer window system. Not least those of us who are in the business of generating football news stories. The intrigue surrounding the type of megadeals that used to happen mid-season was always a reliable way of filling column inches.Andy Cole's move from Newcastle United to Manchester United...
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It has been a week for the veneration of legends. Ryan Giggs was honoured on Sunday as BBC Sports Personality of the Year for 2009, voted for by the people of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. An additional reward was his being scoffed at by many a critic. Giggs' winning of PFA Footballer of...
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One win in nine matches tells a story. And it should be a horror story as far as Liverpool supporters are concerned. Yet their faith in their manager remains strong. Monday night's 2-2 draw with Birmingham will be chiefly remembered for David Ngog's winning of a dubious penalty yet there were far stronger undercurrents...
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Fernando Torres' ultimately decisive strike in Manchester United's defeat at Liverpool has further sharpened the pencils of those wishing to proclaim the waning of Rio Ferdinand. Last week saw the man himself declare that he needed a run of ten games to pull himself back to the required levels of performance and fitness. However,...
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Craig Bellamy has never been one of the game's sympathetic characters. He is a grandmaster at stealing PR disasters from the jaws of personal victory - see that fist-fight in Sierra Leone when visiting his own charity foundation last summer - and last Sunday followed the usual pattern.Written off as a bit-part of the...
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During those weeks of the season when we're concentrating on domestic action you'll be able to catch our regular "Premier League Heroes" feature. This week, however, sees international football take centre-stage as World Cup qualifying nears its business end.One team with hopes just alive of being in South Africa next summer are Ukraine,...
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The newspaper headlines were much as expected, with The Sun's "Scum" being the prime sample of media outrage at the goings on at Upton Park on Tuesday night. That a man was stabbed in the chest reflected a seriousness to the situation, so too the tears of Jack Collison as he left the field...
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David Beckham's contretemps with a group of angry LA Galaxy fans has seen the ailing of his Stateside move brought into sharper focus. Two games into his return to soccer in the USA and his fraying temper has been on public show. Hollywood scripts are not supposed to end this way.While his post-match comments...
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