Mills to Leeds? A sign Leicester have given up on the play offs?
As an outsider looking in at the Championship it would be easy to glance at recent results and make the assumption that Leicester City are one of the teams making a desperate last push towards the play offs with all at the KP stadium pulling in a top 6 direction.
That said then, the situation regarding £5m central defender Matt Mills at best raises some question marks over the clubs ambitions and at worse suggests they have already thrown the towel in when it comes to promotion this term.. Read more..
How can Football clubs build up massive debts with HMRC? Football debt been a key feature on the front and back pages of daily newspapers of late, at the centre of which has been comment and speculation in relation to the plights of Rangers and Portsmouth and how vast debts to the inland revenue, or HMRC as we are now to call them, could have been allowed to build up to financial black holes which are threatening to swallow some of Britain’s biggest names… Read more…
Agent Willie McKay’s experiment at Doncaster Rovers will fail because he picked the wrong club
Doncaster are stuck to the bottom of the Championship, rooted like the most impressive of giant oak trees and seemingly headed in one direction only.
This surely signals that the agents self celebrated plan to serve up big names with big performances on a budget has fallen flat on it’s face.. Read More..
Portsmouth FC may well be staring down the barrel of a HMRC cocked gun, with fans and officials alike considering the possibility that Pompey may well be no more.
There are at least 1.6 million reasons why the club are where they are today, but the FA must take notice of the situation on the south coast and learn the lessons which are being taught at Portsmouth’s expense.. Read More..
Doncaster hope Diouf can fill in at the Sharp end
Doncaster finally tied up the immediate future of Senegal forward El Hadji Diouf this week following the departure of striker Billy Sharp to Southampton. The club had announced a deal had been done to extend the controversial forwards stay at the Keepmoat stadium.. Read more
Blackpool FC – the Championships consistently inconsistent
Blackpool Football Club’s incredible demolition of Leeds United at Elland Road was as out of the blue as an Ian Holloway sound bite, but the 5-0 victory raises more questions than it provides answers about the tangerines season..read more..
Palace’s jewel Freedman slips under the Championship radar
Southampton have had a great start to the season, and everyone knows it. West Ham were always going to threaten under Sam Allardyce and they have started well and find themselves in second, and everyone knows it. Derby surprised a lot of people with the start they made and are now genuine promotion candidates, and everyone knows it.
What seems to have slipped under the radar however is the remarkable job that Dougie Freedman.. Read more..
Leicester city get what they should’ve expected from Eriksson.
The thing about football wrote about it in the summer, and I’m sure that countless others did too. It seemed clear to most people looking in, that signing more than half a dozen new players would mean that Leicester City may struggle initially to find a settled side, one which could gel with one another as, with the season still in it’s infancy, strangers introduced themselves to strangers, and styles of play were found out.. Read more…
Doncaster Rovers twist with McKay rather than stick with what they have
Now that the dust has settled around Sean O’Driscoll’s sacking as Doncaster Rovers manager the club may have more questions to answer with the moves made since.
The eyebrows raised following Chairman John Ryan’s dramatic turn around, removing his manager just days after he publicly backed him, have now been replaced by a more puzzled look at the gambles.. Read more…
Even West Ham have no time for Tevez as Diouf comes into view So Sam Allardyce has ruled out signing Man City outcast Carlos Tevez as it seems as though the strikers fall from grace is plummeting new depths. Champions league football to Championship football.. Read More..
Astute Hughton can see the Wood for the trees.
It’s likely a few unconvinced eyebrows were raised come mid august when Birmingham manager Chris Hughton turned to teenage striker Chris Wood to ease his Injury concerns. Read more…
Pressure builds on Championship managers looking for magic formula
A number of Managers in the Football Championship are beginning to find themselves shuffling in their seats as the pressure to provide a tangible return on their chairmans investment grows ever more real.
Gone now are the all smiling days of pre season with talk of what might become replaced with talk of what should have been, with those managers who invested so much on so many already feeling the burden after half a dozen games… Read more…
The ongoing Carlos Tevez saga has turned from being an embarrassing pantomime to a distasteful joke, increasingly at the expense of English football.
Tevez seemingly will never appear in the sky blue of Manchester City again, having frequently trotted out the excuse that he is desperate to return to his native south America to be near to his family in Argentina.
This has always been a slightly awkward excuse, right up there with “sorry, Im washing my hair”, but it was mutually beneficial for all concerned, in the uk and beyond, to hide behind this facade in an attempt to save some face while the inevitable played itself… Read more…
Brighton’s new Amex Community Stadium will provide timely trip down memory lane
Next month when Brighton cut the ribbon on their brand new home, the impressive looking Amex stadium, against Doncaster Rovers it would be easy to think of it as just the latest club to unveil a new home and for the neutral to impart only the most fleeting of glances, however fans of both clubs will view the day with much more significance.
14 years ago, Brighton played their final game at their then home, the history laden Goldstone ground, fighting for their lives to retain their English football league status, and to avoid extinction at the hands of a board intent on stripping anything of value from the football club, no matter the cost… Read more…
England women’s coach Hope Powell needs to look closer to home for her sides failings.
This week the England women’s coach, Hope Powell, launched an incredulous attack on her players in the wake of the teams world cup exit.
England stumbled to a 1-1 draw with France before exiting the tournament 4-3 on penalties prompting Powell, who is quoted in the national media as describing those players who were reluctant to take a spot kick as “weak” and “cowardice” to make her outburst, leaving her seemingly more comfortable publicly blaming the bottle of her players than addressing her own, blatant tactical inadequacies… Read More…
Leicester City’s transfer dealings set championship pace
Leicester City have become the pace setters in the race for new signings among clubs in the English Championship. The board are clearly backing manager Sven Goran Eriksson with the funds required to make an impact next season, with the former England manager already having made six acquisitions this summer… Read more…
Can Sir Alex Ferguson avoid another flop between the posts at Old Trafford?
Manchester United fans will doubtless hold their collective breath this summer as Sir Alex Ferguson stumbles into the goalkeeping transfer market once again.
The retirement of Edwin van der Sar has left a big hole to be filled at Old Trafford, it seems prudent that question marks should be hanging over Ferguson’s ability to capture.. Read more..
The beginning of the end at Arsenal?
So, Arsenal haven’t won a trophy in six years. There was more than one occasion last season where that much used statistic looked like being brushed aside by the Emirates finest. Trophy hunting on four fronts was spectacularly reduced to another empty handed waste of a season within a few weeks at the business end of the season, and talk of ‘lost bottle’ and ‘supporters unrest’ replaced dreams of another incarnation of Arsene’s invincibles… Read more..
Oleg Salenko – golden boots he could never fill
The world cup has served up a host of great goal scoring feats achieved by some of the greatest names the game has produced. Locked in footballing immortality are an elite band of players whose names are known the world over by virtue of winning the games most coveted golden boot. Just Fontaine, Eusabio, Gerd Muller, Paolo Rossi, Gary Lineker to name but a few, however there is one name which may jump out from the list above all others, conspicuous by its unfamiliarity.
Russia’s only entrant in the list may not be a house hold name, but in a list where inclusion is not a coincidence or merely an act of fortune, there must be more than first meets the eye to the name and the career of Oleg Salenko. Read more..
That bloke off the telly
I recently spent a few empty and most probably wasted minutes, pondering over the last time I watched an accomplished England performance… A few minutes that I’ll never get back ticked by and I couldn’t come up with an answer. When was the last time I enjoyed watching our national side then? Clearly with time to waste, a few more precious minutes ticked by before eventually a mildly entertaining moment clicked into my now aching head.
The 2007 friendly defeat to Germany, the only bright spot of which, and arguably the most entertaining moment (other than the credit which should go to Christian Panders 40th minute winner) was Gary Lineker’s link to camera before the credits… Read more…
Championship to Premiership – the ‘maybes’ and the ‘maybe nots’
The championship is a hugely competitive and entertaining place to take in football with a number of hugely talented footballers on show across the country on a weekly basis. This is perfectly evidenced by the players who have progressed from english footballs second tier, to make the grade among the countries elite.
Two years ago, the likes of Charlie Adam and David Vaughan were mere also rans in amongst the hustle and bustle of ‘proper football’ and now find themselves courted by some of the the biggest clubs in the land. Even more recently than that, a young english striker called Andy Carroll was struggling to find a grounding in the game, and struggling more for goals, before the championship lessons were learnt and a promising footballer emerged.
Swansea recently captured last seasons top championship goal getter Danny Graham to spearhead their premier league bow next term, for a modest £3.5m fee. Graham has all the attributes to ensure he’s among the goals next term which led me to wonder which other names could make the grade, and may soon make the step up, and which high profile ‘maybes’ won’t cut it? Read more…
Could this summer see the end of spurs?
July and August could yet prove the most crucial months in recent times for Tottenham and go a long way to defining the club for some years to come.
Manchester United’s dressing down at Wembley in the Champions League final has seen Alex Ferguson embark on a rebuild of his squad in an attempt to find some form of solution to Europe’s elite. With £17m already spent and a deal for Ashley Young seemingly all but done, United’s stance is clear… Read more….
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Very interesting observations.I was particulary interested in the Championship comments, and would like more