NO MATTER how well Gareth Southgate’s team performs and how much good progress was made in the 2018 World Cup, many football fans still find international break weekends tedious and an unwelcome distraction. Southgate and his immediate predecessors got what England managers, going way back as far as Sir Alf Ramsey and Don Revie, wanted […]
NO sooner than the World Cup is over, we will all focus on the next international competition, the UEFA Nations League (UNL). Designed to create relevance in a crowded fixture list, the UNL is UEFA’s attempt to make national team games more interesting. Little have they admitted it, the real reason may be to cut […]
WHEN Hungary looked as though they were about to rule the football world, the country had a revolution and the team dubbed the best on the planet all but broke up. In September 1956, Hungary won 1-0 in Moscow in a friendly, an impressive result in front of 102,000 people against a Soviet Union team […]
LET’S be frank, qualifying tournaments have become tedious – bloated and repetitive, full of over familiarity, largely predictable (don’t say that in Amsterdam this summer) and too much cannon fodder. Sometimes, you forget if you’re watching a European Championship or a World Cup qualifier. So here’s an idea. Why not use the continental tournaments as […]
IT’S GOOD NEWS that the Nordic football associations are considering making a joint-bid for either Euro 2024 or 2028. The region has been under-used by UEFA and FIFA, hosting one European Championship in 1992, one World Cup in 1958 (neutral Sweden after WW2) and three European Cup-Winners Cups (Goteborg, Copenhagen and Stockholm). The plan is […]
NEXT YEAR’S European Championship is going to be a strange affair – Wales, Northern Ireland, Iceland and now Albania have all qualified, bringing a whole new perspective on the tournament. The sceptics will suggest that UEFA’s accountants must now be wondering who will turn up to watch some of the “dead-rubber” group games that will […]
I walked past a men’s hairdressers in downtown Bologna and a giant photo of an Italian football team stared out at me through the window. It’s not an uncommon site in a coffee bar, tobacconist or barber to have such adornments – before the corporatisation of Britain, which made people that cut hair into technicians, […]
