Month: September 2006

Sepp Blatter has tired of penalty shoot-outs at World Cup Finals, and wants to replace them with.. well, he doesn’t really know. Counting corners, taking players off one by one during extra time, just playing on until someone scores – like a lot of us, Blatter senses that there’s something cheap and unsatisfactory about penalties,…

Not quite what it sounds. Fray Bentos is one of the more charismatic Flickr contributors, and the title refers to this of his photographs here: Plenty else there well worth exploring.

Leo McKinstry’s other football book, Jack and Bobby, was my desert island volume. That’s the Charltons, not the Kennedys, and this time it’s Bobby who gets to be President and no one is shot unless you count Jack’s interest in game birds. Sir Alf is cut from the same quality of cloth. Painstakingly researched and…

There’ve been relatively few great football novels. The best of them all, of course, was Hamilton of the “Ringers”, 1959, in which a chap named Hamilton joins a First Division side as an amateur, and in his first season as centre-forward helps the Ringers to the title and the FA Cup, helps himself to some…

I’m back, and there’ll be at least two further posts over the course of today. I spent most of the last week just alone in a chair, with my eyes closed, listening to the world go by. In Oxford, that sound consisted of the occasional bounce-tick of a passing bicycle, in Devon of waves breaking…

My plans for the next week chiefly involve hiding away in a quiet back garden in North Oxford, a pile of battered, un-work-related books from Robin Waterfield at my elbow, a cat in my lap and another sitting on my head. Then, a couple of days on the Devon coast. Have a marvellous week, enjoy…

More Than Mind Games has been down for most of the last three days. Dreamhost, my normally excellent host, has been conducting complicated repairs and upgrades and all should now be well.

Were it not for the well-publicised fact that the two clubs haven’t met competitively before, you’d imagine this as one of those floodlit glory nights from the 1960s. Celtic are a better side, now, than they give themselves credit for, and were simply unfortunate to run into Louis Saha in the mood. Of course, the…

From this morning’s Guardian, an article on Sven Goran Erickson’s non-attendance of an international football symposium in Germany. Lennart Johansson says that Sven has had enough of the UK media circus for the time being. I find that entirely understandable. The early days of the World Cup were marked by a variety of newspapers and…

A brief “links” post today, as busy between now and Monday morning. The departures from Southampton of Rupert Lowe, Clive Woodward and Simon Clifford represent to me in stark form the present unwillingness of English club football to do what is necessary to bring the best out of our players and achieve what our national…