”Mi amigos” is how Diego Maradona is known to describe them. Ali Bin Nasser and Bogdan Dotchev are not on cordial terms with one another. Over three decades on, they still blame each…
Month: February 2016
“I‘m not ready to relax on a beach yet,” quipped Ashley Cole as he signed for AS Roma in the summer of 2014. Cole’s views on the possibility of gracing Major League Soccer…
IT IS THE 1994 WORLD CUP QUARTER-FINAL and Sweden have 13 minutes to find an equaliser as they trail Romania 2-1. They turn to 22-year-old Feyenoord forward Henrik Larsson, a player who…
THERE IS AN old Norwegian proverb that goes something along the lines of ‘A friend is known in need, like gold is known in fire’, and it’s hard not to imagine that it…
WHEN VALENTINO MAZZOLA rolled up his sleeves on the pitch, it signalled to the rest of the team that he was about to take over, that the greatest player of calcio was about…
When European football anoraks look back at the 2015-16 campaign the temptation may well be to label it the season of the underdog. Leicester City’s odds-defying title win would be used as evidence,…
MOST FOOTBALL TRIVIA BUFFS AND HISTORIANS you ask will tell you that the transfer of Trevor Francis to Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest in 1979 was the first million pound deal in football. Famously, when…
Reminiscing of a time before he became Ireland’s pre-eminent sports writer, Con Houlihan recalled the World Cup of 1966 with particular affection: “It was the first to be broadcast on television in…
Paul Scholes is arguably the most naturally gifted English midfielder since Paul Gascoigne, but his time at the top was marred by the circumstances surrounding his early international retirement, as well as his…
There may not be a clearer contrast in the career of one man at a club as there is with Graeme Souness at Liverpool, from legend to villain
This feature is part of The Masterminds “EVERY MANAGER DIES a little during a game. I’d rather die in a dug-out than moulder away in a director’s box.” Jock Stein, speaking in 1978. Many…
TEETERING PERILOUSLY close to the swaying trapdoor that is relegation to the Netherlands’ second tier, FC Twente can do little but hope their legs hold out long enough to preserve their top-flight status…
Vladimir Putin is already a powerful man, but as he purposefully shook hands with his Brazilian counterpart Dilma Rousseff in the Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro on 13 July 2014, he…
CHINESE FOOTBALL HAS BEEN GRABBING THE HEADLINES RECENTLY, mainly due to the huge transfer fees that have been paid to entice players to head east. These transfers have made headlines around the…
Football fans are often crying out for an icon to lead them towards glory, a rare talisman who can create dreams on the field of play by acting as a glowing beacon to…
The average attendance at League of Ireland matches in 2014 was just 1,559. In the same year, 120,000 Irish fans travelled to attend Premier League games, accounting for 15 per cent of overseas…
When Tony Yeboah rocked up in the Premier League in 1995, few knew what to expect. A year later, the Ghanaian had written his name into folklore
WHEN YOU’RE A CHILD AND YOU DREAM OF BEING A FOOTBALLER, you dream of playing in games like the one Marseille and Paris Saint-Germain played out on Easter Sunday, 2015. Going into…