By Chris Wright

So, as well as Neven Subotic giving Arjen Robben the old 'Keown' treatment after a spaffed penalty, it seems that Bayern Munich 'keeper Manuel Neuer was also subjected to a bit of antagonisation during last night's clash at the Bundesliga summit - finding himself engulfed in a banana blizzard at one point.

Umbro has followed 2011′s New York Cosmos Blackout range with an all new Whiteout Collection inspired by the 1978 New York City Blizzard. According to the UK-based soccer specialists: February...

By Chris Wright

It snowed a fair old bit in and around Northwest Italy last night, so much so in fact that the Serie A tie between Parma and Juventus bit the big white bullet and was duly called off. However, the same cannot be said for Livorno's Serie B game against Varese, which went ahead despite the stadium being engulfed in a blizzard for the majority of the evening.

For the longest time I have been a type of Eurosnob, you know those fans who want the MLS to be like Europe. I am not a fan of the single table, nor am I a fan of only the ManUre's of the world. I was only a Eurosnob about youth development. They have been doing it there for 100+ years so they have to know how to do it.

Oliver Sparrow and Eric Beard had the pleasure of spending an hour with esteemed author and journalist Jonathan Wilson on the AFR Podcast. Jonathan writes for The Guardian, The Independent, Sports Illustrated, World Soccer, and FourFourTwo. He is also the editor of a quarterly publication called The Blizzard, which is filled with content from some of the biggest names in football journalism.

BY ADAM SERRANO

LOS ANGELES -- Chandler Hoffman can't stop scoring and thanks to the junior forward's incredible run of form, UCLA sits just one win away from the College Cup.

Hoffman tallied two goals, making his total 18 on the year, as UCLA defeated Rutgers, 3-0, at Drake Stadium in the NCAA Round of 16 on Sunday night.

There's a Golden Sky By Ian Ridley Published by Bloomsbury, October 2011 £18.99 ISBN: 9781408130407 It's often been asserted that the one remaining advantage mainstream media has over bloggers is the issue of access to the game's personalities – Jonathan Wilson made this point on establishing The Blizzard earlier this year and Kevin McCauley expounded on the subject in an overview of a spat

There's a Golden Sky By Ian Ridley Published by Bloomsbury, October 2011 £18.99 ISBN: 9781408130407 It's often been asserted that the one remaining advantage mainstream media has over bloggers is the issue of access to the game's personalities – Jonathan Wilson made this point on establishing The Blizzard earlier this year and Kevin McCauley expounded on the subject in an overview of a spat

BY Sharon Hom
A second Kansas City area indoor soccer team has been located on the Kansas side of the metro.
The Kansas Magic of the are managed and owned by B.J. Latas, a former professional goalkeeper with the St. Louis Ambush of the NPSL.

Yeah, my power's been out. Curse you, October blizzard.

Remember when I said attendance was good this year? I was wrong. It was great. Record shattering, in fact. Enough to surpass the NBA and NHL, in fact. Seriously. After sixteen years, we have beaten not only our own record set in 1996, but those of other leagues against whom we're compared.

Photo: Nicolae Stoian

When asked on MLSsoccer.com's Extratime podcast what he thought when Peter Nowak introduced the five man backline to the team, Danny Califf said, "To be honest, you know, I was a bit surprised. Most of the time, come playoff time, it's not the time to be experimenting and trying out new things and new personnel and things like that.

I've been hopping all over the web these past two weeks. Why? Well, some great sites have asked me to put finger to keyboard, and I have dutifully obliged. Think you can keep up?

Let's find out.

First, I waxed for the Free Beer Movement "Brews and Views" series on the current state of US soccer at large.

Canadian author James Grossi writes for The Blizzard and at his blog, Partially Obstructed View.

As MLS grows towards its twentieth club in the coming years there is a risk of losing the balanced schedule. Comments by Commissioner Don Garber intimated that perhaps such a pure form would have to be set aside in order to accommodate the expanded league.

So, a new sports website, featuring the likes of Bethlehem Shoals, Eric Freeman, and Fredorrarci, is nearing lift off. There's just one problem: NASA has privatized space travel, so these fine gentlemen need your kind contributions to get this ship off the ground. They have around two weeks left to raise about $10,000 a bit of a task, but they've already raised over $40,000.

With everybody now seemingly on Twitter, it is difficult to know who is worth following especially if you're looking for decent football opinions. So it is that I've tried to compile a list of the best people out there who are well worth following. Be warned, however that as a rule I tend not to follow player - do they ever have anything really of interest to say?

It seems to me there are three distinct types of football writing.
First, we have the straight-up, journalistic, newspaper style match-report. There are some intriguing variations on this approach, like Michael Cox's Zonal Marking with its intense tactical hermeneutics, or the florid style you might sometimes find in a strange place like the Mirror, incorporating all sorts of colourful, often mixed metaphors that end up featured in the opening pages of When Saturday Comes.

I know. I missed a few things.
Mostly the launch of the Blizzard, what that meant for football blogging and whether it heralded a new page in football journalism, which I hope to talk about in the coming days.
As I hope you've been aware, I've been writing daily posts for The Score's Footy Blog, which has been an incredibly useful discipline.

Kansas Magic to host Colorado Springs Blizzard - Premier Arena Soccer League

...and go buy Issue #1 of The Blizzard. It's a pay-what-you-like model, and I was suspicious of the £3 (~$5) suggested price for the ePub. But I'm a big fan of Jonathan Wilson, so I took the plunge and feel richly rewarded for doing so, both in the quantity and the quality of the work included. A nice stack of non-time-sensitive soccer/football journalism now sits on my phone, just waiting for those little gaps in the day to appear.

We have this wonderfully complex & twisted relationship, you and I. You depend on me to write a post on this blog for your reading pleasure. If I post, you read it. If I don't post, you simmer with anticipation. The cosmic heat from your lingering desire may elicit from me a temporarily curled eyebrow and a smirk, but little more.

FireStingDoug looks back at May 27, 1981:

"The Sting travelled north of the border to Toronto to face the Blizzard at Exhibition Stadium, the site of the 1981 Soccer Bowl. Their six game winning streak came to an end at the hands of the second worst team in the league by a score of 3-1. Derek Spalding scored the only goal on a penalty kick.

• The Independent proves prophetic qualities in its' pre-CL profile of attack minded Schalke coach Ralf Rangnick. (The Independent)
• Leander Schaerlaeckens is less prophetic but all the more impressed by Ralf Rangnick's attack minded Schalke. (ESPN)
• Zonal Marking is not too impressed by all the ludicrous defending going on between Inter and Schalke.

I was around twelve the first time I saw a copy of When Saturday Comes. I still remember the front cover – it included a jubilant Stig Inge Bjornebye after Norway had beaten England – but what really impressed me were the articles that it featured. This was no Match or Shoot but something more grown up.

In this episode of the EPL Talk Podcast, Richard Farley chats with football writer and author Jonathan Wilson to discuss the launch of the brand-new football magazine The Blizzard. Farley explores why Wilson saw a need to start the publication,...
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To the rest of the world it was just another match in the blizzard of international fixtures, the first hurdle for two footballing minnows on the long road to qualification to the London Olympics. But in Ramallah, Palestine's meeting with Thailand assumed far greater importance.

Forty-nine years after the Palestinian FA's formation and 13 since it was formally recognised by Fifa, this game was the first competitive international match ever played on Palestinian soil.

Empty Glasses, Flat Caps And James Horncastle Being off the internet airways for 14 days, Adam and Kevin return in episode 9.1 joined by James Horncastle, one of Calcio's most well respected journalists and contributor to Jonathan Wilson's fantastic new project "The Blizzard" . From Bologna's Marco Di Vaio to Milan's Thiago Silva the boys get James' take.

The Blizzard You might know Jonathan Wilson as a football journalist (Guardian, World Soccer magazine, Sports Illustrated etcetera) and author of four books (including Behind the Curtain: Football in Eastern Europe, Inverting the Pyramid), a tactics genius and historian, an expert on Slavic and Eastern European football, a Guardian Football Weekly regular, and a giant brain sitting in a tub of

Tom, Chris, Jamie, Ben, Andy Barcelona. And Lyon. A minor crisis at EFW Towers this week. After penning part one of this epic two-part series whereby five lads set out to conquer Europe in a car named Beyonce, or was it Emile? Anyway, Jamie Cutteridge was lured away by a multi-pound deal with Jonathan Wilson's new production The Blizzard (everybody is talking about it).

Image: REUTERS/Jon Nazca.

Have you gotten your flu shots, Kickettes?

Well, apparently a few of us missed ours. Others are keeping warm and toasty mid-blizzard in their beds. One of us is really lazy.

So here's the bad news: Iker had Sara C. to tend to his achey head and possibly bruised ego following last night's onslaught of winged water bottles.