Back in August, in those carefree days before we knew America could elect Trump, I had a stab at how the premiership football season ahead would pan out. Given Leicester City had won the previous year after starting the season 5000/1 to do so, this seemed a brave thing for anyone to do. I was […]
Who will win the Premier League this year? My cynical take on this nagging question
I have something to confess, straight off: I hardly ever watch football these days. I tuned in a bit last Spring when it really looked like Leicester City were going to do it, but that was the first English league football I’d watched in several years. So take what I’m about to say with that […]
England v Russia – a review of the match and everything around it
I have to confess something off the top: it’s been some time since I watched an England football match. It’s partly that as I get older, I like cricket more and football less. Another part of it is that something broke in me when I watched that mind crushingly awful England v Algeria 0-0 draw in the 2010 […]
England is thrashed at Lord’s – which hopefully sets up the series rather well
Yesterday, England capitulated in rather embarrassing fashion to the Aussies at the home of cricket. Facing a nominal 509 to win, which really meant having to bat out five full sessions to earn a draw, England fell for 103 all out having made it through only one. Some will now be speculating that the Australians […]
The five most rock and roll footballers to ever play in England
I remember an article that ran in the NME during the late 1990s entitled “Is football the new rock and roll?” No one is calling football the new rock and roll these days, or indeed the new anything, nor is anyone describing anything at all as the new rock and roll. Footballers are a robotic […]
One Last Day at Lord’s
It had been a torpid morning’s play. Lancashire spent it very slowly hammering Middlesex into dust, the score at the lunch break seeing the northern county move into a seemingly unassailable four hundred and sixty-one run lead with six wickets in hand. William helped his father out of the seat he’d been sat in during […]
Lone Man at the Cricket
Having attempted to unload a spare ticket to the Oval to see Day Three of the test against India on Sunday, a day that was ultimately the final one of the English test cricket summer, I travelled to the ground alone. I live about twenty odd minutes walk away, so this was less daunting than […]
Community Shield preview: Gooners v Home of the Goat
Tomorrow is the event which unofficially (or is it officially?) kicks off the football season, the Community Shield. It used to be called the Charity Shield, which made a lot more sense. For a few years after it stopped being called the Charity Shield, it was entitled the Poulan Weed Eater Garden Shield, before settling […]
As the Commonwealth Games begin, here’s five things worth considering about the Commonwealth
The Commonwealth Games kick off today in Glasgow, and in celebration I thought it might be worthwhile looking at what this group of nations, held together by the fact that they were all once British colonies and in many cases not much else, and uncovering some little discussed facts about the whole thing. We often […]
World Cup Review 9: Putin, Blatter and The End
Gary Lineker, not given his full due as a philosopher, once said, “Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end the Germans always win.” It’s as true now as it was in Gary’s prime. After an inexplicable twenty-four year gap, Deutschland finally lifted Jules Rimet once […]