October 2006 Archives

The 20,332-capacity Windsor Park in Belfast is currently used for Northern Ireland's international football matches.Work has now started to convert a former prison -infamous during the"troubles" into a 42,000 capacity national stadium where football, rugby union and Irish sports such as Gaelic football and hurling can be played .
It was in the same prison that Bobby Sands, the leader of IRA prisoners in the Maze, died on hunger strike in 1981. Nine other Republicans also died in a vain attempt to force the British government into giving them political prisoner status.The H-shaped prison blocks, where hundreds of paramilitaries from the Catholic Irish Republican Army (IRA) and armed Protestant groups were detained in separate wings, are etched in the memory of many in Northern Ireland.
In addition to the stadium the new construction will also house an international centre for conflict transformation.
More details here.

Blatter -foot firmly in mouth - has clarified his apology to the Socceroos by issuing a "clarification' of the first apology and then made what sounds a lot like another apology to the Italians !
"The Italian team proved that despite serious pressures at home, they stuck together as a team and delivered exceptional football," Blatter said. "The Italian team proved that superior skills, teamwork and individual determination are the ingredients that lead to World Cup glory."
Now the Aussies should complain and make him issue another clarification of the clarification!

Three goals to see.Ronaldinho smiled again after scoring 2 [ the second a rare header from him ]against Recreativo Huelva. Barcelona extended their lead at the top of the Spanish first division .Xavi scored the third goal.Report here

The soccer videos are thankfully still around - so here's Rooney scoring that great hat trick of goals against Bolton and the one from Cristiano Ronaldo.Enjoy !!

We have heard horror stories of the high crime rate in South Africa where more than 50 people are murdered on an average everyday that will keep the tourists expected for the World Cup away. The present infrastructure of airports, roads, and public transportation, poor even by developing countries standards needs a daunting overhaul, a feat that might prove to be too difficult according to many skeptics. Even the spectre of AIDS is causing many to consider another host for the World Cup.

To them I say, that these conditions can and will be ameliorated. The SA government has succeeded in bringing down the crime rate marginally and with higher allocations of the World Cup budget should be able to bring it down further. In 60% of the cases the victim and perpetrator are known to each other. Just like in Germany where regular units of the army were given the responsibility in assisting the local police in emergency security measures in case of terrorism and riots, SA can also do the same. The question of poor infrastructure was called into question when Greece was given the Olympics in 2004. Many were considering Los Angeles as an alternative host, in case Greece failed. The SA government has pumped more than 6 billion rand into upgrading public transportation and airport construction. Today Thabo Mbeki's government announced that they had renounced the official policy of AIDS denial with the government announcing increased availability of anti-retroviral drugs and increasing support to civic groups fighting AIDS.

However, the question is not whether South Africa can host the World Cup. They can and will do it well. The caveat is that they cannot do it with the Thabo Mbeki government's current alienation with the labour and trade groups. The deregulation of South Africa's economy has led to enormous growth and this growth was chiefly the catalyst for FIFA awarding the World Cup to South Africa, notwithstanding all the heartwarming talk of the new post- apartheid South Africa. However SA's growth has been uneven and the gap between the rich and the poor has been steadily widening since economic reforms took place. The GINI co-efficient which measures the difference between the have and the have nots stands at .578 (the US has a GINI co-eficient with .408). The Mbeki government has gone out of its way to woo the pro-business lobby that has been pushing for the World Cup to happen. The lobby has treated the largest South African labour union, the Confederation of SA Trade Unions (COSATU, an umbrella organization) and the SACP (South African Communit Party) at arms length. The COSATU and the SACP are partners with the ANC in the tripartite alliance that runs SA presently. The drift of the Mbeki faction towards neo-liberal policies has created an atmosphere of mistrust and tension between the partners. The trade and labour unions have largely been absent from the World Cup dialogue that has left them feeling even more alienated. The question that most trade unions would like to know is how the government is going to handle the vending process by which unemployed people can benefit from the job creation expected, in a fair and transparent manner, rather than glad-handing the rich corporate sponsor friends of the pro-business lobby of the Mbeki government. Overhanging all of this is the power struggle between Mbeki and his populist deputy leader Jacob Zuma who represents the trade and labour unions. Zuma was stripped of his post and first indicted and then exonerated in a rape trial that many have seen as the work of Mbeki to scuttle Zuma's chances of being the the head of the ANC and consequently his successor as South African president in 2007. A prospect that has the pro-business faction shuddering in horror. Today, Zuma finds himself as the target of an investigation into a bribery case. If he is indicted in anything perceived less than a fair trial, then the split between the alliance partners will be permanent and the World Cup will be in jeopardy. The recent annual conference of the COSATU reflected the dissatisfaction with the Mbeki government.

The split between an older ideology, pure and rooted in the context of a country's struggle for independence and rejection of colonialist strictures as in apartheid in South Africa, and the emerging forces of globalization and free trade is being replayed elsewhere in Brazil and in India. But nowhere will it be put to the test so quickly and so intensely as in South Africa. In these four intervening years, SA has to find a solution to the question- will the World Cup benefit everyone concerned? And by that I mean, the ordinary citizen- otherwise the number of protestors descending down to SA might just overwhelm the number of football fans that come to enjoy the World Cup.

The Champions Cup was first played in 1955- 56. The first winner was Real Madrid who have won the cup an impressive 9 times out of 12 Cup finals. The last time they won was in the 2001- 2002 season. They are followed by AC Milan with 6 titles and 4 second places. They last won in 2003. Liverpool is next with 5 titles and 1 second place.

Real has been struggling off late and AC Milan has had to play a third round match to advance to the group stage of the Cup. The teams that have made an impressive surge in recent years are Liverpool and Arsenal, with the Reds winning the big one in 2005 and the Gunners coming up just short in 2006. Before that was Manchester United in 1999 that ended a 14 year drought since Liverpool's title in 1984. There might have been more cup wins if not for English clubs being banned after 1985 following the Heysel stadium disaster that led to the deaths of 39 Juventus football fans trapped against a wall that collapsed on them after being chased there by Liverpool fans, following a melee. The tragedy led to a 5 year suspension for English clubs and 6 years for Liverpool in European competition.

There is every reason to believe that the Premiership teams will have a lock on the title of best European club from now on. Chelsea beat Barcelona, 1-0 at Stamford Bridge and now travel to Camp Nou for the return match. Liverpool won their match against Bordeaux even though they have ruined their chances in their domestic league. Arsenal lost to CSKA Moscow but they will be back to form in their return tie against Roman Abramovich's second club this week at the Emirates stadium. FC Porto is their biggest rival in their group. Manchester United stands on top of their table with Celtic, both having beaten their biggest rival Benfica.

The success of the Premiership usurping the Serie and La Liga in having the best domestic league in recent years is primarily because the non- English coaches of these teams, Rafael Benitez with Liverpool; Arsene Wenger with Arsenal; Sir Alex Ferguson with Man Utd; and Jose Mourinho with Chelsea have succeeded in attracting players from overseas. The increasing competitive transfer fees that the English clubs can afford nowadays with private investors plowing in money into the clubs, the relatively benign racial climate in England, and a huge TV and media market that ensures the Premiership is the most watched league in the world have created the right circumstances for the ascendancy of English clubs in Europe.

For the latest on UEFA >>

West Ham 2 Blackburn Rovers 1

Teddy Shearingham showed why intelligence and experience over skill is infinitely preferable as he headed a cross by Benayoun past Brad Friedel. It also says very poorly of the two stars Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano that their impact has been negligible in West Ham's 10 match drought.

Shearingham who by any standards should have called it a day has replaced Tevez with a positive effect on West Ham's game. Today's game showed that the veteran has a few tricks up his sleeve still left as West Ham beat Blackburn, 2-1 and gave Alan Pardew some breathing space.

Meanwhile it is deja vu for Tevez who was brought in by Corinthians to preserve their lock on the Brazilian League and faced the same problem as Corinthians lurched from one loss to another. By the time he left for West Ham, Corinthians were dead last in the league table. And now West Ham faces the same situation with Tevez.

The Brazilian media are having a field day, chortling that a 40 year old player, twice the age of Tevez is showing him how to play football. Not much love lost between the Brazilians and the pair of Argentinians, who they consider as turncoats for dumping Corinthians and running off with the shady duo of Boris Berezovsky and Kia Joorbachian, who offered them up as down payment for control over West Ham.

Globo Esporte calls it the Curse of Tevez (A maldição de Tevez), Astral Hell when Javier Mascherano got bitten by Jermaine Defoe. Other magazines document the number of minutes that West Ham went without a goal with Tevez in the team calling it a joke. Now, they are rubbing their hands in glee as Kia Joorbachian contemplates bringing in Carlos Alberto, also of Corinthians to West Ham during the January transfer.

On Michael Essien

" He is nicknamed Bison because of a frightening fearlessness and strength; Dietmar Hamann and Tal Ben Haim, both on the business end of tackles by the Ghanaian last season, can vouch for Essien's impact on the football field. "

The Guardian discusses Essien's impact on Chelsea football, his meteoric rise as one of Africa's superstars and Ghana's best player since Abedi Pele. Essien comes across as a shy and private individual who is devoted to his mother and shares a complex and disturbed relationship with his estranged father.

Essien will be leading a strong Ghana team that boasts Stephen Appiah, John Pantsil, Emmanuel Pappoe, and Sulley Muntari as Ghana hosts the Africa Cup in 2008.

Liverpool is showing signs of life. Great bit of footwork by Gerrard and a perfect finish by Garcia.

Sepp Blatter tried to soothe the Socceroos by saying that they deserved to go to the quarterfinals instead of Italy. A bone headed play by Lucas O'Neill, an opportunistic dive by Fabio Grosso, and a miserable piece of refereeing by Luis Medina Cantalajo, all in the last minute of regulation time kept the Socceroos out of a fairy tale entry into the quarterfinals of the 2006 World Cup.

However with Blatter everything is too little, too late. Shouldn'nt we call him Sepp Blather, already?

Having Rush Limbaugh go berserk with rage at Michael J Fox for faking his symptoms of his disease in an ad supporting Democratic challenger Claire McCaskill, one knows that Rush has never seen a Parkinson's Disease patient. I work in a hospital where one of my patients has intractable tremors that are controlled for a few hours through medication, a side effect of long standing anti-Parkinson's drug therapy. Michael J Fox was doing what many in his position would do, try and make a point that there is a potentially efficacious treatment that could save many like him the agony of a crippling disease like Parkinson's. This needs federal granting, something the present Bush administration has been loath to do so.

Which brings us back to Rush Limbaugh - what if Rush was given the job of color commentator for FSC? He could go on a tirade every time Didier Drogba took a dive, or Javier Mascherano fell clutching his face in agony when nibbled on his shoulder by Jermaine Defoe (that was truly bizarre, that one!), or at the entire Italian team rolling on the field, rather than playing football. Now that would be to the point and with 10 million dittoheads who listen to him and his radio program, FIFA would have to change the rules in a hurry. Rush, save your rage for the real fakers, the ones in football!

On second thoughts, that would not be such a good idea. I don't think Rush has seen football and if his comments on Donovan McNabb are anything to go by, it is best that he not say anything at all. Football would turn out to be, should we say..... too multicultural for a bigot like Limbaugh.

The South African government will spend 15.1 billion rands on the World Cup. About 40% of it is on upgrading public transportation and security. This figure is 7 times that of what was projected when SA was awarded the World Cup in 2004.

What is especially worrying is the development of super large stadiums seating 70,000 people or more for the World Cup but will have problems filling up for the struggling South African league. They could turn out to be expensive white elephants.

This is the struggle most developing countries where sports is an afterthought, face when they take on the responsibilities of building large stadiums for a sport event that is dictated mostly as a need to showcase their capability to do so. In India, large stadiums lie empty, used mostly for political or social functions, mostly of the Bollywood night variety. Very few serious sporting events are held. India is now contemplating a bid for the 2016 Olympics, when there are indications that apart from cricket, there are very few people that will take up athletics or any other sport, leading to the same problem of under utilized stadiums.

"Scooney Roars again" scream the headlines.Can't blame the English sports journalists for getting their headlines mixed up in excitement !
Rooney has given them a glut of goals to feast on.Not one ..not two... but three goals to rave about !

Kaka is dead on when he says Materazzi sometimes gets nasty on the pitch. A treat for Kaka fans! Inter beat AC today 4-3 in a thriller. We will post the video as soon as we can get it.

Translation

The translation is incomplete but you get most of what is said between the two. Kaka is definitely the more angelic of the two.

Chelski's 30 million pound acquisition, Shevchenko finally scores his first goal! At this rate he'll score 4 more for a cost of 7.5 million pounds per goal.

Mido took sometime but he got it in style against the Hammers.

“We would all like to play football like someone, but this guy was just the best,wasn’t he?” ...was Tony Blair's tribute to Alan Shearer on Thursday .Shearer donated the £1.64mil raised when he retired to 14 local charities.
Newcastle Chairman Freddy Shepherd had this to say
"Alan Shearer is and always will be remembered as a true great. He is one of the finest English players to have ever graced the football pitch."
The other breaking news from England is that Queen Elizabeth II has cancelled a scheduled visit to Arsenal's new stadium because of a bad back!

Mascherano was subjected to a nibble by Defoe but the rest that followed, rolling around, holding his face was quite a nice bit of acting. However, what possessed Defoe to do this?

West Ham lies at the bottom of the Premiership - a scenario hardly contemplated by the likes of Alan Pardew and Kia Joorbachian when they signed on Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano. West Ham should have been challenging Bolton Wanderers for the top four spots in the League.

West Ham was the brightest of the clubs, with a nucleus of potential players, the future of the English squad, with Nigel Reo-Coker, captain of the U-21 team, Dean Ashton, Marlon Harewood, Paul Konchesky, Anton Ferdinand, Bobby Zamora, and Carlton Cole. The season started with the terrible news that Ashton was going to be out for a good part of the season with an ankle fracture. But Bobby Zamora and Marlon Harewood took up the challenge with Zamora an absolute beast, starting the season with a flurry of goals. The signing of Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano threw the English football world into a tizzy. It had all the football pundits anointing West Ham as the upstart Chelsea, with a smaller budget, sure to finish in the rarified echelons of the Premiership.

Two months down the line, West Ham finds its season in ruins. They are in the 19th spot, one spot removed from bottom dwelling Charlton Athletic. They have not won a single match since the first match they played in the season.

Alan Pardew has failed to convince his players to play football. There was a lot of expectancy that with Tevez and Mascherano, West Ham would stroll through their matches. A perfectly understandable feeling. You have signed on players, that have been singled out for praise by Diego Maradona and Luis Pekerman. We saw glimpses of the wonderful stuff that Tevez and Mascherano are capable of the World Cup. But Nigel Reo-Coker, Anton Ferdinand, Marlon Harewood, and Danny Gabbidon have all but disappeared. The nucleus that understood how the Premiership is played that got them to the 9th spot and the FA Cup final last season has dissolved.

There is an element of complacency and even surliness, that has crept into the West Ham team, with the team's elevation because of the two Argentinians, without them playing a single match in the Premiership. It is as if the rest of the team wants to see how far West Ham goes with Tevez and Mascherano, without them playing. That question has been answered, not too far!

The present situation benefits no one, least of all Tevez and Mascherano, who have obviously set their hearts on another Premiership or a La Liga club and look at West Ham as a springboard. Alan Pardew has to be more astute with getting his players to play and assure his players, especially Reo-Coker that he is invaluable to West Ham. Especially with the news that Reo- Coker is understandably aggrieved that he was the target of transfer talks in the last days, wooed by Man Utd and Arsenal, news that he was ignorant of, and now reflected in his lacklustre play.

To most West Ham fans and supporters, it has been frustrating. In the beginning Tevez and Mascherano, were a wonderful distraction. They just might just become the millstone that sinks West Ham. In the end it is the XI players on the field that win matches.

Do you remember the fantastic goal keeping of Joao Ricardo of Portugal that sent a mortified English squad to their doom in the World Cup? He outclassed Paul Robinson because of better anticipatory processes (that and the fact that the English players were just horrible at taking penalties).

A study (Savelsbergh GJ, Williams AM, Van der Kamp J, Ward P, 2002) shows that expert goalkeepers as compared to novices spend less time scanning different parts of the body and focus primarily on the kicking, non-kicking, and ball areas just before football contact as compared to the novices who fixated on the arms, hips, and the trunk.

The expert goalkeepers used a more efficient search strategy involving fewer fixations of longer duration to less disparate areas of the body.

A more recent study by the same researchers (Savelsbergh GJ, Williams AM, Van der Kamp J, Ward P, 2005) examined the success rates of expert goalkeepers in stopping penalty kicks. They found that the successful experts were more accurate in predicting the height and direction of the penalty kick, waited longer before initiating a response and appeared to spend longer periods of time fixating on the non-kicking leg compared with the non-successful experts.

These studies have useful impications for training goalkeepers.

Capello gave Beckham his second start in eight games and he provided the freekick which led to the opening goal against Ecija in the opening leg of their Copa del Rey clash yesterday.Real were held to a 1 -1 draw.
There's a rumour that Real Madrid are going to sell David Beckham in January's transfer window.

They are going going gone - alas - because Video-sharing service YouTube has wiped nearly 30,000 files from its website after Japanese media companies said their copyright was being infringed.
Football videos featured on YouTube, and subsequently on other sites like SoccerGolazo, 101greatgoals and others are being stopped.
Reports here and also here.

Manchester United's Giuseppe Rossi has represented the Italian national team at the Under-16, 17, 18 and 21 levels .He is currently on loan to Newcastle until January 1, 2007 .He will make his first appearance for them this evening.More on that story here

Paul Scholes and Ferdinand send Liverpool packing

Frank Rijkaard has taken Barcelona's defeats against Chelsea and Real Madrid to heart and is also taking the blame for the poor performances.
Talk of poor performances will include Ronaldinho who has lost his smile and is not at his best these days .
Maybe his meeting with basketball star Michael Jordan will help him to cheer up and play better .

21 reasons to celebrate Wayne Rooney's birthday.!!

The goals from Raul Gonzalez and Ruud Van Nistelrooy ...

Normally there wouldn't be a lampost on the pitch!

Raul and Ruud van Nistelrooy beat up on Ronaldinho and gang.

Looks like Capello knows what he's doing. Unfortunately, this means that Becks played for a mere five minutes.

Beckham's gotta get out of there...

Paul Scholes scored on his 500th appearance.

Manchester United left Rafa and gang in the dust when Ferdinand scored a second.

Crouch came in towards the end for Liverpool and did nothing.

He was nine when the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred in April 1986. His village, not far from Chernobyl, was also affected by the disaster, and his family was one amongst the thousands who had to abandon their homes and relocate to the coast to escape the aftereffects.
He has come a long way since then.2004 was a good year for him.He was named the European Footballer of the Year .In the same year he was also named by Pelé as one of the top 125 greatest living footballers and was awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine.
In an ad for ESPN in 2006 he told anchor Scott Van Pelt that since Americans call European football soccer Europeans should call American football soccer in return . . !
An interesting extract from a book about him here .

Andrei Shevchenko, the most expensive player ever to sign with a UK club scores against Portsmouth.
Bonus- you get to see Mourinho doing his Mr Bean impersonation at the end...!

French magazine France Football has released its 50-man shortlist for European Player of the Year.France leads the pack with eleven nominations for the Golden Ball award.
A critical look at some of the names on the list of nominated players here
Also included there is a brief summary of Real Madrid's two goal victory over Barcelona yesterday.Raul Gonzalez and Ruud van Nistelrooy did the scoring.Beckham came off his bench in the 82nd minute only to get another yellow card.More details here.

Diego Maradona is going to play in seven a side friendly matches next week in Honduras and El Salvador at events known as "Showbol "
Pele will be presenting Michael Schumacher with a special trophy after the final grand prix of the Ferrari driver's Formula One career in Brazil today.
Platini is busy with his campaign for the UEFA presidency and Zidane said he was not going to spend the weekend reading Materazzi's book !

Shevchenko ended a 10 game goal drought by finally scoring a goal against Portsmouth yesterday.The goal went in off defender Sol Campbell's foot .Ballack scored the second goal for Chelsea.Both players got yellow cards for overdoing the celebrations after scoring.Shortly after that Mourinho himself ran onto the sideline and overenthusiatically kicked the ball before it had gone out of play.He didn't get a yellow card but the ref had a few words with him.He returned to his place and sat and made faces like Mr Bean for the rest of the match !
Needless to say he too had a few words to say afterwards !

10 minutes of fun... Hats off to Chelsea!

FC Barcelona and its foundation Fundació Futbol Club Barcelona have announced a public alliance and kicked off a five year global partnership to extend the work of the club and benefit orphans and vulnerable children in the developing world.
"Barcelona shows us that sports can be a powerful, positive force for children," Ann M. Veneman, UNICEF's Executive Director, said, describing the landmark alliance with the Club as a "priceless" donation.
The Barcelona Football Club placed UNICEF’s name on the front of its jersey, and also made a generous pledge of 6.5 million Euros.

Didier Drogba"s stunning 47th-minute goal . 'I'm not superman," he said later !!

Barca face a Ronaldo less Real Madrid on sunday in what Van Nistelrooy calls "The biggest game in the universe."

Left over from the World Cup:

Too bad he couldn't do much on the field when it counted this summer.

The German government will raise its economic growth forecast for 2006 this week to 2.3 percent from a 1.6 percent estimate made before the June tournament that brought millions of Germans into the streets for public viewing parties.

If confirmed, that would be the economy's best performance since 3.2 percent in 2000, ending a long period of stagnation.

According to researchers, "39 million German households now 'feel' they have an extra 500 euros income each month because of Germany's good run at the World Cup -- totalling nearly 20 billion euros per month."

Wow.

FIFA President Sepp Blatter criticised government interference in football, just a day after he agreed to set up a commission with Polish authorities to tackle a dispute over government powers to sack footballing bosses.FIFA said it is also concerned by other situations of government interference in Algeria, Cambodia, Iran, Nigeria, Poland and Portugal. A dispute with Greece had been resolved, it said.
Elsewhere Blatter's intervention helped Tanzanian footballer of the century Mathias Kisa to get his FIFA centennial award - overdue by two years.
And Patrick Barclay writing in the Telegraph says not all of Blatter's ideas are bad.

Hilario the goalkeeper had the last laugh.
Barcelona were dispatched by a goal from Didier Drogba and Jose Mourinho dedicated the win to his two other goalkeepers, Petr Cech and Carlo Cudicini.
Liverpool are also facing a potential goalkeeper crisis because Dudek is looking at a 5 match suspension.
Pepe Reina played in goal against Bordeaux yesterday and Peter Crouch scores again.

Match highlights. Poor Thierry Henry got a yellow card for what the referee thought was a handball .Says Henry...
"He gave me a yellow for a deliberate handball but if you can see that on the replay I'll give you whatever you want. "
Spanish referee Manuel Enrique is getting plenty of flak for that boo boo.

Beckham makes his 100th Champion's League appearance and Ruud gets his 50th goal in European football.
Great goal.

The players nominated for the FIFPro Young Player Award are the ones who at the end of the 2005/2006 season were 21 years old or younger.

1. Cesc Fabregas (Arsenal/ Spain)
2. Lionel Messi (FC Barcelona / Argentina)
3. Lukas Podolski (1.FC Köln / Germany)
4. Cristiano Ronaldo (Manchester United/ Portugal)
5. Wayne Rooney (Manchester United/ England) .

The ultimate winner will also be announced on 6 November 2006.
Rooney will have to score a few goals if he is to keep up with the competition.He captained Man U to a 3-0 win over FC Copenhagen on Tuesday but did not score.

A blurred look at Getafe's 1 - 0 victory over Real Madrid and Ronaldo's sending off.

Real Madrid have denied coach Fabio Capello offer to resign after the shock 1-0 defeat .They did better against Steaua Bucharest - winning 4 - 1 . Beckham joins the 100 club !

Stephen Hunt was says he is sorry and did not mean to hurt Petr Cech in the collision that has left the Chelsea goalkeeper in hospital with a depressed fracture of the skull.Mourinho does not agree with Hunt.James Lawton does not agree with Mourinho.Drogba does not agree with Lawton .
He says ..."Don't tell me tall stories, this was not an accident.Hunt saw that he was going to collide with Petr and he didn't try to avoid it. The worst came after that. When Petr was carried out of the ground, Hunt was laughing. I'm not paranoid but they hate us. Some people will use any means to beat us."
You can join in the commotion and vote on the issue here !
But while the pros and cons are being debated it is clear that goalkeeping can sometimes turn out to be a dangerous profession .
Some serious accidents involving goalkeepers in the past

John Thomson Celtic v Rangers, 1931.

Thomson fractured his skull and died after a collision with Rangers' Sam English.

Bert Trautmann Manchester City v Birmingham. FA Cup final, 1956.

The German earned hero status after it was discovered he had played the last 15 minutes of City's 3-1 victory at Wembley with a broken neck.

Ray Wood Manchester United v Aston Villa, FA Cup final, 1957.

A year on from Bert Trautmann's heroics, Wood broke his jaw after being shoulder-charged by Phil McParland, the Aston Villa midfielder. United lost the final 2-1.

Serhiy Perkhun CSKA Moscow v Anzhi Makhachkala, 2001.

Perkhun died after spending 10 days in hospital following a clash of heads with striker Budun Budunov.

Shay Given West Ham United v Newcastle United, 17 Sept, 2006.

Given needed emergency surgery for a perforated bowel after being clattered into by Marlon Harewood. Given described the pain as like "having acid poured into my stomach".

Everything else you ever wanted to know about goalkeeping here !

The sad part of it was that Holland never won a World Cup despite his genius. Instead it was Germany (w/ Beckenbauer) who proved too much in the Finals.

How did he get started? His mom worked as a cleaner for Ajax Amsterdam. She had them sign him to the youth squad at age 12. Brilliant!

Germany mashes Slovakia. The Kaiser thinks we're the best team in Europe. What a turnaround!

The El Hadji Diouf show with some great help from the Magpies defence. Bolton comes away with their first win at St. James Park since 1959. Look at Anelka's neat bit of footwork that leads to the first Diouf goal.

West Ham lies at the bottom of the Premiership - a scenario hardly contemplated by the likes of Alan Pardew and Kia Joorbachian when they signed on Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano. West Ham should have been challenging Bolton Wanderers for the top four spots in the League.

West Ham was the brightest of the clubs, with a nucleus of potential players, the future of the English squad, with Nigel Reo-Coker, captain of the U-21 team, Dean Ashton, Marlon Harewood, Paul Konchesky, Anton Ferdinand, Bobby Zamora, and Carlton Cole. The season started with the terrible news that Ashton was going to be out for a good part of the season with an ankle fracture. But Bobby Zamora and Marlon Harewood took up the challenge with Zamora an absolute beast, starting the season with a flurry of goals. The signing Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano threw the English football world into a tizzy. It had all the football pundits anointing West Ham as the upstart Chelsea, with a smaller budget, sure to finish in the rarified echelons of the Premiership.

Two months down the line, West Ham finds its season in ruins. They are in the 19th spot, one spot removed from bottom dwelling Watford. They have not won a single match since the first match they played in the season.

Alan Pardew has failed to convince his players to play football. There was a lot of expectancy that with Tevez and Mascherano, West Ham would stroll through their matches. A perfectly understandable feeling. You have signed on players, that have been singled out for praise by Diego Maradona and Luis Pekerman. We saw glimpses of the wonderful stuff that Tevez and Mascherano are capable of the World Cup. But Nigel Reo-Coker, Anton Ferdinand, Marlon Harewood, and Danny Gabbidon have all but disappeared. The nucleus that understood how the Premiership is played that got them to the 9th spot and the FA Cup final last season has dissolved.

There is an element of complacency and even surliness, that has crept into the West Ham team, with the team's elevation because of the two Argentinians, without them playing a single match in the Premiership. It is as if the rest of the team wants to see how far West Ham goes with Tevez and Mascherano, without them playing. That question has been answered, not too far!

The present situation benefits no one, least of all Tevez and Mascherano, who have obviously set their hearts on another Premiership or a La Liga club and look at West Ham as a springboard. Alan Pardew has to be more astute with getting his players to play and assure his players, especially Reo-Coker that he is invaluable to West Ham. Especially with the news that Reo- Coker is understandably aggrieved that he was the target of transfer talks in the last days, wooed by Man Utd and Arsenal, news that he was ignorant of, and now reflected in his lacklustre play.

To most West Ham fans and supporters, it has been frustrating. In the beginning Tevez and Mascherano, were a wonderful distraction. They might just become the millstone that sinks West Ham. In the end it is the XI players that win matches.

West Ham lies at the bottom of the Premiership - a scenario hardly contemplated by the likes of Alan Pardew and Kia Joorbachian when they signed on Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano. West Ham should have been challenging Bolton Wanderers for the top four spots in the League.

West Ham was the brightest of the clubs, with a nucleus of potential players, the future of the English squad, with Nigel Reo-Coker, captain of the U-21 team, Dean Ashton, Marlon Harewood, Paul Konchesky, Anton Ferdinand, Bobby Zamora, and Carlton Cole. The season started with the terrible news that Ashton was going to be out for a good part of the season with an ankle fracture. But Bobby Zamora and Marlon Harewood took up the challenge with Zamora an absolute beast, starting the season with a flurry of goals. The signing Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano threw the English football world into a tizzy. It had all the football pundits anointing West Ham as the upstart Chelsea, with a smaller budget, sure to finish in the rarified echelons of the Premiership.

Two months down the line, West Ham finds its season in ruins. They are in the 19th spot, one spot removed from bottom dwelling Watford. They have not won a single match since the first match they played in the season.

Alan Pardew has failed to convince his players to play football. There was a lot of expectancy that with Tevez and Mascherano, West Ham would stroll through their matches. A perfectly understandable feeling. You have signed on players, that have been singled out for praise by Diego Maradona and Luis Pekerman. We saw glimpses of the wonderful stuff that Tevez and Mascherano are capable of the World Cup. But Nigel Reo-Coker, Anton Ferdinand, Marlon Harewood, and Danny Gabbidon have all but disappeared. The nucleus that understood how the Premiership is played that got them to the 9th spot and the FA Cup final last season has dissolved.

There is an element of complacency and even surliness, that has crept into the West Ham team, with the team's elevation because of the two Argentinians, without them playing a single match in the Premiership. It is as if the rest of the team wants to see how far West Ham goes with Tevez and Mascherano, without them playing. That question has been answered, not too far!

The present situation benefits no one, least of all Tevez and Mascherano, who have obviously set their hearts on another Premiership or a La Liga club and look at West Ham as a springboard. Alan Pardew has to be more astute with getting his players to play and assure his players, especially Reo-Coker that he is invaluable to West Ham. Especially with the news that Reo- Coker is understandably aggrieved that he was the target of transfer talks in the last days, wooed by Man Utd and Arsenal, news that he was ignorant of, and now reflected in his lacklustre play.

To most West Ham fans and supporters, it has been frustrating. In the beginning Tevez and Mascherano, were a wonderful distraction. They might just become the millstone that sinks West Ham. In the end it is the XI players that win matches.

West Ham lies at the bottom of the Premiership - a scenario hardly contemplated by the likes of Alan Pardew and Kia Joorbachian when they signed on Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano. West Ham should have been challenging Bolton Wanderers for the top four spots in the League.

West Ham was the brightest of the clubs, with a nucleus of potential players, the future of the English squad, with Nigel Reo-Coker, captain of the U-21 team, Dean Ashton, Marlon Harewood, Paul Konchesky, Anton Ferdinand, Bobby Zamora, and Carlton Cole. The season started with the terrible news that Ashton was going to be out for a good part of the season with an ankle fracture. But Bobby Zamora and Marlon Harewood took up the challenge with Zamora an absolute beast, starting the season with a flurry of goals. The signing Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano threw the English football world into a tizzy. It had all the football pundits anointing West Ham as the upstart Chelsea, with a smaller budget, sure to finish in the rarified echelons of the Premiership.

Two months down the line, West Ham finds its season in ruins. They are in the 19th spot, one spot removed from bottom dwelling Watford. They have not won a single match since the first match they played in the season.

Alan Pardew has failed to convince his players to play football. There was a lot of expectancy that with Tevez and Mascherano, West Ham would stroll through their matches. A perfectly understandable feeling. You have signed on players, that have been singled out for praise by Diego Maradona and Luis Pekerman. We saw glimpses of the wonderful stuff that Tevez and Mascherano are capable of the World Cup. But Nigel Reo-Coker, Anton Ferdinand, Marlon Harewood, and Danny Gabbidon have all but disappeared. The nucleus that understood how the Premiership is played that got them to the 9th spot and the FA Cup final last season has dissolved.

There is an element of complacency and even surliness, that has crept into the West Ham team, with the team's elevation because of the two Argentinians, without them playing a single match in the Premiership. It is as if the rest of the team wants to see how far West Ham goes with Tevez and Mascherano, without them playing. That question has been answered, not too far!

The present situation benefits no one, least of all Tevez and Mascherano, who have obviously set their hearts on another Premiership or a La Liga club and look at West Ham as a springboard. Alan Pardew has to be more astute with getting his players to play and assure his players, especially Reo-Coker that he is invaluable to West Ham. Especially with the news that Reo- Coker is understandably aggrieved that he was the target of transfer talks in the last days, wooed by Man Utd and Arsenal, news that he was ignorant of, and now reflected in his lacklustre play.

To most West Ham fans and supporters, it has been frustrating. In the beginning Tevez and Mascherano, were a wonderful distraction. They might just become the millstone that sinks West Ham. In the end it is the XI players that win matches.

Sam Allardyce shakes a fist!

Remember this summer's musical chairs with the England coach in the post Sven era? Names like Guus Hiddink, Alan Curbishley, Martin O'Neill, Stuart Pearce, Luis Felipe Scolari, and Sam Allardyce were getting tossed around. The overwhelming favourite was Big Phil. Steve McLaren pipped them at the post after spending a few seasons as Middlesborough's manager and doing a decent job. However, his resume was still pretty thin compared to the other candidates. Well, it seems that the lack of coaching experience may be coming back to haunt him.

If Steve McLaren continues to sputter with the 3-5-2 formation with disastrous results as in the Croatia match, the musical chairs might begin again, but this time, I have no doubts that Sam Allardyce will be the hands down favourite. If the FA wants to go homegrown, then Allardyce should be given the job. His stewardship of Bolton has been nothing short of spectacular. He has raised a motley crew to another level, with a 37 year old Gary Speed having the best season of his career, a temperamental El Hadji Diouf scoring goals, and a dysfunctional Nicolas Anelka looking like he wants to play football. The rest of the team has Ivan Campo, Tal Ben Haim, Idan Tal, Nicky Hunt, Ricardo Gardner, Kevin Nolan and Andranik Teymourian, names that don't really roll of your tongue when football superstars come to mind. Let us put this in perspective- Bolton's total worth is 60 million pounds, an amount that Chelsea surpassed this season on acquiring John Obi Mikel, Andrei Shevchenko, Khalid Boulahrouz, Ashley Cole, and Salomon Kalou.

Allardyce has made a believer out of Anelka, which is in itself a miracle. And Anelka is Bolton's most expensive signing in club history. The pundits felt that Allardyce had gone a bit soft, signing on a project in Anelka, whose talent has never been in doubt, a professional journeyman following countless fallouts with coaches and team-mates, earning him the title of the Incredible Sulk. Yesterday, against Newcastle, Anelka showed the damage he could do. I remember Allardyce in an interview soon after the Anelka transfer, talking about how Anelka had matured from those days.

Allardyce has a reputation for knowing his players better than they know themselves, and a great aptitude for bringing out the best in some of the most temperamental players. In fact, he has made a career of it- Jay Jay Okocha, Youri Djorkaeff, El Hadji Diouf, Ivan Campo, and now Nicolas Anelka. He is extremely adaptable- Bolton's back four have been doing a superb job, even with injuries to Quinton Fortune and Joey O'Brien. Allardyce has Nicky Hunt at right back with Ben Haim switching to left back, and the combination has been working. They have given Bolton 4 clean sheets in the 8 games played so far. The defence has only conceded 4 goals.

The rap against Allardyce is that he has little international coaching experience. However, given the fact that he has taken many international talents who would have short circuited elsewhere but under his tutelage have had flourishing careers, I really don't see this as a detriment. Allardyce can be abrasive just like Luis Felipe Scolari, and is immensely popular with the players as well as the crowd. He is the opposite of McLaren who comes of as colourless. One can imagine Allardyce harnessing the likes of Wayne Rooney and bringing a Michael Carrick out of his torpor. I don't think a Peter Crouch would find himself in an Allardyce team, whereas an Aaron Lennon might. When the bottomline is that you have to get your team to play well no matter what, a resume having international coaching experience appears to be an abstraction, and even overblown.

Goals by Ronaldinho, Messi, and Kanoute!

Theo Walcott - 2 great goals in the under 21 game against Germany and a marvellous performance in Arsenal's 3 -0 victory over Watford FC.
Plenty of hype now.

And now he has one last chance to write his name into the UEFA Champions League record books with the trip to PFC CSKA Moskva on Tuesday night.

Theo Walcott's goals in the England Germany Under 21 match on 10th Oct.

Walcott, on as a late substitute, ended Germany's hopes of erasing a 1-0 first-leg play-off deficit in the 84th minute when he collected Leighton Baines' pass then raced clear before shooting coolly beyond Michael Rensing.

Six minutes later he added England's second with an even crisper finish into the far corner after tearing past Eugen Polanski down the left.

Maradona talks about the original hand of God !

Watch Aguero's hand of God.Maradona's was better !

Petr Cech will not play football until next year after undergoing neurosurgery for a depressed fracture of the skull.He was rushed to the Royal Berkshire hospital before being transferred to the specialist brain-injury unit at Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary.
Substitute goalkeeper Carlo Cudicini also landed up in hospital after his collision with Ibrahima Sonko .
Chelsea are facing a goalkeeper crisis.
They will probably have to use third-choice goalkeeper Hilario in the clash against Barcelona on Wednesday at Stamford Bridge.
And more bad news for Mourinho regarding that game.
Leo Messi continues to amaze and Ronaldinho is back.
Barcelona scored a 3-1 victory over Sevilla last night with Ronaldinho scoring 2 and Messi the other.

Well, I thought I'd take a break from Soccerblog for a while, but now this article made me want to tell you all about it.

German racism is back and rears its ugly head once again.

The scene: Last week's match between TuS Makkabi Berlin and VSG Altglienicke. It doesn't help when the referee is scared as well.

Read the story here >>

Meanwhile the German team is learning how to behave. Maybe they should give the fans some lessons as well!

Rooney had a hand, er, foot in every goal. The Beeb can't shut up about how great he is.

Even Ferguson had to say that this was Wayne's best display of the season.

Wigan 1, ManU 0 >>

Wigan 1, Manu 1 >>

Wigan 1, ManU 2 >>

Wigan 1, ManU 3 >>

Highlights of the wierdest game this year.

Did Steve Hunt mean to KO Cech? Probably not. Mourinho's not happy:

An interesting critique of the players on Fifa's World Player of the Year shortlist....especially on Frank Lampard !

Didier Drogba, Emmannuel Eboue, and Didier Zokora, have a few things in common. They are Cote D'Ivoirian, fantastic players for club and country, and last but not the least, share a penchant for diving.

For every Drogba goal, and he has been spectacular this season- remember this beauty, he undoes all the good with his extreme cynicality. Yesterday, he took a tumble after some mild short tugging by Andre Bikey, the Reading defender and had him sent off. Last week, Zokora went down like pole axed steer after Paolo Mendes, the Portsmouth midfielder was no way near tackling him. It led to a penalty converted by Jermaine Defoe. The Spurs went onto win the game, 2-1. In the last Champions League final, Eboue went down in another fine piece of acting and Arsenal pulled a goal back from the resulting penalty, ultimately losing to Barca 2-1.

Are Cote D'Ivoirians players cheaters when it comes to football? No. I am drawing attention to the fact, that diving is a learned behaviour, that many players resort to because it pays dividends. A player who gets away with diving and is successful in getting the foul he wants, will resort to it time and time again. Football is not played in isolation. Didier Drogba is an icon in his country, the captain of the team enjoying remarkable success in qualifying for their first World Cup 2006, instilling a sense of pride in Cote D'Ivoire, a country torn in strife and civil war, united now by their football team. Along with this well deserved pride comes the belief in what got them this far- skill, hard work, team spirit, and yes, a bit of diving. It becomes undistinguishable from all the other aspects of the game. Zokora's glee was not so much that he was instrumental in getting the Spurs ahead but also the fact that he had sold the referee a dummy.

So, the best way to deal with drawing attention to how diving kills the game without singling out a group of players, starts from the coach, who needs to be uniformly critical of your own players, when they indulge in it. That is why Martin Jol's wink and nod to Didier Zokora's dive saying " I guess he was a bit off balance " was the wrong one. Moral relativism, by claiming that others are doing it too, does no good in solving this pernicious problem. The Cote D'Ivoirians are suddenly in the limelight with their success in club and country, and it is but natural that parts of their game are fodder for discussion.

There was a rumour recently that Blatter was going to eliminate boring draws in football by introducing two goals at each end for the goalkeepers to keep!
Daniel Salazar - a referee in Ecuador has done his own bit to make the game more exciting.He allowed a goal to be scored while two footballs were in play.He received a three game suspension for his efforts !
Video here

Sergio Aguero had a hand in the goal he scored against Recreativo Huelva in the Vicente Calderon on Saturday.
In the other big match of the day Beckham failed to inspire Real Madrid and they went down by a goal in their game at Getafe.And comeback kid Ronaldo sadly found himself on the wrong side of a yellow card in the last few minutes of the same game.

Mourinho -after losing 2 goalkeepers.
"The second one, Carlo, I think is a consequence of the way he hit the ground, but the first one, with what Petr has, I'm not sure if he's a Catholic, but ... to be alive is a bit lucky," Mourinho said. "I think it was that bad."

"A broken leg is one thing and a broken arm is another but an injury to your head is a different matter."
"If Petr Cech's mother knows he has a broken leg she is upset but not that worried. When family people know he has lost consciousness she starts to worry about it."
"For me the second one is a fall, a violent fall, but should have just been a yellow card and a free kick to us."
"The first one was unbelievable. The goalkeeper gets the ball and he slides and then Stephen Hunt cannot go for the ball so he goes with his knee onto his face."
"If Cech has not broke any bones in his face he is a lucky boy. He was completely knocked out and went straight to hospital." "I am not saying the intention was to send my keeper to hospital. I believe footballers but it was a very stupid challenge and when he came back to the half-way line he was laughing and showing no concern for my player."

Ballack, Mikel, Sheva- 45 million pounds but where are they?

Chelsea continues to perform but it is clear that they are not the dominant team that they were the last two seasons. I have rarely seen Jose Mourinho look so dishevelled. Part of the problem is that the three big Chelsea players signed to bolster the attack have not panned out. Sheva is playing the keyhole, as a holding striker while Drogba has stamped himself as the striker to go to. Drogba is powerful and is impressive off the air, more suited for the physical English club defences and reliance on aerial attacks. Sheva's strength during his AC Milan days is like that of a goalpoacher in the Hernan Crespo mould. At Chelsea he has had to go deeper to create chances for him and for others. Sheva is not a playmaker, a role he is not used to. He is allowing himself to be defined. Michael Ballack is not been given very much playing time with a crowded midfield and John Obi Mikel looked slow in his first fulltime debut. In an ideal situation, Ballack would have been doing what Sheva is been forced to do. 45 million pounds and not much to show.

The defense has been stellar and the player that has the most impact is Khalid Boulahrouz, a relatively last minute inexpensive signing. He has formed a great defensive wall at the back with Terry, he kept the Reading strikers, Lita and Doyle off their game, with his timely tackles and defensive anticipation.

The way Chelsea celebrated the end of this match, you would think they had won their third title in a row. As it is, it was just Reading, who have been extra-ordinarily impressive this season. But it was no ordinary match. Match statistics like goal attempts or corners taken do not do justice to this match. How about 2 insensate goalkeepers carted off the field, two players shown the red card, and an assistant coach ejected from the field for match interference?

30 seconds into the game, Stephen Hunt inadvertently clips a sprawling Petr Cech in the side of the head trying to get the ball past the rushing Chelsea goalkeeper. A perfectly innocuous injury but one that Cech would not get up from. He was stretchered off. Cudicini replaces him. The match gets pretty testy at times with players get very demonstrative with their fouls. 5 minutes are added on. Just before halftime Ibrahima Sonko commits a boneheaded foul of Frank Lampard, just outside the box. The resulting freekick taken by Lamps, ricochets off Ingimarsson for an own goal. Lamps turns around after the goal and shakes his fist at Sonko.

Sonko would be involved again a minute before the end of the match as he collided with Cudicini in a goalmouth melee. The Chelsea goalkeeper fell from the skies and landed unconscious. He needed oxygen and a neck brace and was stretchered off. John Terry did goalkeeping duty for the last minute or so. The last minute saw Reading mounting their last few attacks, in one of them, the ball went out of bounds and Kevin Dillon, a Chelsea assistant referee held onto it to give more time for his players to fall back. He was ejected.

Both teams were reduced to ten men, when John Obi Mikel was sent off after fouling Sonko (this man was everywhere!) and later in the half, Drogba did a good job diving, and conning the referee into giving Andre Bikey, the pink slip too. Both players went ballistic and the referee was seriously in danger of being maimed. Luckily, they were pushed out of the field by some of their team mates.

Hopefully, Petr Cech and Carlo Cudicini make a speedy recovery from this bizarre set of circumstances. It looks like they might have suffered concussions, the recovery depends on how severe they are because concussive symptoms can range from a minor headache to disorientation.

Israel managed a respectable a 1-1 draw against Russia in Moscow .
More Euro 2008 updates here .
And still with Israel.It's under-21 team has qualified for the first time for the European Championship Football tournament next year. They beat France's under 21 team 1-0 .
Steve McClaren will not be too be thrilled that his next big challenge, when England carry on their strained campaign in the new year, will be a game in Tel Aviv.

Peter Crouch gets competition in the scissor kick department from Marco Bresciano
as Australia ended their Asian Cup qualifying campaign with a 2-0 victory over Bahrain on Wednesday.

Belgian first division team Royal Charleroi's case against FIFA for compensation to them for injuries sustained by Abdelmajid Oulmers while on national duty promises a bleak future to International Football if the landmark court case is successful.
If they win , and clubs become entitled to compensation while their players are away on international duty, there are fears that most countries would be unable to fund national teams.

Another look at Robinson's unfortunate wonder blunder.
He returns to club duty with Tottenham at unbeaten Aston Villa today and said he was saddened by all the condemnation he was getting.
"I have come in for a lot of criticism. I look at the incident and it was just a ridiculous fluke," he said yesterday. "For it to be reported as a mistake, as my fault ... I can't see what I did that wrong. Goalkeepers make mistakes and I've made mistakes as well that have cost goals but nothing like that has ever happened to me before."
And was McClaren writing down what he wanted to say ????

On DVD :The definitive collection of goalkeeping gaffes - David Seaman Presents Goalkeeping Nightmares
Its being given out as a prize to the one who chooses the best musical accompaniment here to go with the video of Paul Robinson's amazing missed kick goal.

Ebi Smolarek's 2 goals in the first half gave Poland a shock 2-1 win over Group A favourites Portugal in their Euro 2008 qualifier on Wednesday.
Scolari was deeply critical of his team.

Xavi Hernandez's 32nd-minute long shot in their 2-1 win against Argentina .

Miroslav Klose - leading scorer with 25 goals last season and Golden Boot winner at the World Cup - probably did one of his trademark aerial somersaults when he discovered that he was voted German Player of the Year.

Klose won by a landslide, polling 64 percent of the vote, organised by the German Professional Players' Union, to beat runner-up Ballack (4.5%).
Meanwhile repeated incidents of racism are also bringing German football into the news but for the wrong reasons.

And a German magazine (Deutsche Sprachwelt) has declared war on English-language terms that have infiltrated the country's soccer in recent years .They are encouraging all Germans to use proper German terms like"Torschuetzenkoenig" instead of "shootout" and "Schiedsrichter" instead of "referee".....etc, etc, etc.
Their battlecry - " Ve haff vays of making you talk (properly!!) "
More correct German terms here.

Zinedine Zidane,Steven Gerrard, Wayne Rooney and Frank Lampard are among those nominated for this year's FIFA World Player of the Year award.
There are 6 Chelsea players in the longish shortlist and some of the World Cup finalists featured are Italians Gianluigi Buffon, Fabio Cannavaro, Gennaro Gattuso, Alessandro Nesta and Andrea Pirlo , French players Thierry Henry, Franck Ribery, Lilian Thuram, Patrick Vieira and Zinedine Zidane and Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo .

Soccer's world governing body will announce the three male and three female players with the most votes in early December. The winners then will be chosen from those finalists and presented with the awards at the 16th FIFA World Player Gala on Dec. 18, at the Zurich Opera House.
FIFA will also present the Presidential Award and the Fair Play Award for 2006 at the gala.

It's a bird,it's a plane, it's a windmill.....!

A bizarre self goal. Robinson swipes at thin air !
"I went to kick the ball," he said, " and it wasn't there."

England went behind to a header from Croatia's Brazilian-born striker Eduardo da Silva early in the second half.Goalkeeper Paul Robinson conceded the second when he incredibly missed Gary Neville's back pass,kicked thin air and saw the ball roll past him into the net.
McClaren after the game - "It was my decision to change. We've lost the game so obviously the tactics did not work," he said. "The team tried and the players did the jobs they were told to do. It has not worked and we have lost the game."
What makes it a bit worse is that Italy , Germany , Ukraine, Northern Ireland , Wales and France all won their respective matches.
Even the neighbours from across the sea -The republic of Ireland - played out a creditable draw after the 5 - 1 loss to Cyprus the other day.
McClaren had better come up with some new ideas soon or Britannia will sink without a trace instead of ruling the waves !
For now he joins the ranks of English coaches who fell from grace.

Ronaldinho hit the crossbar twice on free kicks after being introduced into the game in the second half.His pass brings Kaka's game-winning goal. The spectator running onto the pitch prompted Dunga to say after the match "Supporters that run onto the pitch should be jailed for a month,"

NSW Premier Morris Iemma has called on FIFA to award the 2010 World Cup to Australia as uncertainty continues to plague South Africa's attempt to host the world's biggest sporting party.
Blatter had recently expressed concern that, although all the plans were in place, work on the new stadiums had still to arrive at the pick-and-shovel stage.
Other problems include a lack of a transnational rail system to take the increased weight of traffic during the world cup .
More serious - rampant crime.
South Africa has a crime wave that is only surpassed by Colombia. In 2004, there were 19,000 homicides.
There is an online petition to change the venue from South Africa to a safer country here.

Morris Iemma said yesterday that Australia had an" international reputation for hosting major events like the 2000 Olympics," .
"We have the infrastructure and the capacity to step into the breach at a moment's notice. If it can't come off with South Africa, and there are doubts that it can, then we are by far the best alternative.
Here is a collection of fifty reasons why Blatter will surely come up with a speedy solution to this problem soon.

Dunga's tactic of getting his players to share rooms has paid off .Brazil won their game against Ecuador extending Dunga's unbeaten streak to five matches.
The Ecuadoreans were reduced to 10 men in the first half when Antonio Valencia was sent off for a reckless challenge on Dudu Caerense.
The coaches had different views on that sending off.
"This match confirms to me that we are heading the right direction," said Dunga ``It is often much more difficult to play against 10 than 11."

Ecuador coach Luis Suarez said "We were doing pretty well when we were 11 players, but it is always very complicated to play Brazil and it is a lot more difficult when you are a man down."

Trix and Flix,Flitz and Blitz or Zigi and Zagi ?
Trix and Flix won.
The choice of the names Trix and Flix were closely followed by Flitz and Blitz, with organisers saying that just over a third of the competition's 67,406 voters had gone for that combination, while a further 30 percent preferred Zigi and Zagi.

The owner of the rights to a pair of German cartoon foxes Fix and Foxi are considering legal action because of similarities between Trix and Flix and Fix and Foxi.
Take a look at Fix and Foxi here and see if they have a case !

Glenn Myernick, Bruce Arena's chief assistant with the US team at the past two World Cup finals, and a former head coach of Major League Soccer's Colorado Rapids, died on Monday after suffering a heart attack last week. He was 51.

"We lost a great person today," said Bruce Arena. "He was an unbelievable husband and father, and the finest soccer person I've ever come across in the United States. He was an amazing resource for soccer in this country."

"Glenn Myernick was a player and coach deeply passionate about soccer and life," US Soccer president Sunil Gulati said in a statement. "Whether it was family, friends or soccer, 'Mooch' was the kind of person that embraced everything in life, loving every minute of it."
Read memories from fans and friends here.

Cristiano Ronaldo scores three times - although only two of them count. [Scolari would've been a great coach for England!]

Someone needs to wake up... even if it's just one lion!

Once again, the English team underwhelms us with a lackadaisical performance.

Crouch belongs on the bench. Rooney does too (until he regains his form). C'mon Rooney!

A friendly Brazil destroys a club team masquerading as the Kuwaiti national team. Still, it's fun to see Brazil scoring again. Robinho is the next Brazilian superstar. Why they didn't play him more in the World Cup is beyond me!

The Irish papers have been baying for manager Steve Staunton's head after Ireland's humiliating 5-2 defeat in Cyprus on Saturday in their Group D Euro 2008 qualifying match.
"Pack your bags and go Stan," read the back page of the Irish Daily Mirror and the front page headline read "Stan Ain't the Man".
Staunton acknowledged his side's performance was poor but vowed to stay on.
"It's a terrible result for us. There's not much more you can say about it ... I'm not happy about it but we have to pick ourselves up," he told reporters after the match.
"I'm not walking away," he added.
Irish President Mary McAleese happens to be on an official tour to Cyprus at this time .

McAleese was less than complementary about the Irish performance. "Well it wasn't great was it now," she said. "We were outclassed. You were two-and-a-half times better than us."

Portugal play Poland next and Ronaldo wants another win though Scolari is willing to settle for a draw.
Portugal have climbed to third place in their group with a thumping three - zero win over Azerbaijan .
Cristiano Ronaldo continues to be in devastating form .He scored in the 24th and 63rd minutes in the Group A match, while Ricardo Carvalho added the third goal in the 30th.

Brazil's national soccer team arrived in the Swedish capital on Sunday for a friendly against Ecuador sometime this week.
Coach Dunga has made the players revert to the old practice of sharing rooms in a bid to improve fighting spirit and teamwork.
Pele approves.
'I have confidence in Dunga's capabilities, I think he has everything he takes to be a great coach,' he said on the Brazilian Football Confederation's (CBF) official website.
The media in Brazil were not so supportive of Brazil's recent 4-0 win in Kuwait against a team which was called the Kuwait National side by THE CBF's Web site but turned out to be a Select XI based on a local club.

Materazzi has also written a book !
His book is called "What I actually told Zidane" and in it he lists 249 possible phrases he could have uttered, including the real one.
The book costs US$13 .It is being published by Mondadori and was shown at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Book your copy now !
The proceeds from the book will be donated to the UNICEF

"The Bonnie Prince" is the title of the autobiography of Chelsea legend Charlie Cooke .It was released in the UK on the 5th of October.
Synopsis
Before Joe Cole, Dennis Wise and Frank Leboeuf were 'Here, There and Every Where', there was Charlie Cooke. He arrived at Chelsea in 1966 as a replacement for club favourite Terry Venables and promptly delighted the fans with his superb ball skills, searing runs and perceptive crosses. Most spectacular of all was his magical body swerve that triggered a collective mega-decibel sigh from the Shed. They called him 'the Magician', 'the Maestro' and 'the Wizard', or just 'Charlie, Charlie, Charlie Cooke'. Cooke became a pivotal member of the mercurial Chelsea side of the late 1960s and '70s, playing alongside the likes of Peter Bonetti, Alan Hudson and Peter Osgood. The epic two-match 1970 FA Cup final against arch-enemies Leeds remains to this day one of the most-watched television events ever in the United Kingdom. Like many of the era, Cooke finished his career in America, where he played with and against the likes of George Best and Pele. But unlike most of the other British players, Cooke stayed on in the USA, helping the country to develop as a footballing nation. "The Bonnie Prince" is an insightful, exciting and entertaining account of a special footballer, once seen never forgotten.

Charlie currently runs a soccer school in Cincinnati, Ohio .
About soccer in the USA he says "You guys are in dreamland if you don't think it's taking off. Soccer's a huge industry in this country. A lot of people in Europe and Britain want to look down their noses at it and protect their superiority, but they're gonna get their comeuppance."

Rooney's lost form remained lost and McClaren's English honeymoon came to an end with the goalless draw that was played out against Macedonia yesterday.
Despite the favourable astrological omens France went down to Scotland by one goal so Raymond Domenech blamed the ball boys for the loss.
"I was disappointed with the ball boys for slowing down the game,'' he said after Les Bleus' 1-0 loss to the Scots on Saturday. "I think they may have been educated in that. It's regrettable that it was here in a country known for its fair play.''
More pain for Spain and Aragones as they lost 2 - 0 to Sweden.
Italy won against Ukraine by the same margin - their first win since the World Cup.

It will be Macedonia and not England who will be playing the 3-5-2 formation at Old Trafford today.Steve McClaren is sticking with the tried and trusted 4-4-2 system .
Alan Smith writing in the Telegraph says that 3-5-2, 4-4-2 or even 0-0-10 will be fine if one man finds his long lost form.

The FIFPro World XI team will be named from these 55 players in November this year.

In July and August this year 43,000 professional footballers belonging to the 40 professional organisations across the world that form FIFPro received voting forms in a secret ballot to choose four defenders, three midfielders, three forwards and goalkeeper to make up the World XI Team.
55 players have been shortlisted and the final World XI will be announced at the FIFPro World XI Player Awards ceremony in Athens on 6th November 2006.
Chelsea heads the list for the most nominations with eight.
AC Milan ,Barcelona , Juventus ,Bayern Munchen , Real Madrid, Manchester United ,Arsenal, Inter, Valencia Fiorentina, AS Roma, Palermo, Werder Bremen and Atletico Madrid also have players nominated.
Rest of the article and names of the shortlisted players here

The Bafana Bafana's badly need to win against the Chipolopolo on sunday if they want to qualify for the 2008 African Cup of Nations finals .
Defeat would leave them five points behind the Group 11 leaders with four matches to play.
In the meantime the Pharaohs have assembled a star studded team to take on the Zebras for their match on saturday.
The Warriors are the favourites in their game against the Flames but the Atlas Lions are the still on top of that group.
The Snakes and the Super Eagles and the Scorpions and the Hawks and the Crocodiles have also probably played a few games !
For an extensive list of nicknames of African teams go here...........!

Roberto Donadoni is struggling to get the World Cup champions to make it to the Euro 2008 championship.
With Ruud van Nistelrooy and Mark van Bommel refusing to play for Marco van Basten the Dutch team has its own share of problems in their matches against Bulgaria on Sunday and Albania four days later.
Spain coach Luis Aragones intends to recall Raul Gonzalez but his own job is at stake.
Steve McClaren seemed to have been having a better time than the rest of them with his experiments with a 3-5-2 system in a bid to coax the best out of his under-achieving squad.
But now he is busy denying rumours that his players are revolting.
Tough times for the coaches ....!

France's most garlanded goalkeeper Barthez follows Zidane into retirement . He made the announcement on French television channel TF1.
"I am quitting the French team. I am quitting club football," he said.
Some believe that France won the 1998 World Cup because Laurent Blanc planted a kiss on Fabien Barthez's bald head before each game. Apart from the bald head and great goalkeeping he also more than justified the old saying that all goalkeepers are slightly crazy !
Elsewhere in France a lawyer is going to the courts to contest Zinedine Zidane's World Cup final red card!

20th Sept 2006- Liverpool vs Newcastle.
Is there a greater long distance goal scorer than Xabi Alonso ?

Sam Wallace writing in The Independent about Crouch and McClaren has this interesting compilation of statistics on Peter Crouch.

The Positives -
For England :He has scored 11 goals in 14 appearances, six of which have been as a substitute. He has played a total of 924 minutes and scored at a ratio of a goal every 84 minutes.
For Liverpool: In nine appearances (five starts) this season he has scored five goals, including a spectacular scissor kick against Galatasaray. He has played 460 minutes, scoring at a ratio of a goal every 92 minutes.

The Negatives-

For England :The majority of his goals have come against lesser nations: Jamaica (3), Andorra (2) and Trinidad & Tobago (1). May not start if Wayne Rooney, Andrew Johnson and Michael Owen are all fit.
For Liverpool:Has spent 620 minutes of the season so far on the bench or in the stands.

..........and his house got burgled recently

Yesterday in an interview with the BBC Real Madrid president Ramon Calderón said: "As far as I know he's decided to retire in two years. For us it would be fantastic if he could stay with us for the next two years."
Then a spokesman from the Beckham camp rejected the claim saying surprise surprise. "No one has ever discussed a retirement date.David's only concern is to play for Real Madrid and win things at the club"
And this is followed by the club's sporting director, Predrag Mijatovic's quote for the day "Who said anything about paying him more? Maybe he will stay earning less."

Another bend in the bumpy road to South Africa 2010 . FIFA General Secretary Urs Linsi stated yesterday that FIFA "has no doubts the 2010 World Cup" would be "played in South Africa" dismissing reports over the past few weeks that it could be moved to Australia and Franz Beckenbauer issued a written apology to Irvin Khoza chairman of the 2010 Local Organising Committee .

New England Revolution midfielder Clint Dempsey, seen here scoring the only American goal at this year's World Cup, was named US Soccer's national team Player of the Year.
He won the award in voting by a 207-member American sports media panel and received 237 points.Runner-up goalkeeper Kasey Keller got 184 points and Brian McBride came in third with 127 points

Here's something to put on the shopping list.Boys from Brazil - The BBC’s history of the Brazilian national team, up to and including the Mexico ’86 World Cup - available at last on DVD

Didier Zokora sets new heights in the art of diving in Tottenham's win against Portsmouth over the weekend.
Glenn Hoddle called him "a despicable cheat". The referee Chris Foy apologised to Harry Redknapp for the penalty awarded .
It's time to change the laws
Former England captain Tony Adams has added his voice to those shouting for the use of technology to penalise cheats and divers.

The Web Marketing Association's 2006 WebAward for Best Events Website went to Ericsson and Zooma for their work on the Rogers' FIFA World Cup Site.

Ole Gunnar Solksjaer scored twice to put Manchester United back on top of the Premiership with a 2-0 home win against Newcastle but it was Ronaldo who created most of the plays.
Ronaldo has been outstanding this season since returning from the World Cup despite all the booing he is getting for his wink and nod in the famous Rooney exit incident.
"Marvellous," was Sir Alex Ferguson 's instinctive reaction to the first mention of Ronaldo's performance. "But he's been marvellous since the start of the season. Nothing fazes him; he's got such great courage."
Rooney on the other hand has been a shadow of himself but gets to play for England against Macedonia even so.
No such luck for Beckham .He barely manages to get off the bench these days.

Soenke Wortmann the top director who won acclaim for his movie "Miracle of Berne" [A movie about the German national soccer team achieving an unlikely victory in the 1954 World Cup soccer championship ] has created a new documentary on the German Team entitled "Deutschland: Ein Sommermaerchen" (Germany: A summer fairy tale) .
It is receiving unprecedented media coverage before its red-carpet premiere in Berlin deliberately set on Oct. 3, a national holiday celebrating Germany's reunification.
The trailer can be viewed here.

Under Bill Shankly, the Reds lay their foundations to one of the best football clubs of the world.

As Reds fans wonder what maybe going wrong with their season, in 9th place in the Premiership after a disastrous early start, it might do a world of good for Rafa Benitez and his players to remember Bill Shankly's legacy in Anfield, on his 25th death anniversary. At this moment they should have been in a dogfight with Chelsea for the lead in the standings.

This is not where the Reds were supposed to be.

"Shankly's triumphs were built on hard work, an eye for a player and, above all, his remarkable strength of personality and man-management skills."

Under Shankly, the Reds crossed into the realms of the super clubs winning FA titles in 1965 and 1974 and laying the foundation of the Bob Paisley years which saw Liverpool lock up 6 League titles and 3 European cup titles in nine years.

Sports is funny in the sense, as to what inspires teams and players to give off their best. Sometimes just reflecting on Bill Shankly's contribution to Liverpool and their place in history is what might get Benitez and his boys to start playing the football that they are capable of playing. This season is far from over.

Definitely a candidate for the most spectacular goal of the season! Persie sprinting 15 metres full tilt, and then on the run volleying a ball about 4 feet from the ground, burying it at the top of the net. Absolute stunner! After Hleb's gem of a pass to Eboue on the right flank, whose cross hung in the air. Gunner football at its best. The Brit Samba boys cannot stop rocking!

For those of you who are asking that question, relax. He's busy with an off-off-broadway play for alteregoproductions...

They're doing a production of "A First Class Man," a dramatization based on the story of the mathematicians Ramanujan and G H Hardy. It's set in South India, Cambridge, and London during the First World War. Ramanujan was an untutored genius and a mystic who believed his formulae came to him through prayer. Hardy was an atheist, a mandarin of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a leading mathematician of the day. He brought Ramanujan to Cambridge and together they did significant work. The alliance changed both men in unexpected ways. The central themes of the play are faith versus reason and the difficulty of being an outsider in a closed society.

Great stuff, I'm sure.

If you're in NY, check it out >>

In the 10 years since his first match in charge of Arsenal in October, here are 10 ways in which Wenger has changed English football...

A brilliant article by The Guardian's Amy Lawrence.

What it's like from the stands:

Man U was lucky to get the tie.

Three questions:

1. Will Sir Alex bench Rooney?
2. Will Adu join Reading?
3. Who will Man Utd. get in January?

Soccerblog has been talking about the MLS business model for some time now. Now it's time for that model to kick in and deliver some cash - to the league, and more importantly to the clubs.

It's not whether Freddy's leaving or not, it's when. Might as well be January.

Will it be Reading, Man Utd. or Chelsea. At Reading he'll play. At Man U and Chelsea he'll be a bench warmer. What's it going to be Freddy?

Farewell, Adu. And we'll root for you no matter where you go!

Funny song on Mourinho "The Special One" sung to the tune of Andrew LLoyd Webber's "Any Dream Will Do" and called "Any Team will do" !!