The Flowers of Manchester - originally posted on Soccerlens.com

Daniele (from Red Rants) has a written a moving piece on the Munich disaster here's an extract:

Sam couldn't have been more focused if he had been watching a movie, so I moved on: "Harry Gregg, United's keeper, had been thrown out the cabin after the impact along with Bobby Charlton.

THE DARK SIDE CHRONICLES: Edition 001 Hello to all friends and foes in the Red Rantiverse. Yes I'm back and I must say that returning to Red Rants is as much a shock to me as it is to you. When I left some moths ago, I was determined to stay away for good as [...]

During today's FA Cup game at Anfield, Liverpool fans booed Patrice Evra every time he touched the ball. His crime? Being racially abused by Luis Suarez in the last game between the two clubs.

One Liverpool fan was caught on camera doing a monkey impression when Evra was on the ball. "This matter is now under investigation by specialist hate crime detectives and we are working with Liverpool Football Club to identify the man in question.

Bryan Robson recalls the day United overcame a title winning Liverpool side at Maine Road in the 1985 FA Cup semi-final replay despite going a goal behind thanks to a Paul McGrath own goal. Fancy a portion of goosebumps?.....watch this..... "Classic FA Cup: United v Liverpool 1985 Semi Replay" was originally published at Red Rants [.

Wes Brown was repeatedly given a hard time by Sir Alex Ferguson when it came time for contract negotiations. In October 2004 the club had offered Brown what they believed to be a reasonable deal and weren't prepared to budge.

"We've made the boy an offer and he's turned it down," said Ferguson.

Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson is infamous for exposing his players to 'hairdryer'-like rants on the training ground or the locker room.
It's referred to as a 'hairdryer' when Ferguson shouts at his players, because he is yelling so loud and hard that it pushes the player's hair back like someone blow-drying their hair.

After reading the written reasons behind the decision to charge and ban Luis Suarez, you would think even Liverpool fans would be forced to ditch their usual "victim" stance and admit their player had done wrong. Not just their player though, but their club, for releasing that shameful statement and then organising for their players to parade around in t-shirts supporting a man who had just been found guilty of racial abusing someone.

Carl Markham has written an article for The Independent in response to Luis Suarez being found guilty of making racist remarks to Patrice Evra.

The FA report: "The two witnesses who say they heard those words directed by Mr Bethell at Mr Evra are the Manchester United first team coach Mr Mike Phelan and the goalkeeping coach Mr Richard Hartis.

Liverpool Football Club have released an astonishing statement in response to the eight match ban Luis Suarez has received for racially abusing Patrice Evra two months ago.

After Kenny Dalglish foolishly repeatedly defended their racist striker, the club had been left with little option to back Suarez.

Craig Bellamy and Joey Barton were involved in a X-rated tunnel bust-up at Anfield on Saturday.
The controversial pair had a heated exchange of words during the closing stages of Liverpool's slender 1-0 weekend win.
Queens Park Rangers boss Neil Warnock tried to brush the on-pitch feud under the carpet in the post-match press conference.

View This Poll "Poll: Who should be made Stand-In Captain?" was originally published at Red Rants - Manchester United Blog.

Ahead of kick-off on Wednesday I was nervous but I was still entirely confident we would progress to the Champions League Round of 16. I would have preferred not to endure a nervy draw and fancied us to get a win, but it was neither here nor there. Whilst there was some talk of the game falling on the 6th anniversary of the last time we had failed to get out of the group, it didn't feel within the realms of reality that history could repeat itself.

szólj hozzá: Ma1-1Ne[Matchhighlight.com]

Rio Ferdinand put in a brilliant challenge on Ben Arfa in the box only for the linesman John Flynn to flag for a penalty. Mike Jones, who was filling in for Phil Dowd, had initially rightly indicated that a corner should be awarded, before a discussion with Flynn saw him award a penalty, denying United the three points.

It was a minor exchange among ‘readers' comments' in Bournemouth's Daily Echo newspaper. But it summed up much about AFC Bournemouth under current chairman Eddie Mitchell. The exchange concerned the relationship between parent company, AFC Bournemouth Limited, and a company set up by Mitchell, AFCB's then-largest individual shareholder, called Black Label Events (BLE), which runs catering and conferencing at Bournemouth's Seward Stadium.

So yeah, it's our birthday.

Two years ago today, PSP went live. Somehow, we're still here.

So for once, PSP is going to write about PSP in a bit of a stream of consciousness.

Ch-ch-ch-changes (as in, we had a few)

A lot has changed over two years. Philadelphia actually has a team now, for one.

Typically, the weekend's press contained many rumours linking Newcastle United to various players, some of which I provide a summary of in this article. Amidst the rants of Llambias and the mutterings of discontent or otherwise about the stadium renaming, there was also a healthy serving of transfer speculation on the weekend.

What are the effects of "offering" free employment?

On Wednesday, one of Britain's longest running and highly respect newspapers, The Guardian, announced a new, bold idea for its sport section of its website, . The concept, the Guardian Sports Network, would basically establish a sort of partnership between Guardian Sport and a selected number of sport blogs (most of which are centered on soccer/football).

OK so by now many of you are sick and tired of my negative post match rants and so rather than risk infuriating you some more, let me change things a bit and inject some sarcastic humor to the proceedings. Instead of a review of the match vs Otelul, let me expose my thoughts through [...]

Following Chelsea's defeat to QPR, footage of John Terry allegedly calling Anton Ferdinand a "black cunt" was circulated on the internet. Chelsea fans immediately insisted that the word being used was "blind" and scolded rival fans for thinking they were lip-reading experts.

As much as anyone hates Terry, no one should wish for him to have said something racist because that's fairly sick.

It beggars belief that somebody could earn a salary for writing such dross but James Olley, from The London Evening Standard, has managed to do just that.

Olley claims that if Evra cannot prove that he was racially abused then he should have the book thrown at him. Is that how justice works?

The football was nothing to write home about in 2008-2009 but in terms of excitement and nerves, it was one of the best seasons for years. As usual, we were fighting it out for the title, but this time it was against our hated rivals, Liverpool.

United were a few matches behind everyone else at the turn of the year after taking time out to compete in and win the FIFA World Club Cup.

The football was nothing to write home about in 2008-2009 but in terms of excitement and nerves, it was one of the best seasons for years. As usual, we were fighting it out for the title, but this time it was against our hated rivals, Liverpool.

United were a few matches behind everyone else at the turn of the year after taking time out to compete in and win the FIFA World Club Cup.

In the summer of 2006, Wayne Rooney was sent off during the pre-season Amsterdam Tournament for an innocuous challenge on Pepe, as both players jumped for the ball. It was only a couple of months earlier that Rooney had been sent off against Portugal in the World Cup and Pepe was prepared to use this to his advantage.

Andre Marriner has been appointed referee for United's game against Liverpool at Anfield this weekend.

He has previous...

1. After being shown a yellow card for a two footed challenge from behind, Steven Gerrard told Marriner to fuck off, before sticking his fingers up at him. No punishment was given.

After our ignominious defeat to Manchester United (I'd H8-2 be an Arsena- *joke cut short by baseball bat swung in the face*), it was obvious that new and better signings were needed. Not just obvious, absolutely essential. And while you may argue over the reasons and quality and other minutiae regarding our new signings, the fact remains that they were signed, and none have reached Silvestre/Squillaci levels of awfulness.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you have no doubt heard of Jack Wilshere's latest news- he's a dad! Oh yeah, he got injured, or something.

First of all, congrats to the Wilshere's for one more person with Arsenal DNA making it to this world. While the fact that Nikola Tesla never got to reproduce but a teenage footballer did saddens me, it's always good to see one of our players get to experience such a happy day.

I usually wait a period of weeks or months before posting an entry, but I thought, since I'm not going to add a ton of commentary (see all my rants about NFHS sprinked throughout the over 900 entries posted here), and since high school soccer is just about ready to start for a good chunk of the US, I thought I'd just post a summary to this link:
Is New Soccer Uni Regulation a Whitewash?

View This Poll "" was originally published at Red Rants - Manchester United Blog.

We're kicking off a little later than usual, but feel free to share your thoughts, observations, rants and raves about Premier League Saturday, gameweek six — in the comments section below. There are plenty of games on today to pique ...
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MLS underway this evening with Houston vs. Columbus at Crew Stadium.

What a perfect time to bring up the following:

Shouldn't Davis be wearing the Stars & Stripes at some point in 2011?

• Brad Davis is having an MVP campaign. CAN EVERYONE HEAR ME?!

If you caught up with TSG on Twitter recently, you've heard our rants on Davis.

Rio Ferdinand's ban for failing to show up for a drugs test has rightly been a frustration to Manchester United fans, given that Manchester City's Christian Negouai also failed to attend a drugs test in 2003 and received no ban.

Channel 4′s Dispatches has today shown we have even more reasons to feel aggrieved, with 240 drugs tests being abandoned between April 2007 and August 2010 after players failed to attend.

I mean, come on, it's a valid explanation. Did he?

Apologies for the lateness of this post. I have a tight schedule on weekdays, so writing and posting stuff is harder for me now. We'll get back to regular programming this weekend for the Swansea game.

Injuries, well.... injuries SUCK.

Well I'm back as the designated D&G (doom and gloom) blogger of the group, to keep anyone from getting too excited about how the transfer window ended. But there are quite a few positives to take from the last few days, and I want to be fair and balanced. And to be even more magnanimous than usual, I'll present 10 pieces of good news, coupled with only 5 pieces of bad news.

On August 14, I wrote a blog in the wake of Cesc's departure to Barca. In that blog, I argued that we desperately needed to get a high quality replacement at such an important position on the field. I then proceeded to suggest Sneijder, since he's been in the news a lot lately as a potential transfer for someone.

After overseeing another defeat to their local rivals at the weekend, Sunderland manager Steve Bruce has been the focus of some fairly angry rants from fans on forums and websites across the Internet. After the sizeable investment seen over the...
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Since the dawn of the internet era, there has probably never been a time where there was so much unrest among Arsenal fans. Not only has there been criticism of players, coaches, and ownership, but fans have gotten rather testy with each other. And we've certainly seen our share of that lately on this website, so I thought I'd devote a blog to that topic today.

When the trademarked Special One was at Chelsea, I was an advocate of him. No doubt he brought something interesting to the table that other foreign managers simply don't. Wenger, Benitez and the rest are generally as dull as dishwater. And as much as we already had cause to dislike him for his hop, skip and a jump down the Old Trafford touchline after being robbed by his lucky Porto side, there was always that respect factor for a man that was achieving trophy hauls in what appeared to be a new manner.

When the trademarked Special One was at Chelsea, I was an advocate of him. No doubt he brought something interesting to the table that other foreign managers simply don't. Wenger, Benitez and the rest are generally as dull as dishwater. And as much as we already had cause to dislike him for his hop, skip and a jump down the Old Trafford touchline after being robbed by his lucky Porto side, there was always that respect factor for a man that was achieving trophy hauls in what appeared to be a new manner.

View This Poll "Who will be the next Manchester United manager?" was originally published at Red Rants - Manchester United Blog.

One of the longest-running transfer sagas in recent memory has finally ended, with the official website declaring the sale of Fabregas to Barca. It's still too early to get firm reports about the price, but one site said it was £30 million, rising to £35 million with various bonuses for performance.