This is the famous burst and flattened beachball look. Priceless!

I am still celebrating even though I know it was only a battle we won and not the war. But still, how often have we felt this euphoria in the last, say, 20 years? Not so many times. Anyways, I bet many of us fans have had friends or collegues gone missing the past two days.

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Back in the bright days of August, I cited momentum as a reason why I thought Leicester City would make a play-off spot come the end of the campaign, and lo and behold, there they stand - in a vertiginous sixth spot. Am I feeling smug? Well no - and not just because I failed to follow through my punditry with a trip to Betfair or Paddy Power. Click to continue reading...

Sheesh! Every match Sir Alex gets 5 minutes of extra time?

While each fan will be watching his club play tomorrow, it will be the Liverpool vs Man Utd knockout that will occupy centerstage. It is all about establishing narratives.

The club that most pundits, including the Guardian, that oracle of footballing wisdom, picked to win the Premiership is faced with a situation where this win if it does happen, does not salvage its season as much as it gives hope that there is a kinder God.

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Good old Peter Crouch. His scoring record for England now reads: played 35, started 17, scored 18; comfortably inside the hallowed ‘goal every other game' ratio international strikers look to operate in. More prolific than Michael Owen's 40 in 89 haul and offering a greater return, even, than Shrek Rooney (25 in 55); Capello's favourite man-child.

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Back in May, before I knew that academic statisticians were eavesdropping on my thoughts, I mused on Sport Is a TV Show that "judging the footballing abilities of two football teams is so difficult that football itself is often a bad way to do it." I was writing about matches that end in penalty shootouts, but the thought applies just as well to matches in which one team plays better than the other team but loses anyway.

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For various reasons, I had to pass on my ticket to the match on Sunday. Tragic, that is. Truly tragic. Because I missed one of our best performances for many a moon.
And it highlighted an important point. Keep Fabregas, Rosicky, Arshavin and RVP fit, and we have a brilliant team. A big, fat 6 in the 'for' column is testament to this. Click to continue reading...

Whether it is player rotation, Steven Gerrard's best position or how much was spent on transfers, there has always been press criticism of Rafa Benitez's decisions. And with Liverpool conceding a number of goals from set-pieces this season, the tiresome 'zonal marking' myth has been resurrected yet again. Click to continue reading...

Peter Reid has surpassed previous efforts at disinformational and disorderly discourse with two interviews (one in the September issue of World Soccer Magazine and one in Theo Guardian this weekend).
For the interview with World Soccer, Reid was manager of Thailand, a job that he combined with punditry on BSkyB and for Coral/Eurobet Bookmakers, and things. Click to continue reading...

Sometimes football is far too serious and it needs characters to lighten the mood. Step forward Ian Holloway; decent footballer, decent manager, brilliant in interviews and punditry. Over the years, I've enjoyed listening to some great quips from the likes of Cloughie, Strachan amongst others, and our beloved Sir Bobby was great with his sometimes [. Click to continue reading...

Sports coverage across the globe has taken an odd sheen in the age of the internet. There is so much more information available to everyone that not very much escapes our notice. One can look up scores from around the world and hundreds of goal highlights. I love seeing the goals, but don't really enjoy reading all the anonymous negativity and pointless punditry that the internet seems to facilitate.

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A sickening tackle on Eduardo more than 18 months ago leaves him a doorstep from a permanent end to his career.

Clips of his mangled ankle with the bone protruding out is replayed again and again, evoking a visceral reaction of horror and disgust that fails to lessen in intensity each time its shown.

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Forked Tongue Talking Heads Speak The Manipulators Language
Those in the pay of bookmakers and other internal sections of the Premier League turn up with alarming regularity in the world of television punditry.
The inversion of the disinformation is hardly rocket science.
Listen to ######################################################################
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Some of these individuals keep sloshing up again and again and again - for example, as far as we are aware, #########################################################
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But, generally, this is harmless media fraud. Click to continue reading...

The new season kicked-off yesterday and there was no shortage of talking points. Ahead of the opening Premier League fixtures just about every leading neutral pundit (Bob Wilson, Paddy Crerand and Paul Lake don't count) had written-off Arsenal and big-spending Manchester City (I use the term neutrality advisedly, because it is a rarity where punditry is concerned - as Alan Green would no doubt Click to continue reading...

"When you look at Arsenal you see all the great players have left and are now in the past," Toure was quoted as saying in British media on Sunday.

"Players like (Thierry) Henry, (Patrick) Vieira and (Ray) Parlour that brought success to Arsenal and I believed it was right at this stage of my career to also move on.

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Here it is. The match every one wanted. Another chapter in the historiography of the fiercest rivalry in the Concacaf region.

It has sharpened so much because of the US domination of Mexico in recent years. So there are stakes a plenty for both teams. But at this stage, a Gold Cup win means much more to El Tri than it means to the US.

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No Ronaldo? No Problem!

The Premier League might have lost Cristiano Ronaldo to La Liga but the league still has some great players. There were a few players who missed large parts of last season through injury and should be fit and raring to go in time for the new season, or at least at some point next season.

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London- Watching the Miracle of Bloemfontein from England was doubly delightful as the BBC were forced to eat their words on the US for the first time since World Cup 2002.Korea was a flash in the pan, as the 2006 edition and the US defeat to England at Wembley last year confirmed, you see.3-0 and 4-0 to the Spanish, confidently predicted the punditry duo of former Arsenal and England defenders Click to continue reading...

In 2004, he left Liverpool for Real Madrid in search of Champions League glory. Early on, Madrid mostly shackled him to their bench and later ducked out to Juventus in the first knock-out round. The Liverpool players bounced on the big stage in Istanbul: lifting the trophy without him.

The next season, after Liverpool didn't take him back, he moved to Newcastle, citing the chance to play alongside the great Alan Shearer as a big part of what drew him to Tyneside.

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I just received this from journalist Phil Mison, who recently interviewed our man Paintsil. Enjoy!

Paintsil puts football in perspective

It's the fag end of another peripatetic season in the oversold Premiership, that hypomanic offspring of the stripey-suited money men and hustling marketeers.

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And now it's time for all good little football writers to predict the winner of today's final. No dodging the question. No avoiding the responsibilities of punditry. Well, Clyde, I think it's too close to call. I mean, if we don't pick a side, we're being wishy-washy, right? Readers want deliberate statements.

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First thoughts on Newcastle Utd's relegation...
Like many neutral fans, I really wanted Newcastle to go down - because I knew it would be very enjoyable to see such a "massive" (translation: deluded) club drop down to the Championship, where they would face ingnominious, reality-check trips to outposts like Doncaster, Plymouth and Swansea. Click to continue reading...

Now I don't mean to rip off the idea Dexy, but this whole best XI business somehow got my mind racing. It got me thinking about those past and present who have been our eyes, ears and experts on the game, and just what we think about them. Who do we appreciate (see below) and who are best forgotten (see David Pleat, Mark Lawrenson, John Barnes, etc.

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YouTube - eamon dunphy euro 92 part 1 YouTube - eamon dunphy euro 92 part 1
Above (and continued below) is RTE's legendary Eamonn Dumphy and team just hammering England manager Graham Taylor after they fell out of Euro 92. Click to continue reading...

Over the weekend, the BBC gave football fans the length and breadth of the world the news that they'd waited years to hear. Finally, after 13 years of clueless ramblings, smug arrogance and a frighteningly poor knowledge of the game he professes to love, Tim Lovejoy is to be booted off as a regular presenter of 5 Live's 6-0-6 football phone in show.

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Arsenal 1 (Van Persie pen 75) Man Utd 3 (Park 8, Ronaldo 11, 61)
(Champions League Semi Final, agg 1-4)

The temptation today is for many to point the finger at a fourth consecutive season without a trophy, and demand immediate wholesale changes. It is easy to label four or five players as substandard, and insist on a Championship Manager-like overhaul.

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Alan Hansen's Picks On Footballpools.com

Legendary Liverpool centre half and punditry veteran Alan Hansen has been making his picks on Footballpools.com's Premier 10 games: "Tottenham are not the easy touch they were so I would cover a Manchester United home win with a draw just in case.

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Liverpool skipper can go tighter, lower and wider than Jamie Redknapp For a long time Jamie Redknapp has, erm, held his own as the ladies man of the Sky Sports punditry team. But last night he came up against stiff competition from some younger, fitter competition. Never one to back down from a fight, Steven Gerrard picked [. Click to continue reading...

I hate to return after a week off with a ranty bit of pundit-bashing, but I'm sitting in my living room watching this annoying jerk pompously sound off on who's right and who's wrong as if he were St. Patrick, Lord of All Matters Football for All Time, and I feel I want to smash his head against his little presenter's desk top. Click to continue reading...

It makes me laugh to read 'expert' punditry from the likes of Stan Collymore, Mark Lawrenson and their muggy mates.
All season long they have stuck a knife into Arsenal's back and twisted it more than a game of twister. They wrote us off more than a written off car. Wankers.
When it seemed that Arsenal would struggle to finish in the top four they all jumped on the 'Arsenal are finished' bandwagon. Click to continue reading...

There must be a handful of fixtures preferable for Newcastle United interim boss Alan Shearer's first managerial venture away from the North-East.
Stoke City's form at the Britannia Stadium rarely disappoints with their 28-point haul at home likely to provide the crucial edge in the tightest bottom-of-the-table scrap seen for a long time. Click to continue reading...

Its a game of two halves, jumpers for goalposts, they don't like it up em... the old adages are dangerous ground in terms football punditry, but tonights 1-1 draw at the El Madrigal stadium against Villareal was a great example of football being a very funny old game. Its also not usually wise to go for a match report straight after the game, as your objectivity is usually as absent as Tomas Click to continue reading...

Another one. Has on-line football punditry gone mad? Are my socks black? It's round three ladies and gentlemen. There was a time when 'one hundred percent' referred to undefeated streaks. Surely we shouldn't have to remonstrate poor old Liverpool and victimized Chelsea for not winning their third match of the 2008-2009 Premier League season? Click to continue reading...

What do footballers get up to once they retire? Once it was a pretty straightforward choice between finding a way into football management, going to work in a factory or else buying a pub, with the ultimate decision depending largely on how much money any testimonial had managed to raise.
These days players, at least those lucky enough to spend some time in the Premiership, have no such problems. Click to continue reading...

Lawro makes a disastrous move into management... If you've ever wanted to see John Terry being ripped to death by Chihuahuas this is your chance. Having grown bored of punditry Lawro's finally making a move into management with the fantasy football. But with a paralysed Michael Owen, an Arsenal team who won't shoot, and a Sean Wright [. Click to continue reading...

Lawro makes a disastrous move into management.... If you've ever wanted to see John Terry being ripped to death by Chihuahuas this is your chance. Having grown bored of punditry, Lawro's finally making a move into management with the fantasy football. But with a paralysed Michael Owen, an Arsenal team who won't shoot, and a Sean Wright [. Click to continue reading...