What were you doing on 11th June 2017? In years to come that may well be seen as the day that finally saw England’s footballing fortunes turn. Almost a year on from their shambolic exit from Euro 2016 and a bemused Roy Hodgson telling the assembled press he wasn’t sure why he was there, England’s… Keep Reading
There is a current crop of managers at present that you could consider genuinely world class. Jurgen Klopp, Pep Guardiola and Zinedine Zidane are three that come to mind, with notable mentions for Mauricio Pochettino, Thomas Tuchel, Carlo Ancelotti and Diego Simeone perhaps warranted. It is with this in mind that I decided to look… Keep Reading
Kosovo has a unique football culture. Could you think of another territory or country whose people ferociously support a national team that isn’t their own? And not just good wishes for a neighbour or a Celticesque willing for England to lose. I spent a week in Kosovo in 2015. It happened that two fixtures for… Keep Reading
La Masia de Can Planes, or La Masia for short; translation: ‘The Farmhouse’. Once an old Catalan farmhouse, this iconic location no longer produces milk and eggs, but has been producing some of the finest footballing talents the world has seen in recent decades. This is F.C Barcelona’s academy, one of the staple names in… Keep Reading
The players that enthral us the most have always been the goal scorers. Defending is an art and there are few things as beautiful as a pinpoint 60-yard pass. However, it’s the players that score which are hailed as heroes, especially in this digital, statistic obsessed age. That being said, it’s weird you’ve probably never… Keep Reading
A giant of European football has fallen and is struggling to get back on its feet. Yes, Monaco’s va va voom has turned into a damp squib in recent seasons with the club slowing falling from heights it once peaked at. The decline at Monaco has quickly descended and there is real worry across the… Keep Reading
The Bradford City fire disaster. The Kenilworth Road riots between Luton Town and Milwall fans. Hooliganism, Heysel, Hillsborough. These are some of the darker images that linger in the mind when we think of football in the 1980s when the reputation of British football fans had sunk so low that they had apparently seeped out… Keep Reading
“There are moments in football that are exclusively poetic: these are the moments of the “goal.” Each goal is always an invention, it is always a subversion of the code: each goal is an inevitability, shock, awe, irreversibility. Just like the word poetic. The top scorer of the league is always the best poet of… Keep Reading
Paddy Moore was born in 1909 in Ballybough Co. Dublin, just north of the traditional socio-geographic dividing line of Ireland’s capital, the River Liffey. Although those lines of class division have blurred a little in recent years, the general rule is if you are born north of the river you are working class and if… Keep Reading
What do you get out of football and sport in general? Apart from the obvious emotional tube-ride we enjoy with the masses, the thrills and the spills, running the gamut of agonisingly unjust defeats and those invigorating derby day victories, that semi-sadomasochistic pleasure and pain that is indiscriminately doled out by the football gods during… Keep Reading
