There’s a wonderful simplicity that characterises Jermain Defoe’s career: a love of playing and a love of scoring goals. It sounds faintly ludicrous – a Premier League striker driven by the desire…
Tag: premier league
EACH PREMIER LEAGUE season provides a stark reminder of the global reach of the English game and its continual ability to extend into previously untapped areas of the plane, in search of…
It’s fair to say that Englishmen don’t have the best reputation away from home. Overbearing, lobster pink dads with melanoma-level sunburn berating hospitality workers in slow, loud English as they try to order…
I can’t think of a specific watershed moment where the adulation of specific players changed into pleasant dispassion, but I know it happened. As I bled on paper for Fàbregas, Rosický, Nasri,…
It is often the players who seek the elusive who find the ‘what might have been’ in football. Some players are simply part of the wrong generation. This generation is one where club…
Strike partnerships are a beautiful thing when they come along. The days of deadly duos are something lost to nostalgia in the modern game, with threatening tridents and often even quartets becoming…
“Why couldn’t you beat a richer club? I’ve never seen a bag of money score a goal.” The words of Johan Cruyff. That’s the sort of trailblazing, fearless thinking that helped push…
The random and unprovoked memory of some games has the power to make you clench your jaw. Time isn’t always a healer. It might require a sharp intake of breath, a furrowed…
Not many footballers simply fall into the habit of kicking a ball around a patch of grass for a living. It might not seem that way sometimes with play-acting, cynicism and the…
It is the end of the 2012/13 season and Juan Mata has just received the Chelsea Player of the Year Award for the second year in a row. “I just want to…
ON A WARM spring evening in May 1999, Alex Ferguson is standing on the touchline of the Camp Nou as his dream of a treble-winning trophy haul slowly dies before his eyes.…
Football isn’t politically correct. It’s not an ideal location for discourse, and it’s not the best place to hear enlightened views about modern society. It’s a sport where telling the referee what…
I once heard a joke involving Owen Hargreaves when the midfielder was a Manchester United player. The joke went along the lines of ‘Hargreaves ruled out for a further four weeks after…
SOME VOICES intrinsically command respect, others obedience, but as the powerful, deep growl boomed out there was only one emotion flooding over the shaking 12-year-old boy: pure fear. “What do you want?”…
April 2015 saw Watford Football Club return to the Premier League eight years after a forgettable campaign under Aidy Boothroyd, which saw the club finish bottom with a mere five victories. A 2-0…
Michail Antonio’s rise from non-league star to getting an England call-up interestingly mirrors that of Leicester City star Jamie Vardy. Both came from semi-professional football to eventually reach the promised land of…
Adam Lallana is one of those players who has always been there. There, hanging in the space between irrelevant and popular. A decent, gifted squad player who can be relied on, but…
CHASING THE BALL DOWN THE LEFT FLANK, Kanu steals it from Chelsea right-back Albert Ferrer and finds himself confronted by Ed de Goey, the keeper having rushed out of goal to close…