THE RECENT Soccerex Football Finance 100 showed that English football is the dominant force in world football at the moment. Of the many clubs from the Premier League and Championship, there was one name that certainly made you look twice to ensure your eyes were not playing tricks – Barnsley, the 65th strongest football club […]
THE mounted Police were out in force. “I think they use horses to calm the fans down,” said one Fulham fan walking through Bishops Park as a large, Shire-esque creature plodded through the waterlogged pathway. “This is how they control football crowds in England,” he added to his foreign guest. A police horse has never […]
HOW OFTEN does a crowd filter out of a football stadium feeling they haven’t really been entertained? All too frequently, there’s a collective shrug of the shoulders, comments like, “not bad” or “they tried”, although supporters of the winning team console themselves with the result, a case of points over performance, function over form. Not […]
ANYONE who watched Fulham’s calamitous 2018-19 season probably felt there was no way the team constructed by the club’s owner and his son was “too good to go down”. Certainly, even if the players bought in the summer of 2018 – an example of scatter gun team construction – underperformed because of a lack of […]
ONE YEAR after newly-promoted Fulham were throwing money around and buying players for fun, the Cottagers found themselves back in the more humble surroundings of the Championship. The moneyball experiment, if that’s the right word for the way the club accumulated quantity over quality, was over and some of the higher profile names, notably some […]
NEWCASTLE UNITED’s fans are incredible. Just consider the club’s honours list: last trophy of any significance, 1969; most recent FA Cup triumph, 1955; last league title, 1927. They haven’t had much to cheer about, but they are intensely loyal, passionate and mostly, very well behaved considering that the river Tyne, in football terms, has been […]
OK, SO THE Premier League is tougher than expected. One hundred million pounds may have been spent, but most of it went on players that nobody had really heard of, and it is taking time to come up with a settled, competitive team. Alright…it is going to be a tough winter. There, it has been […]
JUST imagine, if Chelsea’s founding family, the Mears, had got their way, there might not have been a Craven Cottage and the football world would have been deprived of one of the real pleasures of watching the game in London. Is there a more pleasant experience than walking from Hammersmith, past the Odeon (the theatre […]
IF LONDON’s often abysmal infrastructure had got its way, I would not have reached Craven Cottage on time for Fulham’s second Premier League home game of the season. Train delays, tube disruptions, over-crowding from the Notting Hill Carnival and to top that, incessant rain. Normally, that wouldn’t bother me, but a damaged knee made the […]
