Chasing the Big Leagues FC Zwolle (Dutch Eerste Divisie) is a post from: Just Football
Just Football's Tales from Tier Two series, in
association with @tiertwofooty, concludes now with a look at the runaway leaders of the Dutch
Eerste Divisie:
FC Zwolle
FC Zwolle are in pole position to return to the Dutch Eredivisie eight years
since they were cruelly relegated after both Volendam and Vitesse claimed rare victories as Zwolle
were being thumped 7-1 at Feyenoord.
The last week or so has said a lot about England, the state of the country, its sporting culture
and the team that is supposed to represent it on the stage of international football. Apathy levels
with the national team, however, are growing to the point at which it may become pertinent to ask
the question of what the England national football team is actually for.
The last week or so has said a lot about England, the state of the country, its sporting culture
and the team that is supposed to represent it on the stage of international football. Apathy levels
with the national team, however, are growing to the point at which it may become pertinent to ask
the question of what the England national football team is actually for.
At the Heysel Stadium in Brussels on the eighteenth of June 1972, West Germany lifted their
first major tournament trophy since the 1954 World Cup. Two years later, at the Olympic Stadium in
Munich, they lifted the World Cup. Yet it is sometimes said that the team of 1972 is more fondly
remembered than the team of two years later, and it is certainly fair to say that the road to these
twin victories was not without its problems.
"Check that's not Jackie Chan, will you?" after one particularly high challenge in the African
Cup of Nations (ACN) semi-finals. Ah yes. Gary O'Reilly was back on Eurosport. And welcome back
too. However, the most telling comment of any international football tournament is "no goals
against." And that's a quote from Cote D'Ivoire.
It has, as many of you will already be aware, been a long few months for the supporters of
Kettering Town Football Club. During this period, their club has been uprooted to the former home
of their defunct former local rivals, they have been promised the earth and have seen only the
delivery of unpaid bills and an uphill battle to avoid relegation from the Blue Square Bet
Premier.
Welcome to English football in 2012. The captain of the national team faces a criminal charge
for the use of racially aggravated abuse during a Premier League match. Five months after the
event, the FA announce that this player will be stripped of the captaincy without, it would appear,
having consulted the manager.
Copa Libertadores 2012 Property of Brazil? is a post from: Just Football
South America's flagship competition, the Copa Libertadores, is up and running
for another season with the group stages kicking off this week. 32 of Latin America's finest will
compete to succeed Santos as champions, and thanks to the increasing strength of
the Brazilian economy and the country's increasing ability to keep hold of and attract their finest
countrymen, Brazil is once considered the trophy's most likely destination come the final in
July.
So, Fabio Capello quits as the England national coach. This is, perhaps, unsurprising
considering the dog's abuse that he has taken while leading the national team through an almost
flawless qualification campaign, before finding that the decision over who would take the England
captain's arm-band was taken away from him without consultation.
We have something a little different for you today on Twohundredpercent, as Paul Grech meets Ben
Perry Acton, a player that forsook the English game to pursue a career in Malta. In addition to
this, Ben had a grandfather whose name will be more than familiar to the supporters of Blackpool
and Bolton Wanderers Bill Perry, who scored the winning goal in The Matthews FA Cup Final match
between the two clubs in 1953.
In December of 1970, the Italian playwright Dario Fo released a play entitled "Morte Accidentale
Di Un Anarchico" ("The Accidental Death Of An Anarchist"). Based on the aftermath of the 1969
Piazza Fontana Bombing in Milan, which killed seventeen people, it was a play that shone a light
upon the subsequent death of Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist activist and railway worker who fell
from the fourth floor window of a Milan police station under suspicious circumstances after having
already been held for longer than Italian law specified was legal without being granted by a
judge.
They huffed and puffed. And Cote D'Ivoire and Ghana, Africa's two best footballing nations
according to Fifa's rankings (so it must be true), are looking good to contest Sunday's African Cup
of Nations final, without looking good in getting there. That said, they form half of what was
nearly a semi-final line-up that some (i.
The weather has not been a friend to football supporters of late. The cold snap did for a
majority of matches scheduled below the Premier League, and this evening, an hour before kick-off
at Anfield, there is a possibility that it might strike again, with a thick fog over Liverpool. The
fog clears in time for kick-off, though a lack of clarity will turn out to be a common feature of
the evening.
As you are probably already aware, the weather took an axe to this weekend's non-league fixture
list and only a handful of matches took place anywhere. The FA Trophy Third Round matches were
completely called off and will be played at a later date, so the draw for the quarter-finals, which
is to be made tomorrow, will have a somewhat odd look about it.
Over England way, John Terry has been stripped of his national team captaincy. The move comes in
the midst of Terry's ongoing prosecution for racially abusing Anton Ferdinand, with a trial on the
incident set for the summer. Terry's leadership of England was under question before, but the
controversy surrounding what he allegedly said to Ferdinand was the tipping point for removing him
as captain.
When questions about your football club are raised in Westminster and the Prime Minister agrees
that the situation needs investigation then you know you are in a bad way. Not because you might be
investigated but because the Prime Minister actually knows what Penny Mordaunt, MP for Portsmouth
North, is talking about.
There's something in the air at The Emirates Stadium. Arsenal Football Club has had a difficult
2012 so far, and patience for some, at least is starting to wear thin, leading to a protest that
has brought puzzled expressions from elsewhere. At this lunchtime's match against Blackburn Rovers
in the Premier League, a group of supporters plans to place black bin bags on seats at the ground
prior to the match.
Eurosport's international football coverage, as unique as it remains in the field of sports
broadcasting and run on a shoestring budget, remains excellent. And this year's ACN coverage has
been as comprehensive and well-informed as ever. But, as Groups B and D came to their conclusions,
well... oops.
In that special, unique way that only they can, the FA managed to set a dozen hungry cats
amongst the pigeons of the John Terry case this morning. Their announcement, that Terry had been
stripped of the England captaincy for this summer's European Championships but that he would still
be available for selection by Fabio Capello sends out a message so mixed that it would require an
FA-branded centrifuge to be able to properly decipher.
What's stopping you, Kenya? is a post from: Just Football
Sudan aside, there's a glaring geographical gap at this year's African Cup of Nations.
Andrew Crawford has a few ideas why:
Watching the current African Cup Of Nations (ACON), it is somewhat tellingly
awkward how there isn't a stronger presence from countries from East Africa, although the same
could be said for almost every ACON and since it began.
Chasing The Big Leagues Southampton and the challengers (English Championship) is a post from:
Just Football
Tales from Tier Two is a series on Just Football
in partnership with @tiertwofooty, in which we assess the promotion chances of the clubs in tier
two of Europe's major leagues at the midway point of 2011/12.
The tragedy that occurred in Port Said on Wednesday evening has overshadowed all else in world
football this week, and this is a subject that we will be returning to when the dust has settled on
a disaster so appalling as to be almost incomprehensible. Reports from Egypt have been pouring
across the world via social media, and we would urge anyone reading this to bear in mind when
reading reports on this subject elsewhere in the media that the events of this week are
representative of broader political issues in Egypt than mere football rivalries.
The phrase "emotional rollercoaster" is one that is overused in football these days, but the
supporters of Darlington FC are rapidly becoming more than familiar with the term after another
week in which their club sailed close to extinction before receiving confirmation from its joint
administrator that it had permission to continue to trade and therefore play until the end of this
season.
Chasing The Big Leagues West Ham United (English Championship) is a post from: Just Football
Tales from Tier Two is a series on Just Football in
partnership with @tiertwofooty, in which we assess the promotion chances of the clubs in tier two
of Europe's major leagues at the midway point of 2011/12.
It was, as things turned out, a mercifully quiet transfer deadline day, but the most curious
acquisition of the day ended up involving a young player with just a handful of first team
substitute appearances under his belt but also, it would seem, the capacity for potential
brilliance and and self-destruction in roughly equal measures.
Chasing the Big Leagues Real Valladolid and the contenders (Spain Segunda) is a post from: Just
Football
Just Football's Tales from Tier Two series, in
association with @tiertwofooty, continues now as we continue with Spain's Liga Adelante. First we
assessed the promotion chances of Deportivo La Coruña in Spain's Segunda
Division:
Real Valladolid
Real Valladolid have been in and around the top six all season in Spain's
Segunda Division following a run of just 2 defeats in 22 games since kicking off the season with a
3-0 win at Gimnastic Tarragona.
If the draw for the Fifth Round of this year's FA Cup was notable for anything in particular,
what really stood out was the presence of two clubs for whom an appearance at this stage of the
competition would been inconceivable just a couple of decades ago. Last weekend, both Crawley Town
and Stevenage chalked up notable wins in the Fourth Round of the competition both by a single goal,
with Crawley's coming at Hull City and Stevenage's against Notts County - and the reward for each
is a home match against Premier League in the next round, in the form of Stoke City and Tottenham
Hotspur respectively.
If the early history of the European Championships can be seen as explicitly wrapped up in the
politics of the time, then Spain's victory on home ground in 1964 European Nations Cup could be
regarded as one of international football's ultimate flashes in the pan.
This was a victory that was simultaneously the last gasp of one of the greatest club sides that
European football has ever seen and the beginning of a lull that would last for more than twenty
years, a brief victory for the ultra-nationalism that blighted Spanish political life for the most
of the four decades that followed the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939.
Our non-league videos of the week are twenty-four hours late this week, but we have four matches
for you this evening two from the top of the Blue Square Bet Premier, one from the Blue Square Bet
South and one from the FA Vase. First up are two matches from the championship battle at the top of
the Blue Square Bet Premier.
Group B
Sudan went into this tournament having failed to score an ACN goal since 1976. Bet you didn't
know that at kick-off against Angola last Thursday. Bet you were sick of hearing it by
full-time.
Sudan broke this goalscoring duck (36 years, you know) moments after Eurosport's Matt Jackson
declared he didn't know where their next goal is coming from.
The tripartite nature of footballing rivalry in the north-east of England means that this
afternoons FA Cup Fourth Round match between Sunderland and Middlesbrough has a hint of being a
local derby about it without fully appearing to be the real thing.
Still, supporters of both of these clubs have cause to give a wry smile this afternoon.
The FA Cup may well be the oldest football cup competition in the world a fact that television
viewers will doubtlessly be reminded of around three hundred times over the next seventy-two hours
or so -but football supporters that don't have to habitually wipe rage-induced spittle from the
corner of their mouths could well be forgiven for approaching this weekends fixtures in the Fourth
Round of the competition with a degree of trepidation.
A little gallows humour can go a long way. Kettering Town's patchwork team played Gateshead in
the Blue Square Premier in Tuesday night. Another crowd of under one thousand, another critical
evening in a relegation battle that may yet prove to be highly important should the club somehow
scrape through its current woes.
Generation 2022: Al-Kass Under-17 International Cup Scouting Report is a post from: Just
Football
Always on the lookout for new talent here at Just Football, we sent our man
in Qatar to check out the inaugural Al-Kass International Under-17 tournament. A warm welcome to
Raphael Nawari, who reports on a competition full of promising youngsters:
In a small secluded part of the world, the new stars of tomorrow are taking part in a newly
formed tournament, which in years to come will be considered as one of the better known youth
tournaments, rivalling the Milk Cup and others where the likes of Wayne Rooney, Ronaldinho and
Lionel Messi have graced us with their precocious talents.
It is a sobering thought to consider that, for all the hard work and drama involved in keeping
Darlington FC alive just nine days ago, the looming deadline over the clubs future comes up for
renewal again on Monday. The last few days have seen a patchwork team lose narrowly to Fleetwood
Town and Hayes & Yeading United in the league, but performances on the pitch have, by necessity,
had to take a back seat to the continuing efforts to save the club.
Still being several weeks away from the start of a new season for association football in the
US, much of the current chatter surrounding Major League Soccer revolves around the announcement
of this summer's All-Star Game in Philadelphia and, well, oatmeal. Okay, perhaps not specifically
about oatmeal, but rather the unveiling of Quaker as the new shirt sponsor for Chicago Fire SC that
begins with this video of a morning bowl of Quaker Oats and has continued by sending these rather
special packages to not only sports media but also prominent US football bloggers to spread the
word.
Sometimes it is so, so nice to be so, so wrong. Spain's 4-3 win over Yugoslavia in Euro 2000 was
memorably described at the time has "having everything except full-frontal nudity." Given
Equatorial Guinea's celebration of their astounding 2-1 win over Senegal in the ACN last night, I
expect we had that as well.
"It only took nine years" was the cry from South-West London last summer, when AFC Wimbledon won
promotion back to the Football League after a dramatic penalty-shoot-out win as if there is any
other sort against Luton Town at The City of Manchester Stadium in the Blue Square Premier play-off
final.
Chasing the Big Leagues Deportivo La Coruna (Spain Segunda) is a post from: Just Football
Just Football's Tales from Tier Two series
continues now with a look at the promotion chances of Deportivo La Coruña in
Spain's Segunda Division:
Deportivo La Coruna
Deportivo have a three point lead on Valladolid and Hercules going into week 22 as the
blanquiazules aim to bounce back to La Liga at the first time of asking.
The 2010 African Cup of Nations fell away in quality and excitement after the opening round of
group games. If this year's tournament does the same, we will be in for a long three weeks. Over
the course of the next couple of weeks, we'll be bringing you up to date with the progress of the
four groups in this competition as each round of matches is completed and the first round of group
matches is now over.