One might think that the group stage of the CONCACAF Gold Cup was a complete failure for Curaçao. The Gold Cup newcomers accumulated zero points after losing a trio of matches by…
Month: August 2017
The 2010 World Cup is remembered for all the wrong reasons. Yelping vuvuzelas, squalid football and the infamous Jabulani mean the tournament’s sporting legacy lies on shaky ground. When Andrés Iniesta brought the football…
Fireworks, smoke from flares and ticker tape filled the Buenos Aires night sky as Boca Juniors lifted their 32nd Argentine championship in June 2017. The title had been sealed five days earlier…
THE DATE ATOP the newspapers read 28 April 1978. On their back pages, the latest Bundesliga table told of a campaign 33 rounds old, just a day from its conclusion, whose two…
I once spent most of an evening being eyeballed by Diego Costa. At least that’s what I thought was happening. I was in a pub in central London and whenever I looked up…
On the day that legendary Manchester United youth coach Eric Harrison was formally honoured for his extraordinary developmental work with young footballers – most notably his discovery and nurturing of the Class of…
NOTICEABLY QUIET AND EMOTIONALLY DETACHED, when young Casemiro finally opened up about what had been tormenting him since he was a boy, he told his mother Magda one day while playing of…
It was hard to tell what was more disconcerting – the abrupt sign warning that firearms were banned or the eerie emptiness that enveloped the ground. Although piercing sunshine blazed all around,…
THE PREMIER LEAGUE IS BACK with a bang but few transfers over the summer have divided opinion as much as the return of the prodigal son to Goodison Park. Some people say…
When Kevin Campbell arrived at Everton in 1999, they were facing the real threat of relegation. Months later, they were safe, and Campbell was a hero
The brutality was as effective as it was violent. The claustrophobia inflicted on his opponents was stifling to the point of suffocation. Reputations were swept away as easily as a standing leg…
Two years ago, Hamburger SV came within seconds of a very first relegation from the Bundesliga. The Dinosaur, the only club to contest each and every Bundesliga campaign since its inception in…
BODO ILGNER, Andreas Köpke, Oliver Kahn, Jens Lehmann, Manuel Neuer; the list of Germany’s first-choice goalkeepers over the past three decades reads off like a reel of dynastic succession. Not only is…
Jolted by an unexpected and most unpleasant sensation, the elegant defender fell to the turf. The Wimbledon striker, John Fashanu, was the closest opponent to him as a sharp, shooting pain pierced…
Zlatan Ibrahimović arrived at Ajax as a gangly target man but would with the platform to become of the best strikers ever seen in European football
Hit and miss: that’s an honest way to describe Chelsea’s history with forwards in the Premier League. For every Didier Drogba, there have been a couple of Adrian Mutus on the books…
“Awareness is the most important thing in soccer.” Paul Dalglish makes this proclamation regularly to the players at Ottawa Fury, reminding them that it is often this skill that separates the best from…
It’s unlikely that anyone who witnessed the FA’s celebrations, which failed to capture the nation’s attention for over a year, will remember them fondly