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 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 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 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.