Professor Champions League

Why Real Madrid haven't got Kaka’s number

2009-07-03T13:00:00Z

With a feint as elegant as any he showed in the 2007 UEFA Champions League final, Kaka has given Real Madrid’s attempts to make him the new Zidane the swerve.

In an interview with Champions – out on July 8 – the Brazilian made it clear that: “I wouldn’t like to wear Zidane’s No.5. That would be a huge responsibility after all he has done for the club over the years.”

His own preference was probably No.18 – the number he wore playing for the Rest Of The World against Real Madrid on February 18 2002 in a match to celebrate the club’s centenary, and his age when he fought back from the injury that could have left him paralysed.

But 18 isn’t an especially sexy number. It doesn’t have the quirky resonance of Michael Jordan’s 23 and was only worn as 1+8 at Inter by Ivan Zamorano because Ronaldo wouldn’t relinquish his No.9.

Inter Milan vs Sesame Street

And the number has some odd associations: 18 could be a coded homage to Adolf Hitler as it uses the first (A) and eighth (H) letter of the alphabet.

Certainly this choice could have hit Madrid's merchandising machine in Belgium, where footballers have been banned from wearing 18 and 88 (usually taken to stand for HH – Heil Hitler) because of their suspected Nazi sub-texts.

This is not to suggest that Mikael Silvestre, Dirk Kuyt or Marek Jankulovski (who all wear No.18 for their clubs) have any idea of the number’s sinister undertones or are even aware of the British neo-Nazi movement Combat 18.

Madrid’s marketing men felt that, purely in the interests of shirt sales, it was the Brazilian’s duty to wear a more iconic number.

Within the club hierarchy, the idea of Kaka as Real’s No.5, as the new Zizou, seemed the perfect solution, almost as much of a no-brainer in this sequel-ridden world as Harry Potter VI and Police Academy 67.

But Kaka obviously dug in and, after some wrangling and wrestling, player and club compromised on No.8.

In football parlance, it’s not an especially legendary number, lacking the mythology that surrounds 7, 9 and 10.

"We'll start the bidding at 65 million Euros"

Hristo Stoitchkov wore 8 for Bulgaria in the 1994 World Cup, while three clubs have retired the number: Cobreola (for midfielder Fernando Cornejo), Dynamo Ceske Budejovice (Karel Poborksy) and Fredrikstad (for winger Dagfinn Enerly).

In a battle of global football icons, none of these are seriously going to challenge Kaka but maybe that is the point: this is the Brazilian’s chance to become the definitive number eight.

Eight is regarded as a lucky number by the Chinese (it sounds like the word for prosper), Buddhists (there are eight spokes in the wheel that symbolises Buddha’s teaching) and many Christians because, as Kaka would certainly know judging from his evangelical line of T-shirts, Jesus Christ dwells on eight beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount.

So Kaka is now No.8, moving incumbent Fernando Gago to No.5 – a number which, in Argentinian football is almost as resonant as 10, signifies a defensive midfielder who has the artistry to play a bit too.

Eight is a small victory for Kaka, evidence of the determination that – since his remarkable recovery as a teenager – hasn’t always been apparent beneath the beautifully spun blandness of his public persona.

And if his move to Madrid succeeds, kids across the world could be wearing 8 in his honour for years to come.

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Betamax, Best & Buzz

2009-06-29T09:00:00Z

I have seen the future of football on TV and it is terrifying.

Yes, even scarier than Newcastle's new away kit inspired by Custard Creams, deckchairs and the laudable desire to ensure that Geordies don’t suffer from seasonal affective disorder.

I don’t know if your TV is ready for HD. Mine is unready, probably unwilling and almost certainly unable to offer any definition higher than slightly blurred.

Turns out I needn’t worry because HD will soon be as cutting edge as Betamax. The tellies of tomorrow will show football in 3D!

Jonathan Sim, Sky Sports’ amiable press officer mentioned this last autumn when I visited Fortress Isleworth to interview Graeme Souness.

Not wishing to show my ignorance – did he mean we’d all wear those funny paper glasses in our own homes? – I tried to grunt knowledgeably. A couple of months later, Sky tested the idea on a Liverpool vs Marseille game.

There are technical obstacles and the usual rows over standards but many sane people in sport and broadcasting seem convinced that in a few years, for the price of a plasma TV, we’ll be able to watch the action in 3D.

This isn’t quite as scary a prospect as it might have been a decade ago.

Watching the menacing amplitude of Neil Ruddock in 3D would have prompted millions to cower behind the sofa as if the Daleks were coming.

As vivid as 3D TV will make football, I have one question: what happens when players spit? Surely broadcasters aren’t prepared for the avalanche of personal injury claims from viewers who irreparably damage neck muscles jerking to avoid flying phlegm.

"LOOK OUT! It's coming right for us..."

Stripping yarns...

Not sure if the Newcastle away strip is the worst ever. See what you think.

I especially like Birmingham City’s splashed blue strip from 1992. It is tempting to see such monstrosities as evidence that the modern game has gone bonkers.

But kit designers have always shown been a bit barmy as this gallery of Victorian football strips richly demonstrates.

The agonising glory of Lubanski...

Jonathan Woodgate’s mum has, according to his tweet, been rediscovering her childhood through YouTube.

I thought I’d have a go at finding the most obscure footballers from my formative years.

Sadly, there was no Paul Cutler – Nuneaton Borough’s answer to George Best (he had the hairstyle and was the hero of our 1966/67 FA Cup run)

But I did find Wlodzimieriz Lubanski, the greatest Polish footballer who scored against England in 1973 and was then crippled – three and a half minutes into this clip – by Roy McFarland.

Despite McFarland’s attempt to use international sign language to suggest that Lubanski was just being an eastern European jesse, the wrecked cruciate ligament sidelined the star for the 1974 World Cup and he had retired when the Poles made the 1982 finals so he never became a household name like Grzegorz Lato and Kazimierz Deyna.

But about 18 years ago, when I was in New Orleans, a young black cab driver started talking to me about soccer.

Once he realised I was English, talk swiftly turned to Bobby Moore and then to Lubanski.

“Lubanski was baaaad,” he declared emphatically, the first time I, in my sheltered existence, had heard the word “bad” inverted to mean good.

I was so taken aback, I never really discovered how a young black taxi driver in New Orleans – he must have been 20 at most – had come to conceive such an intense admiration for a reasonably obscure, if brilliant, Polish footballer.

Football fame works in exceedingly mysterious ways.

Lubanski: "That goal was baaaad"

The Buzz Aldrin question...

Late last week, as the latest issue of Champions was being wrestled into submission, the question was asked: “Should we do a Buzz Aldrin feature in Champions?”

The feature would not, alas, focus on Buzz’s secret life as a long distance supporter of Bristol Rovers, but on the dilemma he faced as he hurtled back to earth in a craft that was almost, as David Bowie said, a tin can: after you’ve been to the moon, what can you possibly do next?

Footballers are luckier than astronauts. There is always another competition to win to help deflect the big question.

But sometimes, it forces itself upon a player. As Michael Parkinson noted, the night of the 1968 European Cup final was the point when, George Best felt, Bacchus replaced Busby as his mentor.

Best could remember the game but not the celebration or the meal that night with his girlfriend. He was only 22, had just won the European Cup and that campaign would win him the European footballer of the year award.

But he never won another significant trophy.

Romario’s fall, after winning USA 94, was less tragic – he just got bored with playing for Barcelona, only rekindling his fire as a club player when he had that 1000 goal target in his sights.

It’s hard to see any of the Barcelona players losing it as spectacularly, or as tragically, as Best but the Buzz Aldrin question will haunt many of them in its own way.

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The outlaw known as CR7

2009-06-26T09:00:00Z

Lithe as a cat, a snappy dresser, a lethal marksman who rose from abject poverty to achieve fame and notoriety and be exploited by image-makers.

This could easily describe Cristiano Ronaldo but it actually refers to the notorious outlaw Billy the Kid.

Billy – or Henry McCarty to use his real name – doesn’t look much like CR7.

Truth be told, his picture on Wikipedia makes him look a bit gormless – not that I’d ever have said as much to his face or his pistol.

CR7 looks like a lot of people – Cliff Richard circa 1958 (though with more genuine menace) and Ian Beale’s gay brother-in-law (who just happens to be called Christian: coincidence? I think not) to name but two – but takes to the pitch with the cocky strut of a gunfighter confident he can out-draw any opponent.

Cliff: "£80 million? I don't stir for anything less than 100!"

Even in the misery that was his night in Rome, there was something heroic, if self-defeating, about CR7’s evident belief that he could, in the manner of John Wayne, win the thing single-handed.

Statistics were as pivotal to Billy’s fame as to Cristiano Ronaldo’s.

CR7’s 42 goals in a season will loom over him almost as much as The Kid’s inflated tally of 21 victims – one for each year of his life – doomed him to a shabby end, shot in the dark (and possibly in the back) by sheriff Pat McGarrett in 1881.

Ronaldo’s stats are genuine – evidence now suggests that the Kid may have only killed four men.

CR7 and Billy are natural soloists.

Though the Kid belonged to a gang called the Regulators, who have been posthumously hailed as revolutionaries fighting corporate conservatism in the American West, he was never a team player.

Nor, at his best, is CR7. This is often used in evidence against him but you could level the same charge at so many other geniuses from George Best to Hristo Stoitchkov.

Almost every successful striker has been a selfish genius.

And like many selfish geniuses, CR7 and Billy were obsessive self-improvers – Ronaldo’s obsessive willingness to keep practicing free-kicks is matched by Billy’s enthusiasm for practicing shooting at anything from every conceivable angle.

Just as the American West needed gunfighters like Billy to fuel its mythology, so football needs bad boy anti-heroes like Ronaldo.

We grudgingly admire his genius but love to tut our disapproval when he doesn’t pass to a well-placed teammate.

Every Ronaldo tantrum gives the grubbiest of us the cheap thrill of moral superiority, just as Billy’s misdemeanours – real or inflated – gave upstanding, law-abiding citizens an easy pride.

Ronaldo’s salary provokes a media pandemic of synthetic outrage as columnists, though eager to switch newspapers and websites for a few thousand quid, hypocritically lambast him for his greed.

And we are entertained by his bizarre costumes – it enables us to mock this working class hero (sorry folks, but that’s what CR7 is, even if, like many other working class heroes, he does stuff we don’t approve of) for his dubious taste.

Cristiano sports the cream suit & crutches look

In contrast, Lionel Messi is sold as a clean cut hero, Diego Maradona’s skills in the persona of Gary Cooper.

But if Westerns tell us anything, it’s that the distinction between hero and villain is usually not as clear-cut as it appears.

And, for good or ill, there is something intriguingly authentic about Ronaldo’s moodiness, snarls of frustration, and arrogant genius.

You almost get the sense that, like Billy, he could cut loose at any moment and decide the rules don’t apply to him.

It’s not admirable, and it doesn’t make him a great role model, but it does make him thrilling to watch.

So I, for one, will be disappointed if it all goes horribly wrong for CR7 in Madrid.

Football has enough players who are '25 going on 40'. The game, like the American West and the movie genre it inspired, needs its outlaws.

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Matt, Macca & Johnny Foreigner

2009-06-21T11:00:00Z

His dream of playing for his hometown club in ruins, Matt Derbyshire has done a very brave thing, effectively engineering a move to Olympiakos.

Ignored in Blackburn, adored in Athens, the promising 22-year-old is setting an example many other English footballers should follow – for their own good and the good of the game.

The narrative of Britain’s football industry in the 20th century bears certain similarities to the story of British shipbuilding and steel.

Where once we led the world, exporting to all four corners of the globe, we now rely on imports.

And our frustration at this state of affairs leaves us, too often, xenophobic and insular, an attitude brilliantly caught by Simon Barnes in The Times, commenting on Big Phil’s demise:

“You may be good enough for Brazil, but if you think you’re good enough for Chelsea, you got another think coming.

"You come here with your fancy talk about winning the World Cup, but what about the Carling Cup, eh? How many times have you won that?”

Greek god: Matt Derbyshire

Buccaneers and pioneers...

It wasn’t always like this. British sailors introduced football to countries as diverse as Brazil, Iran and Spain.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, a buccaneering, hardy breed of British coaches like William Garbutt, Jimmy Hogan, Fred Pentland and James Richardson Spensley popularised British methods on the continent.

Garbutt, a right-winger for Arsenal, managed abroad (mostly in Italy) for 35 years. His Genoa players called him “Mister” and the title stuck – for Garbutt and every coach in Italy.

Rejected by the English game, Hogan collaborated with Hugo Meisl to create the glory that was Austria’s Wunderteam in the 1930s and influenced the football played by the Hungary side that beat England 6-3 and 7-1 in 1953 and 1954 respectively.

The next two generations of coaches – men like Vic Buckingham, Dave Mackay, Gordon Milne and, later, Terry Venables and Bobby Robson – were happy to make their mark abroad, winning honours in Egypt, Holland, Portugal, Spain and Turkey.

Yet when Steve McClaren took on the Twente job, he was derided in the parochial British media, as if he had voluntarily gone into exile purely to escape the “wally with the brolly” jibes.

His move showed guts. Too many of McClaren’s contemporaries are content, after a setback, to scale down their ambitions to the pundit’s couch.

Hungary run riot in '53

British players have not traditionally been terrifically adventurous.

But with, according to Fabio Capello, only 35 percent of Premier League players born in England, that attitude must change.

If this percentage remains constant, there will be over 300 squad places unavailable to English players who will face a stark choice: resign themselves to the fact that the Championship is the best they can hope for or move abroad.

Model behaviour...

It’s not just about the players. Developing football nations and clubs usually adapt and adopt a strategy that has succeeded elsewhere.

Over the last 30 years, the most influential models have been:

Brazil (popular in Turkey, the Middle East, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Uzbekistan – and, briefly, Chelsea),

Germany (Greece, the Middle East, Kazakhstan and certain parts of Africa),

Holland (Austria, Barcelona, Germany, Russia, South Korea – and, briefly, Chelsea)

...and Italy (England, Ireland, Spain, Switzerland – and, now, Chelsea).

After les Bleus’ 1998 World Cup win, the French model was briefly in vogue, especially in England, but – apart from Arsene Wenger – the Gallic school remains only really influential in Africa.

Nobody follows the English model because there isn’t one anymore.

France batter the Samba Boys in '98

The rest of Europe respects the Premier League’s wealth, profile and passion – but doesn’t look to England for ideas that will shape the future of the game.

Does this matter? For British players and coaches, it certainly does because it will affect their livelihood.

Besides, the British game is not so perfect that it couldn’t be improved with a few clever ideas from abroad.

And the best English players and coaches may learn from that trade in ideas. The Premier League may even benefit because, as Florentino Perez is showing, it cannot count on wealth as its competitive edge forever.

Even if England do win the 2010 World Cup, it will, sadly, be regarded as a victory for the Italian school of football.

When Capello’s home country appoints an Englishman to coach a top-flight club, the country that invented the modern game will, once again, be able to claim that it is influential as well as rich.

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Cornish patsies, Tinmen & c**k a boodle do

2009-06-19T11:00:00Z

There are eight Cornish footballers famous enough to be listed on Wikipedia.

Three of them have the word “c**k” in their surname. Make of that what you will.

(Ed - note our efficient swear filter has unfortunately edited the surnames of brothers Jack and Donald)

Scouring cyberspace last week, I came across the words “Cornish footballer” and wondered – this being the close season – if I could construct a team from the county of King Arthur, surf boards and ice cream.

So far, the answer is no.

I have Nigel Martyn in goal, another goalkeeper Dave Philp (seven games for Plymouth in 1984/85) out of position at centre-half, Matthew Etherington bombing down the wing – or not, as is his wont – and five strikers: the c**k brothers...

Jack, a gifted tenor singer who became the first Cornishman to play for England and his younger brother Donald who wasn’t as good a singer or footballer.

Mike Trebilcock (the first black player to score in an FA Cup final), Tony Kellow (fondly remembered by Exeter fans – if not by me – after scoring a hat-trick against Leicester City in the 1981 FA Cup and now campaigning to have Cornwall enter the next Commonwealth Games).

And Richie Reynolds (Pompey supporters player of the year in 1992).

Jack: England's first Cornishman

From Cornwall to Millwall...

The c*cks (another brother Herbert played a bit too) were born in Hayles, on the southwest coast of Cornwall, but were never really local heroes.

Perhaps scarred by what must have been unremitting playground taunts, they went east and made their names at Brentford.

Jack, a tall, mobile striker scored two goals in two games for England in 1919/20 and, bizarrely, was never selected again.

He really made his mark at Chelsea but did score 73 of his 234 league goals for Plymouth Argyle between 1927 and 1929.

Once again, he spurned the southwest for the southeast, joining Millwall when he was 34 and making like an unstoppable goalscoring machine.

After managing the Lions (during World War II) he ran a pub in New Cross. When he died in 1966, he was 73, some innings for a man who, in World War I, had been declared “missing in action, presumed dead” on the Western Front.

He died a few weeks before the World Cup but, mercifully for him, before The Sun reinvented the sports headline.

Otherwise his name might have inspired such screamers as “Ay up c**k!” after he single-handedly demolished Barnsley in the third round of the FA Cup; “c**k-a’Hoop!” as rumours of a summer move to QPR reached the back pages and “c**k a boodle do” after Chelsea doubled his wages.

From three c*cks to Trebilcock...

I remember Mike Trebilcock, not as a player but as a card I swapped at school and as a name that, in memory, is always spoken with that peculiar urgency and invisible exclamation mark David Coleman brought to football commentary.

The dramatic cry of “Trebilcock!” must have lodged in my memory after the 1966 FA Cup final in which he scored twice in five minutes for Everton to shatter Sheffield Wednesday.

I seldom heard the name again because, although he was only 22 then, that was as good as it got for Trebilcock.

He was soon shuffled off to Portsmouth (where he was reasonably prolific), Torquay and Weymouth before emigrating to Sydney where, at the tender age of 30, he starred upfront for the Western Suburbs.

"TREBILCOCK!"

As a boy in the fishing village of Gunnislake, Trebilcock read – and dreamt of being – Roy of the Rovers. But scouts rarely made it as far as his council estate.

It took a new neighbour – a woman who knew the Blackpool manager and offered to write a recommendation for the youngster – to persuade the boy Trebilcock his dreams might become reality.

His family couldn’t pay the fare to Blackpool but in a circuitous way, his neighbour’s enthusiasm paid off.

Ellis Stuttard, who managed Plymouth then and had a rare genius for scouting the right 14 and 15 year olds, told him: “You don’t want to go to Blackpool – come to Plymouth it’s nearer home”.

Even so, it was a while before the Trebilcock family were convinced football was a better prospect than working in the quarry.

Trebilcock’s travails may explain why, historically, Cornwall has been one of England’s least significant football counties. (Just above the now defunct Rutland.)

In the old days, scouts returned to hotbeds and feeder clubs – like Wallsend Boys Club, the source of Alan Shearer, Peter Beardsley and Michael Carrick – they knew, and Cornwall wasn’t really on the map.

Today, the trade in footballers is so global, a nearby league club is almost as likely to sign a player from Liberia as Liskeard.

Last season the Pilgrims had no Cornishmen in their first-team squad but did have a Hungarian defender, midfielders hailing from Togo and the Congo and an English-born Austrian striker called Ashley.

Cornwall’s football may prosper if troubled property magnate Kevin Heaney achieves his dream of making Truro City the first Cornish club in the Football League.

The Tinmen, winners of the 2007 FA Vase, have four rungs to climb on the non-league ladder.

As Truro has a population of 20,000 – nearly a third smaller than Accrington’s – such a goal seems on a par with Kevin Costner’s dream of building a baseball stadium on his farm.

The difference being, alas, that dreams come true more often in Hollywood movies than in football.

Truro: Making waves in non-league

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Cristiano, Alf & the world’s most expensive racehorse

2009-06-16T07:30:00Z

When Alf Common broke the world transfer record with a £1,000 move to Middlesbrough in 1905, one sportswriter snootily complained: “We are tempted to wonder whether association football players will eventually rival thoroughbred yearling racehorses in the market.”

That moment has long passed.

The world’s most expensive racehorse Green Monkey cost John Magnier, Sir Alex Ferguson’s fellow enthusiast for the sport of kings, a mere £9m in 2006.

This expensive young colt was put out to pasture last year after failing to win a single race.

"You can't win anything with green monkeys... no, seriously"

Green Monkey’s anti-climactic fate has been shared by many footballers traded like livestock for record-breaking sums.

Common, an aggressive, sturdy forward with an eye for goal and a Lord Kitchener moustache did his duty for Boro, scoring 65 goals in 178 games and keeping them in the top flight.

But the FA heartily disapproved of this lucrative transfer and he never played for England again after joining Boro. When the time came to leave Teesside, he didn’t even get his promised £250 benefit and joined Woolwich Arsenal on a free transfer.

Syd Puddefoot did well financially out of his world record move from West Ham United to… Falkirk in 1922.

He was given a £390 signing fee (not bad when a player’s average wage was £8 a week) when the Scottish club paid £5,000 for him.

But the Cockney striker only scored 45 goals for the Bairns because, he claimed, his Scottish teammates wouldn’t pass to him and joined Blackburn – for £4,000 – in 1925 having missed the Hammers’ FA Cup glory in 1923.

Fifty years later, Giuseppe Savoldi became the world’s most expensive player, joining Napoli for £1.2m.

He was 28, had been pretty prolific at Bologna (he was top scorer in Serie A in 1973/74), and scored only slightly less frequently for Napoli. But he won only three more caps while in Naples and, four years later, rejoined the Rossoblu.

He did make an indelible impression on the fans though.

By 1992, the price for the world’s most expensive footballer had risen to £13m. The Serie A star burdened with this fee was winger/left-midfielder Gianluigi Lentini.

The Vatican condemned his purchase by Milan as an “offence against the dignity of work” and religious souls may have seen evidence of divine disfavour when a car crash left him, at the age of 24, in a coma, with a fractured skull and a damaged eye socket.

He made a full recovery, his career didn’t. Only 40, he still plays for ASD Saviglianese in the Italian regional leagues. On YouTube you can get a sense of the talent, looks and style that prompted some to liken him to Maradona.

So the dismal pattern continues, with some variations.

Alan Shearer’s record-busting £15m move to Newcastle delivered lots of goals, no trophies and a crown of thorns status as the new Geordie Messiah.

Other record-breakers gone wrong include Denilson (£21.5m, paid by Real Betis, in 1998), Roberto Baggio (£8m to Juve in 1990), Ronaldo (£19.5m to Inter, 1997) and Christian Vieri (£32m to Inter, 1999).

You can count the number of record-breaking deals that definitively succeeded on the fingers of one hand: Luis Suarez to Inter (1961), Johan Cruyff to Barcelona (1973), Maradona to Napoli (1984), and Luis Figo to Real (2000).

Zidane’s £46m arrival at the Bernabeu in 2001 is a hard one to call.

He was truly inspirational, sold shedloads of merchandise but won the UEFA Champions League only once (while his less galactical predecessors conquered Europe in 1998 and 2000) and never won a major trophy with France while at Real.

You might say the transfer paid off – if only for the artistry with which he entertained the Bernabeu faithful.

But his transfer, like many others, suggests that no matter how fulsomely the world’s most expensive player is praised as they sign their lucrative new contract, in the long run these transfers often work out better for the club – and the Guinness Book of Records – than the player.

Zizou seals his one - and only - Champions League triumph

Real Madrid may pay nine times as much for CR7 as Magnier splashed out for Green Monkey but the deals do have certain similarities.

Footballer and racehorse were bought in the belief that past results guarantees future performance. And failure will not be tolerated.

CR7 will, at least, have longer to justify his cost. Green Monkey retired after failing to win three races.

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Galacticos, urchins and why CR7 let United down

2009-06-12T10:00:00Z

It was the best of seasons, it was the worst of seasons.

Yes, 2008/09 was a season where one club could spend £136 million on two players in a week while a rival in the same league, Valencia, were so impoverished – in a Dickensian-Victorian street urchin kind of way – that they considered hiring out players to grace bar mitzvahs and weddings.

You have to admire Florentine Perez’s audacity. Since he quit Real Madrid in 2006, it has been impossible for anyone in football to use the word ‘galactico’ without smirking.

The mere mention of the g-word conjured up all the empty emperor’s-new-clothes pomp of a discredited regime.

But now back in office, Perez seems to have decided that, yes, he made mistakes – but they weren’t the blunders everyone thought he made. His true faux pas, his transfer dealings suggest, was not to think galactically enough.

It’s as if Napoleon, mulling over that tricky away fixture at Waterloo, had decided his fatal error had been not to take on the Austrian army as well as the British, the Prussians and the Dutch.

One way out of a fixture pile-up

Perez's return is swanky, expensive, headline-hogging proof that the “fan in the boardroom” syndrome is alive and well.

Not that anybody who has followed the extraordinary odyssey of Gigi Becali, the Steaua Bucharest owner, will ever have doubted that.

Becali threatened to go back to tending sheep if he didn’t win a seat in the European Parliament. Sadly for Steaua fans – but luckily for those placid, woolly creatures – Becali did get elected.

His love for a much greater European institution, the UEFA Champions League, is so fierce that he is now talking of fusing Steaua with Romania’s surprise champions Unirea Urziceni so his club can compete in the tournament next season.

While football can be too insular, it’s hard to see fusion – a concept that works well when reconciling different national cuisines – catching on.

Unirea have given Becali’s suggestion short shrift. Becali might get a slightly longer shrift from Mike Ashley, but that’s another story.

The fact that Ashley’s club, Newcastle, is apparently now worth only slightly more than Cristiano Ronaldo is an appropriately bizarre footnote to a surreal, rambunctious season of European football which has ultimately degenerated into freakonomics and deserved to have as its headline sponsor Charles Dickens, Irwin Shaw (author of Rich Man Poor Man) or Andre Breton who, as leader of the Surrealist movement, had the most difficult managerial job imaginable.

Apart, of course, from managing a squad of Dutch footballers.

Besides, the player of the season for me isn’t CR7, who, according to this Statbunker list only scored twice away from home in the Premier League (Ed: True – two within eight minutes, when United were already 3-0 up at wooden-spooners West Brom) but Milivoje Novakovic, the Cologne skipper who, despite sounding like he ought to represent Slovenia at tennis rather than football, scored 12 – out of 16 – of his Bundesliga goals away from home.

Novakovic: "In your face, pretty boy!!"

While the resurgence of the galacticos is good for a headline or thousand, the real story of 2008/09 may be the number of club chairmen and presidents across Europe who, after watching Barca triumph in Rome, are ordering their directors of football, in a manner reminiscent of the tyrant in the Sam Peckinpah Western, to “bring me the new Josep Guardiola.”

Football, like the mafia, isn’t always that imaginative. And many of Joan Laporta’s peers across Europe will be staring at their youth and reserve team coaches this summer and thinking: “Could he? Is he?”

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Rebels or robots: Which would you prefer?

2009-06-08T09:30:00Z

On dull days like these I find myself missing the gorgeous, selfish genius of Hristo Stoitchkov.

The only Bulgarian to win the Ballon d’Or, he completed Johan Cruyff’s Dream Team.

True, he never quite clocked the fact that football was a team game but, for Cruyff, that was the point. His Barcelona needed the Bulgarian’s unpredictable, egotistical greatness to conquer Europe.

The Dream Team could pass their way to glory but if that wasn’t working, Stoitchkov could, in his heyday, be relied on to try something spectacular, outrageous and successful.

"In your face, world!"

Such genius is fragile; it doesn’t take long before the player begins to believe in their own infallibility.

But Stoitchkov gave me arguably the finest 90 minutes in my football life against Germany at USA 94. I have a tape of that game in a box in the cupboard under the stairs and still watch it twice a year.

Sadly, Stoitchkovs are rarer than they used to be.

You could even argue that as far back as the 1990s, Stoitchkov was actually a throwback. The debate over how much freedom players should have on the pitch is almost as old as football.

But as Jonathan Wilson points out in his fine book Inverting The Pyramid, it became particularly acute in the 1960s and 1970s.

The application of an English-style based on shape, pressing, a high offside trap and long-ball counter-attacks in Sweden by Bobby Houghton in the 1970s laid the foundations for Malmo’s run to the European Cup final and IFK Gothenburg’s two UEFA Cup triumphs.

But it also ran the risk, as coaching instructor Lars Arnesson complained, of “stifling initiative and turning players into robots”.

Arnesson’s fears were fulfilled just across the border by Egil Olsen’s hugely successful, but almost unwatchable, Norway.

The fact remains that we, as supporters, like to be entertained by players, and not coaches.

And although football can, in one way, be seen as a tactical evolution – the inversion of the pyramid, as Wilson puts it in the title of his book – it can also be seen as a YouTube clip of glorious moments, a history that is even more powerful because it is personal and unique.

My own clip includes Stoitchkov’s screaming free-kick against Germany, a crossbar sent a-quivering by Frank Worthington one 1970s weekday night when the Foxes beat Ipswich 5-0, and a Maradonaesque goal (the dribble, not the Hand of God) by the wonderfully named Hampton & Richmond striker Ashley Sestanovich against Aylesbury in 2005.

The day I conclude that my personal YouTube compilation is complete is the day I give up on football.

Worthington: Certainly not an automaton

In Champions earlier this season, the Brazilian great Falcao called on midfielders to show “tactical insubordination” and defy their coaches if they felt the game required them to do so.

Guus Hiddink had the courage to let Philip Cocu do just that at PSV, switching formations whenever he thought it necessary.

Wayne Rooney might have done better in Rome if he’d had more of Stoitchkov’s selfish certainty.

You couldn’t fault his loyalty, energy or diligence against Barcelona, but a player of his gifts should be encouraged to use them as he sees fit; to improvise a Plan B if Plan A is so obviously not working.

It’s odd that in a game where players are increasingly judged on the quality of their decision-making, many coaches do their best to ensure they have so few decisions to make.

A team of Stoitchkovs would be delightful and disastrous, but surely more coaches could really mean it when they tell their players to express themselves?

And more great players should rebel and have the guts to risk failure and reproach by trying to take the game’s outcome into their own hands.

If I wanted to watch football played by robots, I’d go and watch the heavy metal sport in Korea.

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The perfect man to coach Chelsea

2009-06-04T13:00:00Z

Is Carlo Ancelotti the perfect man to coach Chelsea? Obviously not.

The perfect man would need the cunning of Machiavelli, the intelligence of Socrates, the vision of Napoleon and the humility of the Dalai Lama.

Such paragons are hard to find, even in football.

But is he the best man available to do the job? Probably.

Guus Hiddink would have offered more continuity. The flaw in his CV is that he doesn’t want the job.

The Moyesiah has done a great job at Everton on reasonably limited resources – I say reasonably because he has spent £27 million on the Yak and Marouane Fellaini – but he has won no significant silverware and made little headway in Europe.

And do David Moyes’s Everton play football in the entertaining fashion of Real Madrid, a style that captivated Roman Abramovich when he saw the triumphant white angels at Old Trafford in 2003?

Even diehard Everton fans would have to admit they do not. Moyes is a very good manager but, compared to Ancelotti, his only edge is that he speaks better English.

"GetbackandefendasaunitNOW!"

The case against Ancelotti is that he is Italian, could be another Scolari and, in recent years, has presided over the decline of an ageing team in Milan.

The likes of Tony Cascarino are already predicting he won’t last the season.

Since none of us – not even Cascarino – can predict the future, let’s focus on the facts.

Under Abramovich, Chelsea has been famous for byzantine intrigues and rumours about the owner’s preference for certain players and a particular style of play.

In other words, the same situation Ancelotti who has managed at Milan since he replaced Fatih Terim in 2001 and found himself getting advice about team selection and tactics, through the media, and from Silvio Berlusconi.

No matter how baroque the boardroom politics at Chelsea are, they surely won’t surpass anything Ancelotti experienced with Juventus and Milan.

In the competition that matters most to Abramovich, Ancelotti has a better record than any coach in Europe.

In eight years, he has won the UEFA Champions League twice, lost a final on penalties and, in 2006, was deprived of a place in the final against Arsenal on the whim of a referee who disallowed a perfectly good Andriy Shevchenko goal.

"Eh?"

Milan have been a team in transition of late and Ancelotti’s exit from the San Siro marks the end of a cycle for the Rossoneri.

But the decline is not entirely of Ancelotti’s making.

As Berlusconi tightened the purse strings, the Rossoneri have simply not competed with Inter in the transfer market.

Relatively inexpensive gambles on short-term solutions like Rivaldo, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and Beckham were not, in such circumstances, so daft.

Refreshing the team by signing younger players, as the media demanded, would have cost Berlusconi millions he didn’t want to spend.

Ancelotti has bequeathed one exciting young talent to Leonardo. If Kaka does go, Alexandre Pato could be the player to build a new Rossoneri around.

Watching Ancelotti’s Milan in the flesh – in Athens in 2007 and in that summer’s Super Cup – I realised that they were a proper football team in the old-fashioned sense.

Players knew what their jobs were, did them and played for each other with a selflessness that is rare in the modern game.

The relentless focus on teamwork started with Arrigo Sacchi but Ancelotti has gloriously maintained that tradition.

Chelsea, by contrast, have only showed that kind of spirit in the first season under Mourinho and, more recently, under Guus Hiddink.

"Press, Marco. Like this"

Ancelotti’s alleged preference for old masters has been used in evidence against him because the consensus is that he has to rebuild an ageing squad.

But there are fewer Chelsea pensioners on the books than the media would have us believe: Alex, Jose Bosingwa, Joe Cole, Michael Essien, Salomon Kalou, Michael Mancienne, John Obi Mikel and John Terry are all the right side of 30.

Besides, the brutal truth is that the Premier League is now so uncompetitive – Chelsea could have dropped another 19 points last season and still made the Champions League play-offs – that Ancelotti could, with Abramovich’s backing, afford to focus on Europe.

I’m not saying that Ancelotti will succeed. Appointing foreign coaches to run Premier League clubs is a hit (Mourinho) and miss (Josef Venglos) affair.

But Ancelotti has, unlike Scolari, vast experience coaching one of the best clubs in Europe. He understands Champions League football as well as anyone and has managed a side that, for the most part, has entertained and succeeded.

And, at 49, he’s the right age to take on the challenge.

Add all that up and you can see why, in the absence of Mr Perfect, Ancelotti seems a reasonable risk to Abramovich – if not to Tony Cascarino.

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The King, Rosbif and Cruyff

2009-05-29T13:00:00Z

Elvis, Great Gatsby, Mourinho’s coat. Those are, alas, my only notes from Rome.

They refer to a United fan who must have been as hot as the surface of Mercury walking around the sticky Eternal City in an Elvis jumpsuit and wig, a Barcelona supporter wearing a T-shirt with the original cover of The Great Gatsby on it and two fans at Rome airport wearing a limited edition T-shirt bearing the legend “Mourinho’s coat 2005” and a silhouette of the special one.

Can anyone tell me where I can get one of these?

I planned to take notes during the game – I even bought a compact, bijou Silvine notebook – but it was so hot in the Stadio Olimpico the ink would have melted on the page.

And the game was too absorbing, a better spectacle in the atmospheric stadium than on television where 300 million viewers across the world saw probably the most one-sided UEFA Champions League final since Porto’s efficient demolition of Monaco in 2004.

"It ain't half hot mum..."

I watched the match from nine rows behind the United bench. Just behind me was Rudi Voller and, two rows behind to my right, sat Roman Abramovich who watched the game with a diplomat’s pleasant inscrutability.

As someone who has been writing about football for 15 years, I ought to have acquired a protective layer of professional cynicism, but my heart skipped when I brushed shoulders with Johan Cruyff just before the match.

Most of the great players come to these games brimming with bonhomie. In contrast, Cruyff looked grumpy and disappeared to the remotest corner of the lounge as if in retreat from his own myth. Oddly, this only increased my respect for him.

At half-time, I was wondering what Cruyff would make of the game. Barcelona were murdering United 1-0 but was the No.14 reminded of a similar master class – given by the Dutch to West Germany in 1974 – which backfired badly?

Football writers always write with hindsight as if they had foreseen every outcome. So, as soon as the whistle blew, Barcelona’s victory was declared inevitable.

That isn’t quite how I saw it at half-time.

Like most United fans, I expected Sir Alex to say the right things and make the right changes to make the second half truly competitive. And I wondered if Pep Guardiola’s team might regret not converting their superiority into a more decisive lead.

You can’t fault Ferguson’s bravery – by the end of the game he had withdrawn almost every tackling midfielder as he chased the goal that might change the dynamic of the match – but nothing worked.

The random comments from United fans around me (“Is it me or is Anderson completely out of his depth?” and persistent growls of “Carrick!”) registered their incredulity as United failed, after the first nine minutes, to play with any great conviction, belief or accuracy.

They registered only two shots on target and, fatally, gave the ball away too often to a side that took ages to give it back.

Barcelona’s pressing in attack and midfield was superb, leaving the two opponents Guardiola genuinely feared – Cristiano Ronaldo and Rooney – increasingly isolated.

For me, the United player who impressed in the second half was Dimitar Berbatov who, as commentators like to say, “should have done better” with his header but kept the ball, played some good passes and showed, at times, why Ferguson values him.

Perhaps one of the paradoxical lessons from this strange kind of defeat is that if United are to rank alongside Real Madrid, they need more players like Berbatov, not less.

Berbatov and Rooney wonder what might have been

Rooney was, the Italian daily La Repubblica declared, “disastroso.” That was harsh. Misused might have been a better term.

Rooney has the energy and discipline to play on the flank tracking back but, against the very best sides, this does diminish his threat. If he can’t play behind a striker in a more advanced Gerrard-style role, he could be encouraged, like Messi, to cut inside when the moment was right.

On his day, Rooney can lose any defender in the world but he is much more dangerous creating that space and opportunity in front of the penalty area than on the flanks.

After the game, an alumni of French football characterised the game as a blow for the “Monsieur Rosbif” school of football.

United don’t play “Rosbif” football, but were so far below their potential in Rome that neutrals probably saw this as the traditional contest between continental finesse and British brute force. (The New York Times said as much in a headline.)

Defeat will spur Ferguson on. On the plane home, he was probably reflecting on how his team could be improved.

United won the Premier League with ease but, being an obsessive, perfectionist team builder, Ferguson will know that United have shown an odd fragility against the very best opposition.

United won the Premier League with 90 points, but only five of those were earned against Arsenal, Chelsea or Liverpool.

The Premier League is not, as Richard Keys and his ilk insist, the best league in Europe. It is almost as monotonously uncompetitive as the SPL.

What it does best is breed sides that can win away at Hull with metronomic regularity.

A very different kind of team, tactics and performance were required for United to complete the Italian job and, against a Barcelona team inspired by the opportunity to prove their greatness, they were found wanting.

I found the alacrity, respect and affection with which Guardiola embraced Ferguson after the game strangely moving. Or maybe it was just the heat.

"I really need to get out of this suit, don't you?"

Guardiola has been fulsome in his praise for Ferguson, extolling the Scot’s trophy-winning longevity. So, even after being congratulated by King Juan Carlos in the dressing room, Guardiola will know he is not the best coach in the world.

But he has created a great team that has entranced the game with a style that suggests the European Cup could be on the verge of a golden era.

Tactically, a senior Italian football bod suggested, Rome was no classic. But Barcelona’s style is an intriguing hybrid of two schools.

The possession, movement and versatility belonged to the Dream Team/Cruyff/Rinus Michels tradition but this was allied to the organized, pressing style first expounded by Arrigo Sacchi.

The morning after, Frank Rijkaard strode through the hotel foyer.

Guardiola’s class of 2009 is better than Rijkaard’s class of 2006, but the speed with which Rijkaard’s team fragmented is a useful reminder for Guardiola – the first non-Dutch coach to win the European Cup for Barcelona – that sometimes the truly difficult bit isn’t winning, it’s what happens next.

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What Tony Pulis could teach Pep Guardiola...

2009-05-27T07:00:00Z

This is the time of known unknowns.

As Wednesday’s UEFA Champions League final nears, the players retreat, coaches mull their selections and the media leaves no cranny unexplored in its search for a new angle.

Many pundits have portrayed Barcelona vs Manchester United as the football equivalent of an Ali vs Frazier boxing title fight.

But Arsene Wenger, who has always had his own take on football, has a different legendary sportsman in mind as he contemplates the final. Not Ali, or Frazier, but Tony Pulis.

Let them beat Stoke
Marie Antoinette was alleged, probably wrongly, to have said of poor Frenchmen: “Let them eat cake”.

Now Wenger, England’s favourite Frenchman, has effectively said that if Barcelona are to prove their greatness, let them beat Stoke City.

Arsenal’s donnish boss laid it on the line in the Daily Mail: “I’m not convinced Barcelona would win the title if they played in the Premier League, It’s very physical and committed – and going to Stoke would be a surprise.”

Funny Wenger should mention that, because I was thinking of Stoke during the semi-final against Chelsea.

Pep Guardiola’s team have played some transcendent football, but Stoke boss Pulis could sharpen up their corners which are often woeful. Barca have taken 82 in the UEFA Champions League this season and scored from just two of them.

"Well this will probably come to nothing..."

From Pulis to Puskas and Seedorf
The hope is that players do not succumb to the pressure and hype surrounding such big games and feel, as Ferenc Puskas put it once, so physically and mentally drained they just want to win the game and be done with it, leaving us with a match as monotonous as Tony Pulis’s cap.

Clarence Seedorf, the only player to have won this competition with three clubs, gives the finalists some free advice in the latest issue of Champions: “Free your mind, and your legs and enjoy it.”

Pointless but interesting
In The Times, Bill Edgar notes that Barcelona have won two of their last eight games, while United have won seven. Not sure if it means anything but it’s interesting.

Barcelona’s average possession in Europe this season is 62 percent. Juan Castro, Marca’s chief sports writer, expects that edge to prove decisive in Rome.

Castro reckons that Barcelona only fear Rooney and Ronaldo but “it will be difficult for those United players to get the ball because Barcelona will dominate possession.”

He believes half of Spain will support the Red Devils for the final. Less flatteringly, he adds that “Liverpool and Arsenal have more followers here than Ferguson’s team.”

The Archibald precedent
Graham Hunter, who often writes for Champions, suggests that the one question every Barca fan is asking is not “How can I get a ticket?” but “Will Iniesta and Henry make it?”

The fans, Hunter suggests, feel their absence will prove too much of a blow. But both will need to prove their match readiness to Guardiola.

As Hunter points out, Guardiola watched, as a 15-year-old ball boy, when a barely fit Steve Archibald toiled as Barca lost the 1986 European Cup final on penalties to Steaua.

(By the way, The Archibald Precedent was my lame attempt to write a cross-head in the style of Robert ‘The Bourne Identity’ Ludlum).

Key to a Catalan triumph

Formation dancing
The biggest known unknown is whether the media’s predicted template for this game – Barcelona attack and United counter – actually happens.

Guardiola’s team will almost certainly play 4-3-3 while United – the journalists at this intriguing New York Times blog predict – will play one, Cristiano Ronaldo, up-front with Park and Rooney on the wing, so 4-5-1 switching to 4-3-3 in attack.

The whole debate makes for fascinating reading but these points struck me:

1. Can Barcelona break up what L’Equipe writer Erik Bielderman calls the “magic triangle” of Toure, Iniesta and Xavi in midfield without suffering the lack of fluency which so nearly saw them lose to Chelsea? Marca deputy editor Santiago Segurola is convinced they can. I’m not so sure.

2. How dangerous is it if United counter attack and let Barca press them? As Peter Berlin, sports editor of the Herald Tribune suggests, it might make more sense to attack Barca’s rejigged defence early on. Scare a back four with three regulars missing, push Barca back and you disrupt their game plan. Bielderman says the key for United is ensuring that their two lines of defence stay connected and keep Barca as far away from the penalty area as possible.

3. This is the best Barca team ever – according to Segurola. But they start the final as slight underdogs. What nobody can tell, as Berlin suggests, is how the occasion affects both teams. This Barca team may just be inspired by the sense that they are on “the verge of greatness” and by United’s decision to wear the white of their old enemy, Real Madrid. And finals, as 2005 and 2008 proved, often defy the script. They can have a mysterious, alchemic effect on teams and players – one that only becomes apparent when the match starts.

A frog’s life
United’s Korean midfielder, the artist formally known as Three Lungs, will probably become the first Asian player to start in a Champions League final – and he owes it all to dad and some frogs.

Park Senior, the New York Times notes, “took a job in a butcher’s shop to provide him with choice cuts of meat and boiled frogs into an unappetising soup, trying to coax a growth spurt.”

And finally…
Off to Rome now, having ransacked the Bionicle container in the kitchen for Euros, with the fervent hope that, as Sir Alex Ferguson put it, this game “paints the real story of football.”

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By far the strangest team…

2009-05-24T11:00:00Z

My Perfect XI, as seen on the back page of FourFourTwo (or online here), is the 21st century equivalent of the 1970s Shoot questionnaire (“Most dangerous opponent: The wife”).

Most of these XIs are compiled by old pros who namecheck old colleagues like Micky Droy alongside Pele and Maradona.

On the web, you can find debates over proper all-time XIs: is Raul better up-front than Di Stefano? Such questions promote furious, pseudo-academic debate.

"You're having a laugh ain't ya?"

In an attempt to silence my inner anorak I have chosen an utterly random European Cup XI where players are selected on such spurious criteria as: have they been seduced by a ballet dancer, insulted Scottish football or had their haircut partially in honour of Barcelona?

Feel free to make your own nominations.

1 Eddy Treijtel, seagull killer
Treijtel will never forget 1970: the Feyenoord reserve keeper shone in the European Cup semi-final, was benched by Ernst Happel for the final and killed a seagull by kicking a ball in the Rotterdam derby that November.

2 Cesare Maldini, overconfident dad
European Cup-winning defender with Milan in 1963, he was so technically accomplished that he became overconfident and made, John Foot notes in Calcio, so many hideous errors he launched a genre of blunders known as “Maldinate.”

3 Paul Breitner, Maoist millionaire maverick
A multi-millionaire Bavarian Maoist European Cup-winning full-back/midfielder with an erratic Afro, Breitner defended Berti Vogts’ reign as Scotland manager by dismissing Scottish players of that generation as “footballing dwarves.”

4 Franz Beckenbauer, legend with a private dancer
Der Kaiser was a fine skipper, imperious libero and the only skipper to lift the European Cup three times. He was also the object of an alleged seduction attempt by Rudolf Nureyev. The ballet star put his hand on Der Kaiser’s knee in a New York limo prompting the original Becks to talk about his wife and kids. Luckily, the German legend says, “Nureyev understood and we remained good friends.”

"Oi, I'm a happily married man, I'll have you know..."

5 Andreas Moller
Moller is out of position in this all-time XI but the 1997 European Cup winner deserves inclusion as the first and – to date – only German footballer to be fined and suspended for diving. He was docked 10,000 marks and banned for two games after winning a penalty in 1997 against Karlsruhe even though the defender who ‘fouled’ him was a yard away when he started to fall.

6 Emlyn Hughes, V-neck jumper pioneer
The Kop used to sing “Come on without, come on within, you’ve not seen nothing like the mighty Emlyn” in this honour of this enthusiastic, princess-cuddling, Liverpool legend who did for V-neck jumpers what Mary Quant did for the mini-skirt. His crosses were more accurate than his guesses in the picture round of A Question Of Sport. He famously identified one photo as the jockey John Reid only to discover it was Princess Anne. Still, his place in history is secure: he was the first Liverpool captain to lift the European Cup.

7 Cristiano Ronaldo, living La Vida Loca
A completist when it comes to Ricky Martin albums, United’s No.7 has a hairstyle which is partly inspired by Barcelona. As his stylist Pedro Remo told Champions: “His haircut has a British side like Coldplay but a side which is more like Barcelona, unfinished.” CR7 can play a bit too. Is liking Ricky Martin in worst taste than Basile Boli who motivated himself for European finals by listening to Bon Jovi? As Walter Cronkite used to say, “You are the jury.”

"Short back and sides with a few Catalan curls please..."

8 Alfred Pfaff, Di Stefano’s doppelganger
Legendary German playmaker, star of the Eintracht team that faced Real Madrid in 1960, Pfaff was such a leader on the pitch that he was nicknamed Don Alfredo. In his only European Cup final he came up against the original Don Alfredo, the great, grouchy Di Stefano. Sadly for Pfaff, Real’s No.9 won the battle of the Don Alfredos at Hampden. In his two most famous games, Pfaff lost 7-3 to Real in 1960 and 8-3 to Hungary in the 1954 World Cup.

9 Ferenc Puskas, international diplomat
The Galloping Major could juggle soap in the shower with his left foot. But as gifted as he was, he had to eat crow before the 1960 final. The German FA had banned clubs from playing against teams featuring Puskas because the Hungarian had claimed that West Germany only won the World Cup in 1954 because they were doped. Puskas had to send a formal letter of apology before the German FA would let Eintracht play.

10 Hristo Stoichkov, foot and mouth legend
El Pistolero, Cristo, The Dagger, Raging Bull, The Modern Left, they couldn’t coin enough nicknames to sum up the flamboyant, referee-stamping, European Golden Boot winner whose selfish genius completed Johan Cruyff’s Dream Team and prompted Maradona to salute him as a fellow “Crazy head.” Never joined the Premiership – for fear of being nicknamed Stoitchy – he is growing modest with age, telling FIFA recently: “No Bulgarian can ever match my achievements.”

11 Piet Keizer, the enigma’s enigma
Ajax left-winger who made Cruyff look uncomplicated. Keizer danced on the tables when he heard Rinus Michels was taking over at Barcelona, was voted in by the squad to replace Cruyff as Ajax skipper (prompting the furious No.14 to join Michels in Catalonia) but walked out on football in 1974 after a row over tactics. A year later, watching his son’s youth game, he famously stepped away from the ball. David Winner reckons Keizer didn’t kick a ball at all for 30 years.

Coach

Sir Matt Busby, honours kissed
Busby was the first manager to win the European Cup with an English club and the first – only? – recipient of football’s Sword Of Honour. This glittering weapon was given to him in 1964 for “distinguished service to British and international football.” The award was not named in honour of the eponymous trilogy of wartime novels by Evelyn Waugh and occupies roughly the same place in Busby’s trophy cabinet as the Greek of the Year award given to Otto Rehhagel in 2004.

"This will take pride of place in my... erm..."

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Seven ways to lose a European Cup final

2009-05-21T09:00:00Z

1. Turn the match into a holy war
Johan Cruyff had a messianic streak as a manager. And in 1994, as his Barcelona dream team reached their second European Cup final in three years, he was rash enough to bill the contest, against Fabio Capello’s AC Milan, as a battle for the soul of European football.

Attack vs defence, romance vs pragmatism, flair vs efficiency, good guys vs bad guys. If Milan won, Cruyff suggested, it would be the death of football.

Cruyff may have hoped such rhetoric would unbalance the opposition by enraging them. All it really did was ensue that such gifted professionals as Maldini, Boban, Donadoni, Massaro, Savicevic and Desailly were truly motivated.

Cruyff was so busy casting the final as a jihad he was undone by Capello’s surprisingly attacking game plan. By the 47th minute, when Savicevic lobbed Zubizarreta to make it 3-0, the contest was over.

Two trophyless years later, Cruyff was ousted from Camp Nou. His exit was a disgrace but his messianic conviction (“Before I make that mistake I do not make that mistake”) hadn’t always done his players any favours.

Desailly helps Milan destroy Barca

2. Misunderestimate the opposition
The build up to a game as historic as a European Cup final is so tricky that even the masters can get it wrong.

Researching the 1970 Feyenoord vs Celtic final for the latest issue of Champions, I was astonished to discover that even the great Jock Stein could be caught out by the occasion.

Stein’s Celtic had thrilled Europe in 1967 with their demolition of Inter in Lisbon. But at Inter’s ground, the San Siro, his team came unstuck against Ernst Happel’s Feyenoord.

This defeat is such a sore point its causes are still being debated. Stein maintained that too many of his players had a bad night. Most of his players thought Stein had kept the build-up too low key and underestimated the Dutch champions.

Just as Inter coach Helenio Herrera had done in 1967, Stein set out his team in their usual way. As his players took to the pitch, his suggestion that the Feyenoord team would be “sh*tting themselves” rang in their ears.

But Feyenoord’s Austrian coach Ernst Happel did for Stein. Celtic, Happel said, did one thing better than anybody else: attack. Stop them attacking and you could beat them. Feyenoord did just that.

They triple marked Jimmy Johnstone, slowed the game’s tempo so much that Celtic could find no rhythm and then played some fine attacking football, deservedly winning 2-1 in extra-time. No Scottish side has made the European Cup final since.

3. Write your victory speech in advance
Bayern president Fritz Scherer did this in 1987, believing that this European Cup final would mark “the dawning of a great new era” for the club.

With 77 minutes gone, and Bayern 1-0 up, such confidence seemed well placed. But in three minutes, Bayern conceded twice – the equaliser that superb nonchalant back-heel by Rabah Madjer – and lost the final. Scherer ripped up his speech.

Madjer back-heels home

4. Be outfoxed at half-time
Rafa Benitez isn’t the only manager to turn a final with a half-time switcheroo. In 1962, Benfica returned to the dressing room 3-2 down to Real Madrid.

But their coach Beta Guttman just told Cavem to mark Alfredo Di Stefano in the second half, cutting off the supply to Ferenc Puskas, who had already scored a hat-trick. The ploy worked. Benfica won the second half 3-1 and the game 5-3.

5. Concede the initiative
Liverpool’s return from the living dead in Istanbul wasn’t just remarkable because it was the only time a team has comeback from 3-0 down to win a European Cup final.

Even more amazingly, this resurrection happened against Milan, a club with a glorious tradition of winning the European Cup so swiftly and mercilessly their shell-shocked opponents are left wondering ‘what just happened?’

In 1969, under Nereo Rocco, the Rossoneri abandoned the catenaccio that had stifled Manchester United in the semi-final, to shock Rinus Michels’ talented young Ajax side, going 2-0 up after 39 minutes and restoring their two goal margin in the 67th minute.

They did the same against Steaua (in 1990) and Barcelona (in 1994). Bizarrely, Inter and Juventus, who faced Ajax in the 1972 and 1973 finals, ignored Rocco’s successful attacking game-plan, stuck to counter and catenaccio and were comprehensively outplayed.

6. Be caught out tactically
There’s a lot to be said for approaching a final – as Barcelona will almost certainly do – with the attitude that: this is who we are, this is how we play and let the other team worry about us.

The risk is that the opposing coach will worry so much they find a way of beating you.

Happel did just that against Giovanni Trapattoni’s Juve in 1983 to win the European Cup for a second time with Hamburg. He simply switched his Danish striker Lars Bastrup to the left, so he would face Juve’s attacking full-back Antonio Cabrini.

Trap tried to neutralise this ploy by asking Claudio Gentile to follow Bastrup and man-mark him. That left a hole on the right which Marco Tardelli failed to cover and from which Felix Magath popped up to score the only goal.

When you watch the goal you can see, just before Magath’s great strike, a veritable prairie’s worth of space on that side of the pitch.

Stein’s demolition of Inter in 1967 was built on his use of attacking full-backs, the very weapon Herrera had perfected by schooling Giacinto Facchetti to bomb forward for the Nerazzurri.

And Milan’s victories in 1969 and 1994 were inspired by their coaches refusing to stick to the script as they set out their teams.

Magath lets rip from long-range

7. Go two goals down
In 53 European Cup finals, only three teams have recovered from a two goal deficit to win: Real Madrid (in 1956), Benfica (in 1962) and Liverpool (in 2005).

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The European Cup final that sparked a revolution

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The European Cup final that sparked a revolution

2009-05-19T10:00:00Z

In 1960, a 19-year-old trainee striker on Queens Park’s books watched in wonder from the schoolboys’ enclosure at Hampden Park as Real Madrid walloped Eintracht Frankfurt 7-3 to win the fifth European Cup.

That trainee striker was called Alex Ferguson. And the final he was watching wasn’t just magical, it was revolutionary.

Real celebrate in 1960

Before that game, the British attitude to European football was summed up, at its worst, by Rangers manager Scot Symon, who on landing in Germany before the semi-final away leg asked: “Eintracht? Who are they?”

He didn’t bother to inspect the pitch because Rangers would do that “during the game.” His reward for such insouciance? A 12-4 thrashing over two legs by Eintracht.

After the 1960 final – with the likes of Andy Roxburgh, ‘Jinking’ Jimmy Johnstone and Billy Bremner also in the crowd – the blinkers came off.

The Hungarian genius Ferenc Puskas, still the only man to score four goals in a European Cup final, and the Argentine total footballer Alfredo di Stefano (who only scored three at Hampden) were idolised by the likes of George Best, Jimmy Greaves and Bobby Charlton.

The 7-3 inspired a young manager called Don Revie to make Leeds United wear white.

Manchester United’s Scottish coach, Matt Busby, had challenged British football’s isolationism by ignoring the apparatchiks to enter the European Cup. His countrymen – managers like Jock Stein and Willie Waddell – began to seriously study Europe’s methods.

When Stein was moonlighting as Scotland coach in 1965 he quizzed Giacinto Facchetti about the catenaccio with which Helenio Herrera’s Inter dominated European football.

Stein used that knowledge to devastating effect in 1967 when Celtic beat Inter, recording the most comprehensive 2-1 victory ever in a European Cup final.

Cosmopolitan, tactically sophisticated, glamorous, Inter looked, one Celtic player said, “like Ambre Solaire men.” But they were vanquished – some estimates suggest Celtic had 42 shots on goal – by what Stein called “pure, inventive football.”

To ensure Celtic were in the right attacking mood, the manager showed a tape of the 1960 final before the game.

Celtic tonk Inter in '67

The magical, flickering black and white footage of Puskas and Di Stefano had also entranced two 14-year-old Dutch kids, Barrie Hulshoff and Gerrie Muhren.

As striker and midfielder, they won three European Cups with Ajax. But for Muhren, the greatest moment of his career came in April 1973 when, in a European Cup semi-final against Real Madrid at the Bernabeu, he juggled the ball on the half-way line and was applauded by the home crowd.

As Muhren told David Winner in Brilliant Orange: “It was always my dream to play good soccer against Real Madrid.”

Ajax’s greatest player, Johan Cruyff, was the most complete footballer since Di Stefano. With his old boss Rinus Michels and another Ajax escapee, Johan Neeskens (who would later assist Frank Rijkaard as Barca coach), he founded a school of football in Barcelona.

A Dutch school based on movement, possession and technique but influenced, strongly, by the skill, passing, interaction and movement, of the great Real side.

That Dutch school acquired an unorthodox Italian influence when Frank Rijkaard, a Dutch master in Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan, took over at Camp Nou.

A former shoe salesman, Sacchi was a zealot, determined to change the defensive culture of Italian football. As he told Jonathan Wilson, “Holland in the 1970s really took my breath away. The television was too small: I felt like I needed to see the whole pitch to fully understand it.”

Inspired by Honved (where Puskas made his name), Real, Brazil and Holland, Sacchi created an attacking Milan team based on movement, pressing and the conviction that to be truly great you didn’t just have to win, you had to entertain.

Rijkaard’s team initially did both, before the team spirit evaporated, but the same belief underpins Pep Guardiola’s Barca.

So this UEFA Champions League final should be a fascinating contest.

Guardiola, who very nearly joined United when he left Camp Nou in 2001, learned his craft in midfield under Cruyff and is steeped in a school of football that stretches back to Real Madrid in 1960.

Guardiola’s opponent, Sir Alex Ferguson, treasures his memories of the 1960 final and has often, as a manager, shown a weakness for players of technique and vision in midfield and strikers who are more than just predators.

It is crass to say he was searching for a new Puskas or Di Stefano but Cantona, Veron, Rooney, Berbatov and the near signing of Gazza are all testimony to the United manager’s determination to find attackers and midfielders with technique, imagination and vision.

Ferguson’s first European trophy – a Cup Winners’ Cup with Aberdeen in 1983 – was won against a Real Madrid side coached by Di Stefano. Ferguson’s mentor Jock Stein famously suggested that the Dons boss should present The White Arrow with a bottle of whisky, as if Aberdeen were just happy to be there.

Ferguson was delighted when Di Stefano accepted the gift with a puzzled smile.

Aberdeen and Alex Ferguson (r) lift Cup Winners' Cup in '83

In 1960 in Glasgow, an Argentine genius orchestrated a European Cup final that changed football forever. In 2009 in Rome, another Argentine genius will hope to be half as influential as Di Stefano.

The biggest threat to Messi’s supremacy is a Portuguese No.7 who seems to nurture the hope that, one day, he will join Di Stefano, Puskas, Gento and Zidane in Real’s pantheon of legends.

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Calcio’s Venetian tragedy

2009-05-12T07:00:00Z

You will be relieved to hear that Didier Drogba is not castigated or lauded in this blog which contains no jokes about the synthetic Brezhnevian quality of Gordon Brown’s smile and has nothing to say about Ledley King’s nightlife.

Seeking some solace from the hysteria surrounding events at Stamford Bridge last week, my thoughts turned to poor SSC Venezia, a club sinking almost as fast as the city it calls home.

I should probably explain why.

In my eyes, you either support a big club (Manchester United, Liverpool, Real Madrid) or you don’t.

And if you don’t – I write as someone whose football allegiances have been hopelessly split between Leicester City and Nuneaton Town (nee Borough) since the 1960s – you tend to instinctively sympathise with the game’s other fringe outfits. Teams like SSC Venezia, aka the Leoni Alati (Winged Lions).

You can tell a lot about a club by scanning the ‘notable players’ on their Wikipedia page. On Venezia’s, five names stand out for different reasons: Can Bartu, Maurizio Ganz, Nil Lamptey, Andrea Silenzi, Christian Vieri.

Seasoned goal-getter: Maurizio Ganz

Bartu, a Turkish striker, is best known for scoring for Fenerbahce’s football and basketball teams on the same day in January 1957.

Lamptey was one of many ‘new Peles’ who spurned greatness. Silenzi, signed by Nottingham Forest in 1996/97 had done enough, after 10 games, to be officially named the worst foreign player ever bought for the Premiership.

Vieri played 29 games for Venezia in the mid-1980s on his road to infamy. Maurizio Ganz was a ‘have boots will travel’ striker whose impressive haul of 204 goals in 469 games at 14 clubs included eight for Venezia while on loan.

I remember Ganz well because, on my first trip to Venice in 2000, we bought my five-year-old son a Venezia brown, green and orange shirt – yep, very much like a humbug – with Ganz’s name on it.

As my son played one afternoon in Campo San Stefano, young Venetian men waved their arms in ironic homage. Ganz had scored twice that afternoon for Venezia, then still in Serie A but already destined for relegation.

It’s odd the ties that bind us to clubs we have no business supporting.

From then on I have followed Venezia, albeit largely over the internet and, alas, this Easter, just missed them taking on the not so mighty Pergocrema in Serie C1. (The Winged Lions won 1-0).

Their ground is the only stadium in Italy that away supporters must take a boat to and run the (increasingly slight) risk of pirate attacks from home supporters. Just take the No.41 vaporetto to Saint Elena or, if you’re really flush, a motoscafi.

Unlike Leicester, who have choked in four finals, the Winged Lions have won the cup.

They enjoyed a brief heyday (winning the Coppa Italia and coming third in Serie A) in World War II and were recently run by Maurizio Zamparini who, incensed by council shilly-shallying over a new stadium, bought a new club (Palermo) and took the best players with him.

The Venezia side that shone briefly in the 1940s contained such greats as Valentino Mazzola and Enzo Loik who joined Il Grande Torino and died in the Superga crash in May 1949.

To lose one strong side is unlucky, but to lose another – in the Zamparini affair – is careless. Venezia lost its bearings in the 1940s and has never steered itself back on course.

In 1940/41, Mazzola and Loik both scored as the Winged Lions beat Roma, after a replay, to lift the Coppa Italia. In 1942/43, Venezia reached their second cup final in three years but lost 4-0 to a Torino side that included Loik and Mazzola (who scored against his old team.)

Walk around Venice today and you very rarely see the black shirt, trimmed with orange and green that is Venezia’s new home kit.

Even the kids I spotted kicking a football against a church wall in Campo Santa Margherita one sunny evening weren’t wearing Venezia shirts. There is a backstreets supporters club in Castello where 111 mostly old men gather to drink cheap red wine and bemoan the old days.

Venezia's Stadio Pierluigi Penzo

Ominously, on the island of Guidecca, I spotted a reasonably spruce café/club for Milan supporters.

With so much else going on – canals, 20 million tourists a year, magnificent buildings – it is easy to see why Venice might not care about football. But that wasn’t always so.

In the 18th century, as the painter Jan van Groevenbroeck famously recorded, calcio was the sport of local noblemen. A forced merger with the mainlanders of Mestre in 1987 didn’t help the club’s standing in Venice.

And, in recent years, this most romantic, yet ruthless city may just not want to be associated with a team that is near the bottom of Serie C1A.

Yet if Venice is to be more than a living heritage museum, a proper football team, bankrolled by a Venetian Silvio Berlusconi, could give its communal life some vitality. The post-match pub crawl along the Via Garibaldi was one of the finest in European football.

As the 60th anniversary of Superga nears, the homage paid to those fallen heroes will be bitter sweet for Venezia fans who will also mourn the break-up of a team that could have changed their history.

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Are Ronaldo & Rooney the new Di Stefano & Puskas?

2009-05-06T11:00:00Z

The short answer is: well, no.

The long answer is that though they don’t have the range of talents of the brightest stars ever to shine in Real Madrid’s firmament, they showed the kind of joy, technique and verve in their humbling of Arsenal that made the European Cup so special in the first place.

Ferenc Puskas and George Best would have approved of Cristiano Ronaldo’s performance at the Emirates, while even such professionally unimpressed living legends as Alfredo di Stefano and Johan Cruyff might privately concede that United's No.7 didn’t have a bad game.

Tactics, luck, and talent all helped decide this all-England semi-final.

But the hinge factor the tie swung on was that Manchester United had four players who could make and take chances, while Arsenal had just two: Robin Van Persie, injured for the first leg and not as effective as he would have wanted in the second, and Andrei Arshavin, who was cup-tied.

Ronnie and Rooney help outgun Arsenal

The Italians, who analyse football with a scientific rigour worthy of Galileo, like to classify their creative midfielders and strikers. A director (or general) like Gianni Rivera is a regista, a visionary playmaker (or No.10) is a fantasista and a striker is a goleador.

The European Cup has – from Puskas to Rivera, Cruyff to Platini and Stoitchkov to Zidane – been enriched by players who are all three. They’re probably better at two of the roles but do the other if need be.

In the last five years, with lesser teams realising that tediously defensive tactics can bridge the quality gap and coaches knowing almost as much about their opponents’ formations as their own, these three-players-in-one have often defined the difference between success and failure.

The last four UEFA Champions League winners have all featured a creative goalscorer at the very top of their game: Cristiano Ronaldo (2008), Kaka (2007), Ronaldinho (2006) and Steven Gerrard (2005).

Four out of the last five winners of the Golden Shoe, the award for Europe’s most prolific goalscorer, have fitted this template: CR7 (2008), Francesco Totti (2007) and Thierry Henry (2004 and 2005).

And the player most likely to succeed Ronaldo as European Footballer of the Year is a fantasista/goleador called Lionel Messi.

The rise of such talents is an inexorable consequence of the game’s lucrative pact with television.

Once you’ve accepted a billion or seven from TV networks to broadcast your wares, it would be stupid and churlish to insist that football is a sport not an entertainment.

Even Jose Mourinho, the Helenio Herrera for the new millennium, has had to accept that. So Manchester City’s bid for Kaka may have been ridiculous. But it was not stupid.

Di Stefano and Puskas celebrate in 1960

At their best, these artistes have the vision to find space, a particular trademark skill (Cruyff had his turn, Cristiano Ronaldo has two: the stepover king has now developed a cannonball shot from distance that is almost worthy of Puskas) and the ability to devastatingly change tempo as if they can accelerate or decelerate time.

Di Stefano did just that in the 1960 final, which Real Madrid won 7-3. With Real 6-2 up, he called for the ball in his own half and set off on a bewildering run which, after a few rapid-fire passes, ended with a powerful shot that flew into the bottom left-hand corner.

Above all, these greats are improvisers.

Remember Ronaldinho’s goal under the wall against Werder Bremen in 2006? Or that toe-poke goal against Chelsea in the first Battle of Stamford Bridge in 2005?

Petr Cech, like Eintracht’s unfortunate keeper Egon Loy, was left shell-shocked, asking, as a Hollywood executive might put it, “What just happened?”

They also, and it’s a trait they are rarely appreciated for, have guts.

It takes nerve to try a trick in front of 90,000 people in the stadium – and untold millions worldwide – fail and have another go.

And to bear the kicks from outraged defenders or the slings and arrows of critics like Italian football writer Gianni Brera, who derided this kind of player as “abattino” (a young priest) because of their perceived reluctance to do the dirty stuff.

The Brera view, which influenced Italy’s 1970 World Cup campaign, was that such players were luxuries. A team could only afford one of them.

So Rivera and Sandro Mazzola alternated in Mexico to no great effect. 39 years later, Ferguson has four of them in a squad and, when necessary, has played all four.

Ronaldinho bamboozles the Blues

England’s first dominance of the European Cup, with five 1-0s in six finals between 1977 and 1982, is not fondly remembered on the continent.

True, Nottingham Forest’s plucky triumphs were cherished by the kind of romantics who will always have a soft spot for St Etienne. And the majestic talent of Kenny Dalglish, another supreme maker and taker, is still spoken of in hushed tones in bars across Europe.

But this was not regarded in mainland Europe as one of football’s golden ages. This time, English clubs, albeit often with the best foreign talent money can buy, may finally win in a style that would cheer Puskas. That would, in a way, be perfectly fitting.

The Galloping Major’s artistry at Hampden Park in 1960 was, after all, one of the main reasons that the young Alex Ferguson fell completely and utterly in love with the European Cup.

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Welcome to the Tom, Jerry and Guus show

2009-05-01T11:00:00Z

I am not the first person in football to be duped by the genius of Guus Hiddink. Nor will I be the last. But I am undoubtedly the poorest.

Hiddink told Pedro Pinto, CNN’s roving football correspondent, Chelsea are a team that wants to attack and “cannot sit back”.

The trick in the UEFA Champions League, Hiddink confided, was to make sure you did some damage in the away leg. And then, in the pre-match press conference, he told the media this semi-final was a game between two teams who loved to attack.

What he really meant was: “This is a game between two teams who love to attack, one of whom has been ordered not to.”

The 4-2-3-1 – which at times felt more like 8-1-1 – did its job. Kind of.

The “uber-catenaccio” left Barcelona unsettled, depleted by injury and feeling cheated, with Xavi complaining that one team wanted to play football and one didn’t.

"Ye shall not pass..."

Certainly, a few Italian journalists I spoke to were ironically amused by the British press’ praise for Chelsea’s heroism. Such acclaim, they said, would never be lavished on any Serie A side that came to England and shut up shop.

Jean Tigana might say the odds slightly favour Barca. His Monaco side knocked Manchester United out after just such a result at home, drawing 1-1 at Old Trafford in the quarter-finals back in 1997/98.

Without an away goal, Hiddink cannot be as defensive in the second leg. And he will remember the wise words of Juande Ramos: “Barcelona are at their most dangerous when you’re attacking them.”

If Chelsea complete the job at Stamford Bridge, the closing stages of the 2009/10 Champions League will resemble one long advert for the versatility of Guus Hiddink.

Till now, under Roman Abramovich, the dilemma has been: you can win with Mourinhoesque efficiency or you can entertain, like Scolari at the start of the season, but you can’t have both.

But Hiddink has synthesized these contrasting strategies, giving us a new genetic blend of football you might call 'Moulari'.

One week it’s an eight goal thriller, the other it’s an exhibition of the lost black art of catenaccio. If you have the nous and the players to pull this off, this could be the best of all possible worlds.

And, after his misdirection ahead of the first leg. I can’t wait to see if Hiddink turns up for the next pre-match press conference carrying a giant red herring.

Arsene Wenger played a 4-2-3-1 to completely contrasting effect at Old Trafford. The final possession stats – 55 percent to United and 45 percent for Arsenal – don’t really reflect how badly the Gunners were overrun and how lucky they were not to leave Manchester 4-0 down and out.

Almunia keeps Gunners hopes in tact

This was the only semi-final I have ever seen played with the pace, rhythm and demented energy of a classic Tom And Jerry cartoon (one of those with Fred Quimby as producer).

Gazzetta Dello Sport felt, I think rightly, that Wenger’s tactical wheeze ceded control of midfield to United’s 4-3-3. As the Spanish daily Marca put it, Arsenal looked “tormented and flabbergasted by the fury of the Red Devils,” as tormented, in fact, as Tom whenever Jerry turned the tables on him.

In attack, the Gunners passed without penetration, never managing the kind of combination play that would open up United. Emmanuel Adebayor, Gazzetta noted, “resembled a Ferrari racing at Cinquecento speed”.

L’Equipe drolly described Arsenal’s marking as “rather lax, almost symbolic.”

That’s certainly how it looked for the ricochet that let in John O’Shea. Every set-piece can become a melodrama for Arsenal this season and, struggling to regroup after the corner, they gave United the freedom of the back post.

Still, both coaches will wonder if United will regret not killing the tie in the first leg.

The good, but irrelevant, news for United is that the whole of Belgium will be cheering them on, because an Arsenal triumph in Rome would deprive the Belgian champions (either Standard Liege or Anderlecht) of an automatic spot in the 2009/10 group stage.

The known unknown, as Andy Roxburgh, UEFA technical director, put it is that “Both away sides look capable of scoring.” And if United score first, will Arsenal manage to score three?

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Will Hiddink play one at the back?

2009-04-28T11:00:00Z

If you want to know who’ll win the UEFA Champions League semi-finals, don’t ask me.

Head to Alkmaar’s cheese market and find the fortune teller who told Louis Van Gaal AZ would win the Dutch title on 19 April 2009. Van Gaal was sceptical – his team didn’t have a game on that day – but PSV’s 6-2 thrashing of Ajax on the 19 April gifted AZ the Eredivisie.

Instead of predictions – mine usually stink – I bring you stats...

Eight out of the last 10 semis have been decided by a goal or less on aggregate, and five of the last 10 sides to play the first leg at home have progressed.

The last reigning champions to reach the final the next season were Juventus in 1997. That was the last time a side (Borussia Dortmund) won the Champions League for the first time.

Dortmund triumph in 1997

This season’s semi-finalists all broadly favour attack, play four at the back and look a bit dodgy in defence.

Pep Guardiola could have emulated his mentor Johan Cruyff’s 3-4-3 but wisely uses a better organised version of Rijkaard’s 4-3-3. Barcelona’s defence looks in the best nick, although Deco thinks they are too short as a unit.

For the record, Carles Puyol is 5ft10in, four inches shorter than Chelsea’s Serbian not-so-secret weapon Branislav Ivanovic.

Battle of the 4-3-3 squadrons...

Pep Guardiola once said that Johan Cruyff created the chapel and it was every Barcelona coach’s job to improve or restore it.

The one question vexing this smart, obsessive, skinny coach, who has done such a cracking job of sprucing up the Barca chapel this season, will be 'what trick does Guus Hiddink have up his sleeve?'

Surprise can be as effective a weapon in football as it was in comedy for Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition.

Hiddink’s Australia played one at the back against Japan in the 2006 World Cup (as the Socceroos recovered from 0-1 to 3-1). He has used 3-5-2 (at PSV in 1988), 4-4-1-1 (Holland, France 98), 3-4-3 (South Korea, 2002), and 4-3-3 (PSV 2005, when he terrified Milan in the semi-final second leg, and now at Chelsea).

He will probably prefer 4-3-3 against Barca. Coaches often like to mirror the opposing formation (daft as it sounds, it can confound the other team), but the Blues’ 4-3-3 is designed to counter, while Barca’s 4-3-3 is all about keeping the ball and suffocating opponents, pressing so that Messi, Henry, Eto’o can strike.

While the papers focus on Messi. Hiddink may scheme to stop Xavi, who initiates most attacks (although Iniesta scored one and had a hand in three against Sevilla).

As a coach, it’s hard to legislate for Messi’s genius. But if Chelsea can deny Barca’s skilful, industrious midfielder space – will Essien do to Xavi what he did to Gerrard at Anfield in the quarters? – they could isolate the forwards.

"It's my ball, and you're not having it"

Hiddink won’t ask Chelsea to sit back as United did against Barca. In a CNN interview, he says “In Europe, it’s important to get some harm done in the away game.”

Especially as keeping clean sheets can’t be taken for granted at the Bridge where set-pieces have become a concern. And, if we come to the last 10 minutes at home with Chelsea chasing the game, Hiddink will play one at the back – or something equally radical – if he sees fit.

In certain crannies of the internet, fans laughingly call Hiddink “The semi-finalist.” (He has only won one, with PSV back in 1988, losing with Holland in 1998, Korea in 2002, PSV in 2005 and Russia in 2008).

This is his chance to bury that tag. All that stands in his way is a gifted, young coach strongly influenced by Johan Cruyff who, like Hiddink, learned much of his craft as a coach from Rinus Michels.

Who will tinker?

The other semi-final should be a clash of 4-4-2s, if Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger don’t tinker.

Arsenal’s one up front against Chelsea in the FA Cup semi-final looked limp. The 4-5-1 Arsenal played away in their 2006 Champions League run worked because, man for man, Wenger had a better team and because the Gunners didn’t face an English team in the knockout stages.

Alan ‘Smudger’ Smith has noted one vital difference between the 2008/09 Arsenal and the invincibles of 2003/04.

Gone are technically gifted, physically powerful athletes like Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira. Wenger has assembled a nimble, pacy, technically gifted team that lacks physical presence.

This has cost them in the Premier League and may hurt them against United. Some Arsenal fans have, only half-humourously, urged Wenger to buy some players with bones.

A 4-4-2 would make sense. The tie could give Nicklas Bendtner the chance to become more than a legend in his own mind. (Bendtner has actually scored 12 goals this season without significantly endearing himself to Arsenal fans.)

And, as porous as the Gunners’ defence can be, Aalborg and Porto scored twice at Old Trafford.

Arsenal vs United, Wenger vs Ferguson is a perplexing double rivalry that has inspired the Gunners to astonishing heights or led them to the kind of shambling incompetence hitherto reserved for certain Elvis Presley movies of the mid-1960s.

Nobody knows which Arsenal will turn up at Old Trafford. Or which United – the one that played the first half against Spurs? Or the second?

With five Premier League games left, United’s unsettled defence have already conceded one goal more in the league than 2007/08. And there was nothing especially subtle about the attacking play that put Spurs 2-0 up at half-time.

United stuttered with one up-front in the first half at home against Porto so Ferguson may prefer a 4-4-2 or a 4-4-1-1, perhaps encouraging Cristiano Ronaldo, who led the line superbly in Porto, to play ahead of Berbatov or Rooney.

With a richly talented foursome of Berbatov, Ronaldo, Rooney and Tevez (who will surely feature as an impact sub) Ferguson may see the chance to settle the tie this week.

Let’s hope that one semi is decided by a goal as sublime as Thierry Henry’s against Sevilla.

"Someone order a goal?"

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Review: Romance, redemption & Didier Drogba

2009-04-17T11:00:00Z

For a tournament often pilloried as a giant money-making machine, the UEFA Champions League delivered enough old-time romance this week to satisfy purists raised on the early glorious days of the European Cup.

The 4-4 at Stamford Bridge was worthy of the Benfica vs Real Madrid 5-3 final in 1962, and Cesc Fabregas’s brilliant back heel to create Arsenal’s opener against Villarreal would have inspired the goal of the week if it hadn’t been for Cristiano Ronaldo’s rocket against Porto.

Ronaldo lets rip

With 28 goals in eight quarter-final matches, the 2008/09 goals per game average now stands at 2.66, higher than in the last five World Cups.

Didier Drogba, destroyer of Juventus, ripped through Liverpool’s defence like a tank in the second half.

On form and motivated, he is the greatest centre-forward in the world today. In an era when the old-style striker is an endangered species - for reasons Jonathan Wilson explores in the latest issue of Champions – Drogba proved that a great No.9 can still turn a game.

In this vein, the Ivorian may yet redeem himself for the red card in Moscow.

I enjoyed his post-match press conference too, although it was a shame no one asked him if the second syllable of his surname really is pronounced - as ITV’s irrepressible commentator Clyde Tyldesley would have it - like the “Bah!” in Scrooge’s cry of “Bah! Humbug!”

The Blues must now overcome Barcelona, who represent the Rest of Europe.

When Hiddink watches Barca’s 1-1 draw in Munich, he will be encouraged by how much trouble Franck Ribery gave Daniel Alves and Carlos Puyol.

Barca’s triumph was not the cakewalk the 5-1 aggregate scoreline suggests. With Luca Toni sharper, and the penalty they deserved in the second leg, Bayern might have made Pep Guardiola’s team sweat.

Certainly Bayern coach Jurgen Klinsmann deserved better than to be crucified on a German newspaper front page.

As for Toni, quoted as tipping Roberto Mancini to replace Klinsi, he should consider the old adage about players doing their talking on the pitch. If he doesn’t buck up, he could become the first striker in the history of football to have effectively ended his career by wearing a silly moustache.

The tactical dilemma facing Barcelona’s opponents is simple: how can you score if you can’t get the ball? Barca have enjoyed 62 percent of the possession on average in the tournament this season – more than any other side. But this may suit Chelsea who have been lethal on the counter in Hiddink’s 4-3-3.

It will be intriguing to see how Hiddink marks Messi. Does he, as Martin Lipton suggests in the Mirror sacrifice Michael Essien to stop 'The Flea' biting?

Can Chelsea swat The Flea?

That runs the risk of repeating the famous mistake Helmut Schoen made in the 1966 World Cup final when he sacrificed Franz Beckenbauer’s threat by telling the Kaiser to mark Bobby Charlton.

Guardiola’s Barcelona have often looked awesome but have not seriously been tested in this tournament. Their group draw (pitting them against Basle, Shakhtar and Sporting) was easy and they have faced two transitional sides in the knock-out stages.

Their dominance of this season’s la Liga is no great indicator of quality. With Barca the only Spanish side to reach the last four of either European club competition, the Spanish top flight isn’t the force it was.

Watching Villarreal, missing their Senna-Cazorla midfield axis, lose 3-0 to Arsenal only reinforced that view.

Apart from Robert Pires, hailed with heartfelt choruses of “Superbob” from Gooners, Villarreal (fifth in la Liga) looked overawed. Watching Pires’s valiant effort, I was reminded of Raymond Kopa’s lament about the pain of playing with team-mates who aren’t as good as you.

At one point, Pires shaped to hit the ball right and forward down the flank for a team-mate to run onto. But the run was never made and the ball pootled harmlessly into touch. That mis-read pass summed up Villarreal’s performance.

Arsenal look bright, creative and confident. But they would have lost the first leg if Villarreal had been ruthless upfront. Which makes Arsenal vs United as impossible to call as Liverpool vs Chelsea.

The key for United isn’t the artistry of Cristiano Ronaldo but the fitness and focus of Nemanja Vidic and Rio Ferdinand.

Porto’s heroism against United was embarrassing for Jose Mourinho’s Inter. The Nerazzurri and Celtic are the only sides United have beaten at Old Trafford in the tournament this season.

Jesualdo Ferreira’s Dragons paid for not making their supremacy count on the scoresheet. But Porto’s trickery, guts, pace and technique suggested their gung-ho approach might be a better strategy for away sides at Old Trafford than stifling the game by packing midfield.

Of the four coaches left, Ferguson and Hiddink have won this trophy before, Guardiola has won it as a player and Wenger has never won it – or any other European trophy.

Guardiola is the most inexperienced coach and faces, in Hiddink, one of the great touchline improvisers.

But, as Bobby Robson notes in his memoirs, Guardiola was effectively the manager in the dressing room when Barcelona ended their European Cup hoodoo in 1992.

Pep (third right) triumphs in '92

The odds slightly favour Ferguson being able, on May 28 in Rome, to say “Veni, vidi, vici.”

But Chelsea, on the principle that - like every winner since Milan in 2002/03 - they have knocked out the team that knocked out Real Madrid, must fancy their chances.

This is anyone’s tournament now...

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If we don’t win, the lizard gets it…

2009-04-13T09:00:00Z

Sorry folks, but my considered analysis of the UEFA Champions League quarter-finals will have to wait as I am in Venice, wondering if the suggestion that I sneak out to watch SSC Venezia take on the mighty Pergocrema in Serie C1A might lead to divorce.

Then again, Pergocrema does sound like an Italian cure for piles.

Suffice to say: how good were Porto! And how crap was my pre-match analysis!

In the meantime, I have cobbled together a series of random thoughts on training, ritual slaughter and the madness of coaches.

Porto upset the Prof's predictions...

Training daze...

I read a flattering profile of Frank Lampard the other day which said he was invariably the last player on the training ground.

This set me wondering. Frank may be a tireless trainer but if every footballer who claimed they were the last one to stop training really was last the last to hang up their boots, there would be no lasts. Training would simply never end.

There’s also the implicit, Protestant work ethic assumption that such diligence is always laudable. There’s one tiny flaw in that theory. It’s utter b*llocks. Gary Lineker’s idea of a tough training regime was getting out off the bath, but it didn’t stop him scoring 48 goals for England.

As Ed Smith points out in Intelligent Life, training hard doesn’t account for the difference in greatness between, say, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. Nor, Smith adds, would David Gower necessarily have been a better batsman if he’d trained as hard as Graham Gooch.

So can we stop this sports jock snobbishness and just accept that different players have different training needs? And treat every claim that a player is the last in training with due scepticism.

Lampard: Last in the showers again

If we don’t win, the lizard dies…

The lizards of Marseille must be getting nervous. In 1993, before OM met Milan in the UEFA Champions League final, Basile Boli’s wife sacrificed a lizard for luck.

It worked for the final – but couldn’t stave off Tapiegate. Now OM are back in the UEFA Cup quarter-finals, against Shakhtar, further acts of ritual slaughter cannot be ruled out.

Just after reading about Boli’s animal sacrifice, I flew to Geneva to see UEFA. On a concourse plastered with posters for watches, I noticed one promoting a timepiece made out of original parts of the Titanic.

As brand extensions go, this struck me as hideous, tacky and, surely, unlucky. What next? Cuff links containing lumps of the iceberg that struck the ship?

Can’t see either of these fashion accessories catching on with footballers who are, on the whole, a deeply superstitious bunch, obsessed by rituals, lucky underpants and fortuitous rabbits’ foots although, there again, you have to wonder? How lucky can a rabbit that's lost its foot be?

"Quick... leg it"

You don’t have to be mad to coach but…

Continuing my occasional series on football professions where a streak of insanity is a useful asset, coaching surely requires a degree of obsession that could unbalance many ordinary mortals.

I am thinking – and I’m afraid this has to be a no names kind of story because of the laws of libel – of the gaffer who, on arriving at a club, had all the portraits of past glories torn down from his office walls to be replaced with pictures of himself.

I am also struck by my memory of an interview with a top-flight coach where talk turned, as it often does, to tactics. The interviewee leant over and said: “I don’t want to talk too much about this because I think I’ve spotted something in midfield that no one else has seen.”

I watched his team for the rest of the season, trying to discern or deduce what secret wisdom this coach had uncovered and how his team were putting it to use.

Whatever it was, it didn’t work. The team got relegated and the manager’s fluctuating subsequent career did little to suggest that this secret stood him in good stead.

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Wingers: Wide, glorious and daft

2009-04-10T08:00:00Z

If goalkeepers are crazy, wingers must be a bit daft.

The thought occurred to me last weekend, watching No.11 Anthony Gale, son of West Ham old boy Tony Gale, create two goals as Walton Casuals beat Merstham 3-1 in the Ryman League Division 1 South.

Gale Jr had been barracked by Casuals fans because, apparently oblivious to the effect on the team’s shape, he constantly drifted in from the left flank to central midfield.

That left a prairie or two of space from which Merstham raided at will (the visitors should have been 4-1 up at half-time, not trailing 2-1) and confusing his team-mates who kept passing into the space where Gale would have been if he’d stayed out wide.

But all was forgiven as Gale struck two superb free-kicks for Nick Burton to head home. Merstham never recovered from the shock.

I can sympathise with Gale Junior. The sheer social isolation of life on the wing, hugging the touchline in the hope your colleagues will remember to pass to you, is too much for many wide men.

Rinus Michels, in his seminal book Teambuilding, complements David Beckham for his ability to cross the ball with feeling and his discipline in staying out wide.

But as Beckham’s star rose, the idea that he was a gifted, but marginal, influence on a match gnawed at him and he became a frustrated midfield general, often rushing into the centre and discombobulating the team.

Doing what he does best...

Like Gale Jr, Beckham is an unusual winger in that he doesn’t have a trick with which to beat a full-back.

Such majestic egoists as Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews had the swerve, the dribble, and the change of pace to torture any defender. The England selectors’ distrust of Matthews seems bizarre now but Andy Roxburgh, UEFA’s technical director, can probably understand it.

Wingers are soloists with their own muses, wide boys who can play as if they have their eyes wide shut, and some degree of inconsistency is the price of their trade.

As Roxburgh says: “In the old days, you had what I call the ‘lazy winger’ who might have one good game in three or five. The crowd loved them but they were the kind of players who could get a manager the sack.”

Neither Matthews nor Finney were lazy but even the latter, as great as he was, could over-elaborate.

Matthews and Finney so terrorised Portugal in a 1947 friendly that the Portuguese, in John Moynihan’s fine phrase, “melted away with tears in their eyes” and lost 10-0. But even Finney and Matthews couldn’t guarantee to be that gloriously destructive every game.

So Sir Alf Ramsey – either because of the rationale outlined by Roxburgh or because truly great wingers were scarcer in England in the 1960s – preferred to give the No.7 and No.11 shirts to roving midfielders.

1965: Fleet-footed Matthews outfoxes Fulham

Even Brazil have not always cherished their wingers. The great Garrincha notoriously almost missed the 1958 World Cup because the team psychologist, after contemplating a few of the winger’s stick drawings, decided he was mentally sub-normal.

Luckily, Brazil coach Vicente Feola ignored the psychologist and picked the Little Bird for the third vital group game against the USSR. The selecao won 2-0 with Garrincha simply glorious.

If anything, he was even greater in 1962 when, with Pele struggling for fitness, he almost won the World Cup on his own. Yet his team-mate Mario Zagallo later admitted: “Garrincha was too unpredictable, even for us his team-mates.”

Bill Shankly once told a player: “The trouble with you son is all your brains are in your head.”

Most wingers, even the best ones, seem to think with their feet, their ability to enthral and appal perfectly captured by one Partick Thistle fan’s comment on Denis McQuade: “An eccentric winger from the 1970s. He would beat five players in a mazy dribble and miss an open goal.”

There are many wing commanders in the game today but they no longer have a kingdom of their own – a domain that once stretched from the halfway line down the flank to the opposing penalty area – and don’t have the same licence to dribble.

One glorious exception is Arjen Robben, who symbolised the perversity of the breed by being both sublime and ineffective against Liverpool.

There are few things in football quite as thrilling as watching a player like Aidan McGeady or Theo Walcott run at defenders with the ball at their feet and Robert Pires has brilliantly analysed the tricks of the trade.

But in a utilitarian game, coaches may prefer to rely on wide players like Beckham who has made an immense virtue of his own deficiency by perfecting the art of the pass, the cross and the set piece.

Much like Anthony Gale at Walton Casuals.

Walcott bamboozles Bolton...

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Previews: Karma, Porto & the Gunners

2009-04-07T09:00:00Z

And so 32 have become eight.

Four of the 16 possible permutations for the final in Rome would reprise old finals (1987: Porto vs Bayern; 1999: United vs Bayern; 2006: Barcelona vs Arsenal; 2008: United vs Chelsea). Four of the eight teams left standing are English and the draw ensures that at least one will reach the semi-final. But as we look ahead to the quarter-finals what else can we sure of?

Riise: Revenge for Garcia's ghost goal

Not very much. Arsenal and Porto should be wary of the John Arne Riise principle of karmic recompense. The Norwegian’s own goal in last year’s semi-final against Chelsea was explicable only as a karmic equaliser for the ghost goal of 2005. Villarreal and United both enter their ties convinced that fate owes them a favour.

Barcelona vs Bayern

The most romantic tie of the quarter-finals, dripping in European pedigree, a veritable clash of the titans, etc etc. These sides have scored 48 goals between them in the 2008/09 UEFA Champions League, so don’t be surprised if this is 0-0 after 210 minutes and goes to penalties.

Actually that would be a turn up. The Italians, as Ray Wilkins never tires of noting, do know how to defend. Barcelona and Bayern don’t. Not all the time. Pep Guardiola’s men have not kept a clean sheet at Camp Nou in Europe this season, while Bayern have twice shipped five in the Bundesliga (against Werder Bremen in September and last weekend against Wolfsburg).

Bayern won this competition in 2001 but have lost at this stage in 2002, 2005 and 2007. Jurgen Klinsmann’s hopes of defying that dismal record sank when Miroslav Klose ruptured a tendon. Though Klose doesn’t grab the headlines as often as Luca Toni, he works harder and is more pivotal to Bayern’s play.

Klose: Crucial to Bayern's cause

In the latest Champions, Bastian Schweinsteiger says Bayern dream of a final against United and vengeance for 1999.

Klinsmann should check out his old deputy Joachim Low’s gameplan for the Euro 2008 final. If Bayern are to progress, they must seize the initiative, disrupt Barcelona’s possession play and expose the Catalans’ rearguard to the physical and mental quickness of Schweinsteiger, Franck Ribery and, possibly, Lucas Podolski. Germany almost disturbed Spain’s midfield supremacy at Euro 2008 and six of the players in that final should face each other in this tie.

Sir Alex Ferguson’s remarks about Barcelona being the main non-English threat are intriguing. As he has just suggested too much media flattery has upset his team’s rhythm, is this praise designed to flatter Barca? Or wind up Bayern by suggesting they have already been discounted?

With no karmic debts to be repaid here, there is everything to play for.

Chelsea vs Liverpool

In a world of sequels, the fifth clash between these clubs in as many Champions League seasons could be as compelling as The Bourne Ultimatum or as unsatisfactory as Pirates Of The Caribbean 3.

The media will package this recurring melodrama using familiar plotlines – key battles (Torres vs Terry, Gerrard vs Lampard, Drogba vs Carragher) and all that, but nobody – not pundits, journalists, players nor coaches – has any idea how this quarter-final will pan out.

Rafa Benitez and Guus Hiddink almost faced off in Istanbul in 2005. Hiddink’s PSV showed up the Rossoneri’s defensive deficiencies in the semi-final that year.

In the second leg in Eindhoven, Hiddink brought on Brazilian striker Robert who very nearly put PSV 3-0 up and won the tie. But the gamble – Robert replaced defender Wilfred Bouma – backfired, giving Milan the space to gain a foothold and score that crucial away goal. PSV lost 3-3 on away goals. Benitez won the final after another 3-3 – and, Brian Glanville suggests – erring tactically by fielding the patently unfit Harry Kewell.

Hiddink's PSV denied in '05

Benitez’s six-year record in Europe with Valencia and Liverpool is phenomenal – 2004: UEFA Cup winners; 2005: Champions League winners; 2006: last 16 of knockout round; 2007: losing finalists; 2008: semi-finalists. Hiddink won the trophy in 1988 and, if he beats Liverpool, would have a good shot at being the third coach (after Ottmar Hitzfeld and Ernst Happel) to conquer Europe with two different clubs.

This will be portrayed as a battle of tactical wits. But Chelsea under the not so inspirational Avram Grant won the 2008 semi, the most one-sided instalment in the franchise. Sometimes, as Drogba showed in that tie, coaches are helpless because players write the script.

Manchester United vs Porto

81-1. Those are the odds on this UEFA Champions League season ending with a reprise of the 1987 final. Porto beat Bayern in that thriller, partly due to the most famous backheel in a European Cup final – courtesy of Rabah Madjer – and conquered Europe again in 2004 after a 1-1 draw at Old Trafford in 2004, a result Ferguson still regards as robbery.

It would take a Madjer or Mourinho-style upset for Porto to reach the semis – they are 10-1 to win at Old Trafford, astonishing odds for this stage in a major competition – and their hopes rest on Lisandro Lopez sneaking an away goal, Lucho’s midfield leadership, the Hulk unsettling United’s central defence and the Red Devils having two bad days at the office in the competition Ferguson prizes above all others.

This may be one of the United manager’s last chances to become only the second coach, after the great Bob Paisley, to win this competition three times.

Karma – with Paul Scholes’ goal dubiously disallowed at Old Trafford in 2004 – favours United. As do the stats. Porto’s away record in England is W0, D1, L10. United’s home record against Portuguese opposition is W8 D1, L0.

Scholes goal chalked off in 2004

Villarreal vs Arsenal

Almost as finely poised as Liverpool vs Chelsea. William Hill are offering 2.6/1 on a victory by either side in El Madrigal and 2.8/1 on a draw.

The form book, injury news and the fact that Arsenal play the second leg at home should help the Gunners. Adebayor, Fabregas and Walcott are back, while a dislocated fibula rules out Villarreal midfielder Santi Cazorla, their only ever present in the 2008/09 Champions League.

Arsenal’s 17-game unbeaten run is the longest in the 2008/09 Premier League, while Villarreal have, coach Manuel Pellegrini admits, developed a worrying habit of just not turning up for games.

You may hear talk of Villarreal’s mean defence. This is based on a memory of their miserliness in 2006 and against Manchester United in the group stages. After their 3-0 defeat by Almeria, they have kept just four clean sheets in their last 30 games.

Robert Pires, sent off against Almeria, must keep his emotions in check to torment the Gunners. The Frenchman played 18 minutes of the 2006 final for Arsenal, before being sacrificed after Jens Lehmann’s dismissal. He admits that when he saw his number being held up on the touchline in Paris he thought it was a practical joke.

His team-mates aren’t short of motivation either. The feeling in Villarreal’s dressing room after the 2006 semi-final was that they so vastly superior to Arsenal in the second leg that they deserved to win. So, on the Riise karmic recompense principle, Pellegrini’s team might surprise everyone with an undeserved victory.

Cazorla: Stuffed, along with Villarreal's chances

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Messiahs, flying Dutchmen and whippets

2009-04-05T11:00:00Z

So the messiah is back. He has swapped the pundit’s comfy sofa for the heart-melting melodrama that is life in the dug-out.

I’m referring, of course, to Hans Krankl, Austria’s greatest living footballer, who has nine games to save his managerial career as the new boss at LASK Linz.

Krankl is the third man to coach Linz this season, a dismal time for a club that, in its 1965 heyday, became the first side from outside Vienna to win the Austrian league. Linz haven’t won a game since December, and Krankl has admitted that the team’s recent form has been “scandalous.” But so high are expectations that he has already had to advise the press: “I am not a messiah.”

The confusion may have arisen because in his last job, as Austria’s national coach, he was crucified by the media after failing to reach the 2006 World Cup finals.

Not the Messiah, etc

Krankl has three things going for him. Two of them are SCR Altach and SV Mattersburg, the teams immediately below LASK Linz in the Austrian Bundesliga. With nine games left, Altach (who have also hired three managers this season) have 18 points (nine fewer than LASK) while Matterburg have amassed just 16 points but have the same goal difference (-30) as LASK.

Luckily for Krankl, only one team can go down.

The third thing working in Krankl’s favour is that the 56-year-old’s aura of greatness has not been entirely dissipated by his disappointing reign as national coach. Kranklmania has erupted in Linz, much to the delight of local sports photographer Martin Parzer.

But Krankl inherits an ageing, mediocre squad short on confidence. His most famous player, midfielder Ivica Vastic, is now 39 and his most prolific striker, Christian Mayrleb, is 36. Krankl and his assistant Heinrich Strasser have nine games to turn LASK Linz around and then the summer to ponder their future.

Austria doesn’t just have its own returning messiah, it has its own David Beckham.

Unfortunately for Andreas Ivanschitz, aka the Austrian Becks, his career has taken a quantum leap into the doldrums – as Becks’ did at Real under Capello. Benched by Henk Ten Cate at Panathinaikos, the 25-year-old Austrian midfielder was sensationally omitted from the squad for the World Cup qualifier against Romania.

Coach Dietmar Constantini, hired after Karel Bruckner and the Austrian FA parted “by mutual consent,” gambled by dropping two other experienced stars: defender Martin Stranzl and midfielder Rene Aufhauser.

Stranzl (left) and Ivanschitz: dropped

His audacity was rewarded with Austria’s first win in six games, a morale boosting 2-1 triumph over a Romania side that looks increasingly likely to miss the 2010 World Cup.

Confirming the idea that Austrian football is a funhouse mirror reflection of the English game, the Austrian Bundesliga is also puzzling over the future of a globetrotting Dutch coach who, as the season nears its end, has a should I stay or should I go Guus Hiddink-style dilemma.

Co Adriaanse has done a terrific job at Red Bull Salzburg, a club that has been knocking on the door of the Champions League for some years but, so far, always be left out on the step. But he is tempted by the likely vacancy at PSV, Hiddink’s old club.

If the Austrian national side had an up and coming young winger who sprints like a greyhound – and usually crosses like one – you’d begin to suspect that Austrian and English football had been separated at birth.

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Jari's game: How did Litmanen fade away?

2009-03-31T08:00:00Z

Coaches and fans see players differently.

Watching Jari Litmanen, now 38, give the definitive performance as a midfield general against Wales at the weekend, it was hard not to wonder what - eight years ago - Gerard Houllier failed to see in a player the Finns call Kuningas (The King).

Against Wales, Litmanen was perpetually able to find space, circumvented the opposing defence with imaginative, precise passes (one of which led to Jonatan Johansson’s goal, scored slightly against the run of play) and only made three mistakes in the whole 90 minutes.

The riposte may come that this was against a Wales team that has lost its mojo, but you can only beat what’s in front of you. Litmanen may find he has less time and space against, say, Germany but he will still have the same impeccable technique, coolness and vision.

Watching the way he timed and placed his passes was exhilarating but saddening. Here is a player whose goals won the Eredivisie and the UEFA Champions League for Ajax by the time he was 24. (It helped that Edgar Davids would dole out retribution to any opponent who tried to clatter the Finn.)

Litmanen nets in the 1996 Champions League final

But in the last 10 years, since Litmanen left Ajax, a horrendous run of injuries and a lack of faith from coaches like Houllier have condemned him to a nomadic career on the fringes of the European game.

At Ajax, where the fans sang “Litmanen ooh ooh” to the tune of Volare, he is rated alongside Cruyff and Van Basten.

In Finland, he is a god. 10,000 fans turned up in hope of seeing him play for FC Lahti in 2004, and he is the most capped Finnish international and all-time record goalscorer (30 in 121 games – not bad for a country that peaked at 33 in the FIFA rankings and for a player who has often played in the hole behind strikers like Johansson).

But to most of Europe, he remains an enigma, an enormous What Might Have Been. His big move from Ajax to Barcelona didn't work out. Liverpool fans still talk about his solo goal that almost put them through to the Champions League semi-final in 2002 and wonder why he was twice benched after scoring in two games in a row for them.

Litmanen had idolised Liverpool as a kid, irritating Ajax players with his constant references to the Merseyside club. But the dream move became a nightmare and he slipped away back to Ajax.

Signing for Liverpool from Barcelona in January 2001

When Roy Hodgson took a gamble on Litmanen at Fulham last season, the coach was ridiculed. It didn’t help that the Finn was sidelined by injuries, heart palpitations and a bizarre training ground accident in which the reserve goalkeeper accidentally blasted the ball into the back of Litmanen’s head from just four yards.

Hodgson ruefully noted: “Litmanen must be the unluckiest fellow in football. When I first went to the Finnish FA, he was standing next to the sporting director of Malmo who opened a can of Coke and the ring popped into Jari’s eye.”

Through all these vicissitudes, Litmanen has remained imperturbable, apparently harbouring fewer regrets than Edith Piaf. But his career has not been worthy of his talent.

Frank Rijkaard said once: “Dennis Berkgamp was brilliant for Ajax but the best No.10 we ever had was Jari.”

The best we can hope for now is that, for Finland at least, he has many more glorious games left in him.

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Confessions of a league table addict

2009-03-24T09:00:00Z

Some obsessions are truly magnificent. Sir Alex Ferguson’s love affair with the European Cup is worthy of Captain Ahab and Moby Dick.

But I don’t need to spend gazillions on players or risk a ship and its crew to indulge my obsession. I just need a newspaper with some league tables in them.

I’d recommend studying league tables as an obsession: it’s cheap, unlikely to cost you your job and doesn’t do disastrous things to your body – apart from a slight curvature of the spine as you lean forward to check whether only eight points really did separate the 1965/66 Moroccan champions from the team that finished bottom and got relegated.

It’s true – see for yourself.

I pore over tables as if my intense scrutiny could decode their innermost secrets. Cursory inspections of the points totals are for dilettantes.

First, I scour the table for bizarre variations – teams that have scored 100 goals, sides where the contrast between their home and away form is perversely great – before getting down to start the serious, time-killing business of comparing different team records, feeling strangely joyful when I discover that, say, the team in 14th has conceded less goals than the one in sixth.

I blame my childhood. It came too early. With three TV channels, no internet and phones only for use in emergencies, there were so many hours to fill. I was hungry for data.

American presidential elections were great – I’d nick the pages from dad’s Telegraph to scrutinise the tally of votes in all 50 states – but they only happened every four years.

So I got my fix from league tables. Even today, when I am old enough – but not, alas, smart enough – to know better, I study this data as if it were a higher form of truth.

Some tables spotlight the comedy inherent in competitive football. Truly impressive in the 'won none' stakes are Kalev Tartu who lost all 18 games in the 1950 Estonian Soviet league.

The strikers who played for Kalev that season must have hung their heads in shame as they contemplated this table. Their defence wasn’t bad, but their forwards showed such ineptitude – their collective strike rate was 0.22 goals a game – they must be celebrated in the next edition of Stephen Pile’s Book Of Heroic Failures.

Other tables are historic. Take this one from Serie A in 1969/70.

No side has ever won a title and conceded as few goals in a major league as Cagliari in 1969/70. The Sardinians kept 20 clean sheets that season in Serie A. Bologna’s feat – drawing 53 percent of their games – is almost as remarkable.

Look at this extraordinary Hungarian league table from 1988/89.

Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted the extra column. That’s because the Hungarian FA decided there should be no drawn games, penalty shoot-outs settled any match that finished level.

Teams got three points for a win, two points if they won the shootout, one point if they lost it and none if they were defeated in the old-fashioned way. How mad is that?

Honved were champions because they won 16 games within the usual 90 minutes and six in a shootout. Under any normal system, Honved would have had 55 points and come third behind Ferencvaros on goal difference and Videoton, with 56 points, would have been champions.

This wheeze was such a glorious success that Hungarian football rebelled, imprisoning the Mad Hatter who had devised this scheme and scrapping the shootouts for 1989/90.

And you thought it was only Americans who had a phobia about drawn games.

I’ll shut up now.

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The dullest European Cup winners of all time

2009-03-20T09:30:00Z

Showboating. That’s how some would regard the 7-1, 4-0 and 5-2 we saw in the UEFA Champions League last week.

While it was joyous to watch Barcelona, Bayern and Liverpool playing with boyish enthusiasm and scoring, as that dreadful old cliché has it, for fun, I’m sure some of the more curmudgeonly members of the coaching trade would have regarded such performances as a bit suspect. Even slightly unprofessional.

Do the minimum necessary to win, they’d say. Sounds brutal, even cynical, but it works in many spheres of life.

I’d take a “nope” from Gary Cooper over a passage of fancy rhetoric by Al “If I’m not overacting how can I be sure they’ll notice me?” Pacino anytime. And in football, it’s hard not to grudgingly admire such masterful economisers of effort as the Milan side that conquered Europe in 2003.

OK, this particular Rossoneri vintage did briefly lose their heads and beat Deportivo 4-0 away in Group G. But after qualifying with four wins in four games, Milan lost to Lens and Depor.

This worked so well they did the same in the second group stage although, in a remarkable feat of sporting minimalism, they managed to win their first four by the same wonderfully functional scoreline: 1-0.

In the quarters, an efficient 0-0 at Ajax was followed by an unusually nervy 3-2 victory at the San Siro, with Jon Dahl Tomasson’s injury-time winner denying the Dutch the chance to go through on away goals.

Tomasson breaks Ajax hearts

After that it was steady as she goes. They made the final courtesy of an ‘away’ goal against Inter at the San Siro and beat Juventus on penalties after another 0-0. Gary Cooper would have been proud.

It wasn’t entertainment, as Johan Cruyff famously complained. But then, as Carlo Ancelotti replied: “When Cruyff wants to enjoy himself, he can go to the cinema.”

Milan’s economical mastery left me thinking the diktat that a player should cover every blade of grass, which seems inspired more by the English football’s all-pervasive Protestant work ethic than any realistic assessment of what a team needs to do to win.

I’ve often watched a Premier League game and wondered whether some players are running for the team or the cameras.

Considering successful teams who had done the absolute minimum, my thoughts turned, naturally enough, to Guus Hiddink’s PSV side that won the European Cup in 1988.

It wasn’t a bad team. Four players – Hans van Breukelen in goal, Ronald Koeman, Soren Lerby in midfield, Gerald Vanenburg on the wing, and Wim Kieft up front – would have been coveted by most managers in Europe. But they won the European Cup in remarkably functional style.

Shootout hero Van Breukelen settles sterile final

In the old-school knockout format, it took PSV just nine games to lift the trophy. They won just three of them, drew five and lost one.

What makes Hiddink’s European champions even more astonishing is that they drew their last five games in the competition. A 1-1 away and a 0-0 at home to Bordeaux in the quarters was enough to reach the semis, where the same combination of results disposed of Real Madrid.

The final against Benfica was one of the most sterile games ever to decide the destiny of a major trophy. A DVD of the first half, which featured one shot on goal, has just entered phase-three clinical trials as a cure for insomnia.

Benfica played for penalties from the start, putting 11 men behind the ball because their playmaker, Diamantino, was injured. But PSV were wary and the shoot-out, which the Dutch won 6-5, came as a blessed relief.

Maybe Hiddink wasn’t attracted to Chelsea by Abramovich, the opportunity to tear a strip off Ashley Cole, or the chance to win the Champions League. Perhaps he just felt an instinctive sympathy with a club that, in 1954/55, lost 10 games (out of 42) but still managed to win the league.

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1970: The definitive World Cup...

2009-03-14T12:00:00Z

Which is your World Cup?

One of my pet theories is that we all have a mundial that, as it unfolds, feels less like a football tournament than a rite of passage, introducing us to idols, emotions and intrigue we will remember for the rest of our lives. Mine was 1970. I was nine then.

Back Home was at No.1 (with Elton John on backing vocals), there were Esso World Cup medals to collect, altitudes to worry about and I had special dispensation to stay up late to watch England, a privilege hitherto reserved for Michael Bentine’s Golden Silents.

That was the last World Cup I greeted with a naïve certainty that England would win. Or, at worst, reach the final.

My idol Bobby Charlton was destined, I was secretly convinced, to score the winning goal. My cousin Mick preferred – and styled himself on – George Best but he was cooler than me. And contemplating the foreheads on my dad’s side of the family, I may have already suspected, without admitting it to myself, that I was foredoomed to adopt Bobby’s hairstyle.

Bobby and combover tackle Brazil

Last week, in a collectors’ fair in Shepperton Village Hall, I snapped up the official programme for the 1970 World Cup for £4.

This seemed a thrilling addition to my pitiful archive of 1970-related stuff: one Esso World Cup medal (Terry Cooper), the International Football Book annual, and a video of the greatest semi-final in World Cup history: Italy 4 West Germany 3. (Actually, the game is so-so but the extra-time is wondrous.)

There is virtually no editorial in the programme, but a lot of adverts, bad pencil drawings of the Czech team and an incomprehensible grid for each group that you need an A in technical drawing to fill in. On the inside front cover, British Leyland explain why they had supplied the England team bus: “Let’s just say champions tend to attract each other.”

In my memory, David Coleman narrates the whole tournament. Every player’s name, every move (Gordon Banks’ save, Jeff Astle’s miss, Bobby Moore’s tackle) all delivered with that peculiar conviction that Coleman brought to every match, no matter how insignificant or dull.

England didn’t win, of course. Their exit has generated almost as many conspiracy theories as the assassination of JFK and several stories, too libellous to relate, about the bizarre build up to a quarter-final from which, despite England being 2-0 up after 50 minutes, West Germany emerged as the kings of Leon.

I wept when Uwe Seeler equalised. 32-years later, when England choked in the 2002 quarter-final against Brazil, I looked across at my seven-year-old son and saw the exact same expression of stricken disbelief I had worn in 1970 when Gerd Muller scored the winner. He’s worn it twice since. I call it 'The England Look.'

Muller sends England home early

With England gone, I supported Italy, mainly because of Luigi Riva, the rumble of thunder.

I had tried to shoot as hard as him in the back garden. I wasn’t that successful but it was better than failing, to my dad’s chagrin, to curve the ball like Rivelino. Riva scored his only goal of the tournament in a semi-final that, in extra time, became so extraordinary it is quasi-officially known as The Game Of The Century.

I can still picture the disgust and despair with which Franz Beckenbauer, his injured shoulder strapped up, kicked the ball out of the German goal after Gianni Rivera scored Italy’s fourth. Only a minute before, Muller had equalised.

I watched the final wanting Italy to win. But when they equalised and invited Pele, Jairzinho, Gerson (who smoked 30-a-day even when he was playing) and Rivelino to come at them it was clear that was never going to happen.

Against West Germany, Italy had swashed and buckled. Against Brazil, they just buckled.

That Brazil team were the beautiful team – and they played so well I could enjoy each goal – but I was on the wrong side of history.

Years later, when I talked to Don Howe about that World Cup, he went a bit misty-eyed as he talked about that Brazil side. He was part of a delegation of British coaches in Mexico and the highlight of his trip wasn’t any of the matches but the joy of watching Brazil training. It was, he said, like watching a different species playing a more elevated, joyful, accomplished kind of sport.

For me, 1970 will always be the definitive World Cup.

Carlos Alberto thunders home

Not because it was the best but because I have never known such a heady mixture of joy, despair, memorabilia and intrigue since. What neither I nor British Leyland could foresee was that it would be 12 bleak years before I would watch England in a World Cup again.

I even discovered my all-time favourite kit: Peru’s. It was later adopted by Crystal Palace when they were billed as the team of the eighties.

To be fair, they didn’t say which eighties, so it’s always possible that, 71 years from now, the Palace will dominate European football.

Do tell me what your definitive World Cup is and why...

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England expects – but is it wise to do so?

2009-03-10T13:00:00Z

Anybody who wants to predict the future of European football should remember the cautionary tale of the Sydney Opera House.

The makers of this gorgeous building thought it would cost $7m. They ended up spending a munificent $104m – on a cut down version of the original design.

In his thought-provoking, self-congratulatory bestseller The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleeb points out that our models of the future are always undermined by three flaws: we are never in possession of all the information, very small variations can have a huge impact (the butterfly effect) and we cannot account for events which have never taken place before.

So, bearing Taleeb’s cautions in mind, if all four English teams reach the quarter-finals of the UEFA Champions League this week, does this mean the Premier League will reign forever?

After all, no English team has lost to a non-English team since the 2007 final and six of the last eight semi-finalists have come from the Premier League.

Liverpool: Last side to lose to foreign opposition in 2007

Such domination is impressive. But not unprecedented. One of the fascinating themes recurring throughout European Cup history is the fluctuating balance of power between north and south.

Real Madrid won the first five. No team from northern Europe won the trophy until 1967. But from 1970 until 1984, Gabriel Hanot’s brainchild was monopolised by teams from England, Germany and the Netherlands.

From 1985 until 1994, only one bunch of northerners got a look in: PSV (1988). Since Ajax’s surprise victory in 1995, the pendulum has swung pretty regularly between north and south.

So if you take the long view, English domination doesn’t seem as complete. Nor does it necessarily seem destined to be permanent.

One known unknown which could affect England’s future performance is the new qualifying system.

The top three will automatically make the group stage from 2009/10, while whoever finishes fourth will join a new play-off round where they could face either the runners-up from the likes of Belgium, Romania, Russia, Scotland and Turkey, fourth-placed teams in Italy and Spain or third-placed sides in France and Germany.

This is a slightly tougher route to the group stages for whoever comes fourth in the England. And look how nervy Liverpool’s 2008/09 qualification over Standard Liege was.

The big known unknown is the system that emerges to level the playing field across European football and stabilise club finances.

None of the formulas so far suggested – such as the idea that clubs could only spend a percentage of turnover on players’ wages – have garnered unanimous support. And it’s unclear how the European Commission will view such schemes. The wages/turnover formula seems, for example, in breach of competition law.

Liege push Liverpool to their limit in 2008/09 qualifying

So everything is still up for grabs. This season we have seen Manchester City bid over £100m for Kaka while the club that owns him has just announced a 30% wage cut and may sell him to Real Madrid this summer.

Meanwhile Chelsea, once the world’s richest club, will reduce their £148m wage bill at season’s end by selling players.

That’s enough about money. I’m sure that, like me, you have read enough “football in the credit crunch” articles to last you a recession or six.

These pieces can usually be boiled down to this:

1. Things will get worse.   

2. We don’t know how much worse.  

3. We don’t know long things will be worse for.  

4. Err that’s it.  

If all four English teams do make the last eight, The Sun’s Neil Custis will feel his eloquent suggestion on Sunday Supplement that “Serie A has been rubbish for four years” has been vindicated.

I’ve never been able to watch this show since they evicted poor old Jimmy Hill from his own breakfast room. But Custis’s claim prompted a furious, well-reasoned response from Andrea Tallarita on Football Italiano.

If the Premier League is such a great league, Tallarita asks, how come so many teams can’t even get a shot on the Manchester United goal?

Tallarita also points out that if FIFA’s 6+5 homegrown player rule came into force, 16 Serie A teams wouldn’t have to change their squads. Only a handful of Premier League clubs could say the same.

And if all four English teams do progress, who will stop then? Of the likely challengers, only Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona look a real threat – if they pull themselves out of their slump.

The only team who can stop United this season?

Who has the best league is a great pub argument. But Arsene Wenger has already resolved this debate when he said: “Everybody thinks they have the most beautiful wife at home.”

And finally...

The press is already talking of Manchester United’s unprecedented quintet. Statistically, winning five trophies isn’t unprecedented at all.

Celtic did it in 1967 although, to be fair, that haul included the less than stellar Glasgow Cup.

And Linfield won a septuple in 1922 while Valletta clinched a sextuple in 2001.

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Bigmouth strikes again: Cloughie, Ali and Carry On

2009-03-05T11:00:00Z

“Football hooligans? Well there’s 92 club chairman for a start” - Brian Clough

Brian Clough was the Muhammad Ali of British football. The tragedy for him – and Peter Taylor – was that he couldn’t fly like a butterfly and sting like a bee himself. He had to cajole, charm and bully 11 players into doing that for him on the pitch.

He managed with the conviction of a messiah even if many (especially in the football business) regarded him not as a messiah but as a very naughty boy.

For much of his career – at Hartlepools (as he called it), Derby and Nottingham Forest – Clough’s teams were almost as eloquent as he was.

The dark exception, his 44 days at Leeds United, forms the gloomy heart of Tony Hooper’s remarkable movie The Damned United, based on the even more remarkable novel by David Peace.

"Don't come any closer Brian..."

I loved the book and feared for the film, even when the mercurial Michael Sheen was cast as Cloughie.

After watching the movie this week, I wouldn’t say Sheen is the best British actor at work today, but he’s certainly in the top one.

His Clough is brilliant. There are echoes of his previous roles – Kenneth Williams and Tony Blair – at times but, oddly, this somehow added to the resonance because, watching Sheen, I realised there had always been something of Kenneth Williams’ archness about the real Clough.

Sheen is not the only reason to watch Hooper’s movie.

If you are, like me, old enough to remember the 1970s, this is a moving, funny nostalgia trip into a more innocent age when Clough, invited to dine free at the tandoori as reward for steering Derby into the top flight, tells his wife: “Throw the chips away, we’re going posh, chicken bhoona!”

At which point, the entire Clough family jig with such delight they could have won the pools.

The clothes, the decor, the cars, the transistor radios are all spot on. The film’s rainy, grainy, grimy, shiny texture brilliantly evokes the knackered, grey England of the 1970s, a country whose imminent irrelevance is prefigured by the decline in the national football team.

And the training scenes, for once in a football movie, don’t stink.

The performances vary. Many actors playing real people take their cues from Mike Yarwood. Luckily, Sheen, Timothy Spall (who looks nothing like Peter Taylor but is still utterly credible as the character) and Colm Meaney don’t.

Casting an actor called Meaney as Clough’s nemesis Don Revie was a masterstroke. And Meaney has the solidity, smugness and presence of The Don in his prime, although his face is such an odd shape he reminded me of Al Pacino’s synthetically enhanced gangster in Dick Tracy.

Revie’s team aren’t so well cast – Billy Bremner looks like Tom Jones’ stumpy little brother wearing an orange syrup of figs – but an opening montage of their acts of brutal carnage on the pitch sets up the movie beautifully and goes some way to explaining one of the roots of Clough’s antipathy.

I don’t know if Clough was really obsessed with beating Revie. He may, as tyros do, have used The Don as a target. If you were going to be the best, which Clough believed he was, then you had to beat the best.

And in the long run, he did beat him. He won two European Cups, Revie never got past the semi-final.

And Clough had a point, too, when he told Revie’s players they had to change their ways if they were to be loved. They never really did and are remembered more for their cynicism and brutality than for the occasional splendour of their team play.

They adopted Real Madrid’s strip but never consistently played in that glorious tradition.

The miracle, really, is that Clough was given the chance to come back in Nottingham. Football was a close-kit industry and Clough didn’t play by the rules.

He had been reckless and/or outspoken enough at Derby, Brighton and Leeds to have made him a pariah. It wasn’t just Revie who distrusted him. Matt Busby makes it clear, in his memoirs, that he was no great admirer nor, much later, was Sir Alex Ferguson.

"I think it's time I was going..."

But Clough vindicated himself just as Revie’s career was dissolving. There’s a curious trajectory to their rival careers at this point, as if the eclipse of Revie mysteriously helped Clough focus.

Allan Clarke, Eddie Gray and Bremner all had a shot at recreating the glory that was Revie. They lasted longer in the Elland Road hotseat than Cloughie but failed.

As indeed did Jock Stein who, like Clough, spent much of his 44 days in charge in a Leeds hotel, effectively waiting for the chance to manage Scotland. Not much material for a sequel there.

The movie left me wondering how and if Leeds had changed Clough.

Like all the best superheroes, he realised he was never the same without, his sidekick, Taylor and patched up their rift. And he found Forest, a club that fitted him, felt part of him, just as Derby had.

But I left the cinema wondering if his 44 days at Elland Road was the defining trauma of his managerial career. It nearly broke him. But on the Hemingway principle that people are strong in the broken places, perhaps, in the end, it made him.

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So what did we learn from this week’s action?

2009-02-27T11:00:00Z

Anarchy in the Champions League...

First, only seven quarter-final places are still up for grabs.

It is simply inconceivable that Bayern’s 5-0 win in Lisbon, a record away victory in the UEFA Champions League, will be overturned in Munich. It would be a far greater turnaround than Ajax’s remarkable recovery in the 1968/69 last eight.

Rinus Michels’ team hadn’t quite perfected Total Football – does that mean they were playing Partial Football? – and lost their home leg 3-1 to Benfica. But they then thrashed the Eagles by the same score in Lisbon and, in those innocent, pre-penalty shoot out days, won the play-off in Paris 3-0.

Ribery cooly converts No.3 of five for Bayern

Sporting coach Paulo Bento took his thrashing by Bayern well. “We had the chance to equalise but conceded two goals in six minutes. There was anarchy in the team. Even the best teams have their bad moments. Life doesn’t end here.”

Anarchy is not too strong a word for Sporting’s second half performance. When the great Polish forward Zbigniew Boniek was at Juventus in the 1980s, he was dubbed a “tactical anarchist” by the Italian press. This week we saw compelling evidence that Lisandro Lopez is the new Boniek.

The Argentine striker has been, as Gianni Agnelli said of Boniek, like the moon – he only comes out at night. (To be clear, Agnelli meant that Boniek only shone in Europe.)

Lopez’s record this season is simply bizarre: five goals in 19 Liga Bwin games and, after his point saving brace against Atletico, six goals in seven in the UEFA Champions League.

Champions League hot-shot, Lisandro Lopez

How times have changed. The cliché about teams not travelling well now applies to Italian sides. Juventus and Roma have lost their last six Champions League games in England and the bianconeri have lost their last seven on the road in the knockout stages.

At Stamford Bridge, I was shocked at how poor Juve were in the first half. Only Alessandro Del Piero showed much.

They grew stronger as the game wore on, but their recovery was aided by Chelsea’s strange passivity. After the well-worked early goal, the Blues should have delivered the knockout blow.

But, lively as Salomon Kalou was, they lacked the spirit expected from a Guus Hiddink team.

The vapidity of their second half performance was symbolised by Michael Ballack who, in one five minute period, hit three passes back to the player who had just passed to him.

Ballack: 'To me, to you'

The near thing of the week was Xabi Alonso’s shot at the Bernabeu.

The Rafa Benitez saga is turning into the best Merseyside soap since Brookside. But for me, the biggest puzzle about the Liverpool coach has nothing to do with Robbie Keane, and everything to do with Alonso.

Did Liverpool seriously want to sell the sublime midfielder this summer? Or was it an inspired, motivational double bluff by Rafa?

The free-kick of the week had to be Juninho’s against Barcelona.

Nobody can really blame Victor Valdez for the goal. But watching him watching the ball sail into the top of the net, I was struck by how few of the last 16 teams can field world class goalkeepers on top of their game.

Gianluigi Buffon, Iker Casillas, Pepe Reina and Edwin Van Der Sar stand out.

Lyon’s Hugo Lloris may be the best young keeper in the last 16 – the way he twisted to keep out a deflected shot on Tuesday was remarkable – and Julio Cesar almost single-handedly kept Manchester United at bay in the first half at the San Siro.

Cesar keeps Mourinho's men alive

Petr Cech is one of the world’s best but, to my mind, has not fully recovered from that grievous incident with Stephen Hunt. The other keepers vary – some are making their mark, a few are good but not great, others have chocolate wrists.

So, Bayern are effectively through, and Arsenal, Barcelona, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United, Panathinaikos and Porto, are ahead on points.

But Massimo Moratti, for one, thinks Inter will beat Manchester United, while Luciano Spalletti estimated the balance in the Roma tie as “maybe 49% for us and 51% for them.”

As Jimmy Greaves liked to continually remind us, football is a funny old game.

At the start of the season, three Chelsea managers – Ranieri, Scolari and Ten Cate – had teams in the Champions League. And now, five months later, the one closest to the quarter-finals is Henk Ten Cate.

As Martina Navratilova said on I’m A Former Celebrity Can I Stay A Bit Longer Please? “Who’ have thunk it!”

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The spotters guide to the first knockout round

2009-02-24T10:00:00Z

Oh frabjous day! Callou, callay, the UEFA Champions League is back. As you’ll read match previews aplenty, here is my Q&A guide to the action. And don’t worry – there are no more spurious Lewis Carroll references.

Should Inter play for 0-0?

If you kick off a knockout tie at home, 0-0 isn’t bad. That’s how Jean Tigana’s Monaco stunned Manchester United in the quarter-finals in 1997/98. After a scoreless draw in Monaco, Tigana told his depressed players the odds had shifted in their favour. And so it proved: they drew 1-1 at Old Trafford to go through.

Mourinho may be tempted to ape Tigana. A cautious formation, which plays for 0-0 in the hope that Ibrahimovic or Adriano can magic up a goal, would suit Inter. But you can never tell with Jose, he may want to be more forceful to exploit United’s inexperience in central defence.

Monaco send United packing in '98

Can two of Europe’s most prolific goalscorers get off the mark?

Top scorer in the 2007/08 Champions League, Cristiano Ronaldo’s haul so far in the 2008/09 competition is zero, zip, nada etc.

Some say CR7 is discombobulated by his non-move to Real and Berbatov’s arrival. But he usually scores most goals after Christmas and, the stats suggest, remains on course for 32 in all competitions.

Fernando Torres hasn’t scored in five Champions League games. In the Premier League, Torres averages 0.68 goals a game compared to 0.37 in the Champions League.

CR7’s averages are 0.42 (Premier League) and 0.25 (Europe). Those stats don’t do Ronaldo justice: in the last three seasons, his league average is 0.66 and in Europe 0.46. Remarkable stats for an attacking midfielder/winger.

Who defends for Barcelona?

Barca kept just one clean sheet in their group. Against Basle.

Barca fans haven’t warmed to Pep Guardiola’s preferred central pairing, Rafael Marquez and Gerard Pique. Marquez’s form has fluctuated – strong in 2005/06, dodgy in 2006/07, good in the first half of 2007/08, injured (or out of form) for the second – but he is a capable reader of the game, good in the air and a useful cross-field passer.

With Abidal injured, Puyol may stand in as full-back, although fans would prefer Sylvinho at left-back and Puyol reunited with Marquez in the middle.

Can Maxi Rodriguez top this?

Atleti are in indifferent form – even under new coach Abel Resino – so if the mattress makers are to beat Porto it would help if their skipper did something like this. Atleti’s home record in this tournament is P26, W19, D4, L3 so the game at the Vicente Calderon may prove key.

Will Lyon get an early goal?

2-0 is the ideal, attainable score for Claude Puel’s men. So Barca should expect an opening onslaught at the Stade Gerland.

Last time Guardiola and Puel met they were opposing midfielders. Guardiola had the better of it, pulling the strings in the 1993/94 Champions League as Barca beat Puel’s Monaco 2-0 at home and 1-0 away.

Puel’s best hope of avoiding a similar whitewash is to trust the attacking genius of Karim Benzema – who has averaged 0.7 goals a game in the Champions League – and Juninho’s free-kicks. Benzema and Frank Lampard were the only players to score against Manchester United in the knockout stages last season.

Juninho & Benzema: Lyon's best (and only?) hope

Will Joao Moutinho score?

The Sporting midfielder has been “the new Rui Costa” for so long it’s easy to forget he’s only 22.

He can look like a match-winner or a passenger but, at his best, he is brave, technically accomplished, creative and disciplined. If Moutinho is to become Rui Costa 2.0, he needs to score more goals: 1 in 33 Champions League matches isn’t enough for a player of his quality.

Sporting have played 14 games against German teams. And won none. But Bayern have lost three out of their last four, their keeper Michael Rensing says his defenders “get on my nerves” and Luca Toni is injured. Sporting have only one world class attacker, Liedson, but they could frustrate Bayern.

How many free-kicks will Chelsea concede near their box?

Not many if they heed Guus Hiddink’s instructions. Alessandro Del Piero has already scored six from free-kicks this season, including a glorious 40-yard strike against Zenit.

If the Juventus skipper does take one – and Sebastiano Giovinco is playing – watch out for Giovinco’s position. He usually stands directly behind Del Piero so he can pick up a few tips.

Del Piero: Deadly with a dead ball this season

Will Arjen Robben smirk as he flies past a Liverpool full-back?

Billed as a clash of icons: Raul vs Gerrard. Yet anyone who watched Robben’s wonder goal against Villarreal will know that the 25-year-old Dutch master, who has that rare ability to cut a swathe through hapless defences while looking annoyingly supercilious, could be the key to unlocking Liverpool.

The Reds only kept one clean sheet in Group D – against Marseille at Anfield. The media usually blames Rafa Benitez’s insistence on zonal marking but only one of the five goals shipped in Group D was from a set-piece: PSV scored from a corner in a 3-1 defeat by Liverpool.

How badly will Pana miss Loukas Vyntra?

Nearly 28, Vyntra has matured into a pacy, versatile defender who has been an indispensable, ever present for Panathinaikos in Europe in 2008/09.

A bruised left leg has sidelined him for the trip to Spain. After beating Inter and Werder Bremen, Pana seem confident of sinking Villarreal’s Yellow Submarine, but will Joseba Llorente and Giuseppe Rossi exploit Vyntra’s absence?

Villarreal’s creative anchor man, Marcos Senna, needs to show the authority, consistency and discipline he displayed at Euro 2008. His team have kept just two clean sheets in 23 games.

Will Philippe Mexes get the recognition he deserves?

Against Siena at the weekend, a shocked hush fell over the Stadio Olimpico as Philippe Mexes fell badly. Luckily for Roma, he recovered to initiate several great moves as Luciano Spalletti’s men won 2-1.

At 26, Mexes is coming into his prime. Once renowned for charging up midfield and leaving gaps for opponents to attack, he has learned to time such forays and is, in many ways, the epitome of the modern central defender: good at winning the ball and making use of it.

Touted as the new Alessandro Nesta, he says that, like his skipper Francesco Totti, he wants to end his career in Rome. If he can quieten Robin van Persie, Roma could progress.

Mexes: Roma's rock that Gunners must destroy

What do Arsenal need to turn their season around?

If Arsenal are to win the silverware that will keep the likes of Van Persie, Adebayor and Fabregas at the Emirates, they need to win the Champions League or come at least fourth in the Premier League.

The average points tally of fourth-placed teams in the last five seasons is 66.4. Arsenal have 45 from 26, so to be reasonably sure they need 22-25 points from 12 games.

If we assume Aston Villa struggle, Arsenal could requalify with 67 points. But they’d need to pick up two more points in their last dozen games than they did last season.

The easiest way for Arsenal to qualify for the Champions League may be to surprise everybody and win it.

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Curses, wallies & the return of the Russian linesman

2009-02-20T14:30:00Z

The Russian linesman is back...

Sixteen years after his death, the Azerbaijani linesman Tofik Bakhramov is the inspirational centrepiece for an exhibition by artist Mark Wallinger at London’s Hayward Gallery.

The exhibition is called The Russian Linesman because, for years, few people in England knew or cared that a) a place called Azerbaijan existed and b) that Bakhramov, the linesman who gave England’s third goal in the 1966 final, came from there.

The blurb for Wallinger’s exhibition is absurdly pretentious and self-important but the show isn’t.

Bakhramov is such a hero in Azerbaijan that the national stadium is named after him. Five years ago, before England’s game in Baku, a statue was unveiled in his honour but many Azerbaijanis feel their linesman still hasn’t had due recognition.

England's heroes: Bakhramov (R) and fellow 1966 final officials

One fan, Aydyn Zarbaliev, even went so far as to suggest: “Many people in London won’t agree with me but I think Bakhramov deserves a monument from the English no smaller than Nelson’s column.”

Geoff Hurst once presented the linesman’s son with a shirt that read: “Thank you very much” in Azeri. Computer analysis has suggested, but not conclusively proved, that the ball didn’t cross the line leading many to wonder about the linesman’s motivation.

There is an apocryphal story that, when Bakhramov was lying on his deathbed, he was asked why he’d given the goal. Legend has it that the former official mumbled one word: “Stalingrad.”

Masterminds and wallies...

“Sack the coach” was how Danish football journalist Morten Crone Sejersbal greeted the appointment of Magnus Persson as Aalborg coach.

The fact that Persson, a Swede, was replacing Danish caretaker Allan Kuhn was a blow to Denmark’s pride. But Persson masterminded the result of the week in the UEFA Cup, a 3-0 victory over Deportivo La Coruna in his first European game as coach.

Funnily enough Sejersbal now admits: “I’ve changed my mind. It’s good that Aab don’t listen to the media.”

Elsewhere, the UEFA Cup brought some solace for two coaches under fire: Marco van Basten (Ajax won 1-0 in Fiorentina) and Mircea Lucescu (Shakhtar beat Spurs 2-0 despite some ludicrous finishing).

I still wouldn’t be surprised if Lucescu moved on at the end of the season, especially now that Valeriy Gazzaev is in the market for a new post.

Meanwhile, the rehabilitation of the wally with the brolly gathers momentum as Steve McClaren’s Twente comfortably beat Marseille 1-0 in the Velodrome.

Schteve celebrates conquering the French

The curse of the Brazilian World Cup winning coach...

Mario Zagallo, Carlos Alberto Parreira and Phil Scolari have two things in common: they have all coached Brazil to World Cup glory – and have never lasted more than a season at a European club.

Zagallo didn’t even try, Carlos Alberto Parreira endured one forgettable season (1994/95) at Valencia and Scolari spent five months at Chelsea.

But perhaps the curse isn’t restricted to World Cup winning coaches. Vanderlei Luxemburgo had a torrid time at Real in 2004/05, best remembered by the cognoscenti for a pioneering (for which read: suicidal) 4-2-2-2 formation known as the Magic Rectangle.

Zico lasted two years at Fenerbahce and at least left of his own volition, suggesting he’d be up for the Newcastle job.

But Dennis Wise, a man steeped in football history and the power of the Brazilian curse, wisely gave Zico the swerve and the legend is now tasked with reviving CSKA Moscow.

Maybe the curse isn’t restricted to Brazilian coaches. As we point out in the new issue of Champions – look if I don’t plug it, who else will? – Argentine coaches have, since the 1960s heyday of Helenio Herrera, had a marginal influence on European football.

Does this mean there’s something wrong with Brazilian and Argentine coaches? Or with the European game?

Big Phil confronts the dreaded curse head on

And finally, the day James Joyce joined the Hungarian midfield...

The most influential novelist of the 20th century was no master of the “greasy leather orb,” as he referred to the ball but, according to this intriguing post on The Global Game he was happy to rub shoulders with the Hungarian football team at a lecture in Paris in 1937.

Vladimir Nabokov, the goalkeeper and novelist, was giving the lecture and the sight of Joyce “arms folded and glasses glinting in the middle of the Hungarian soccer team” unnerved him.

Fortunately, Joyce just sat there and paid attention. As did the Hungarian players.

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How do you solve a problem like Spain?

2009-02-17T11:00:00Z

From Queen’s Park to Seville...

“The Englishman had all the advantage in respect of weight and pace. The strong point with the home side was that they played excellently well together.”

This is from the Glasgow Herald’s match report on the first ever international – England vs Scotland in 1872 (Scotland were entirely represented by Queen’s Park players and the game finished 0-0) – but could as easily have been the verdict on England vs Spain last week.

Phil Jagielka’s unfortunate assist for Spain’s opener symbolised a carelessness with the ball that has, since the 1870s, been part of English football’s DNA and which must, even for a coach as iron-willed as Capello, be a constant source of irritation.

Villa strokes home Spain's opener in Seville

In fairness, England did not disgrace themselves in Spain but they never really looked in serious contention either.

In Spain, the papers are touting Del Bosque’s side as “the Brazil of Europe” and, in the last year, four very different coaches have failed to devise a plan to defeat them.

In the Euros, Hiddink failed twice with Russia, as his players struggled to keep the ball, Donadoni stifled the Spanish in the quarter-final but the Azzurri were so drained they posed no attacking threat, and Low made the best fist of it with Germany, trying to seize the initiative with some fast, direct play in the final (as Andy Roxburgh, UEFA technical director points out in the latest issue of Champions) but still lost.

Capello’s plan was harder to discern. It may be he wanted England to emulate Germany (with the pace of Agbonlahor), but after about 15 minutes, the battle for midfield supremacy had been lost – and with it the game.

The only reason I’m not convinced Spain will win the World Cup in 2010 is that, in modern times, it is rare for a form team’s reign of supremacy to last that long. France managed it in 1998 and 2000 but the norm has been for the world or European champions to hit their stride either just before or during the tournament or even – in Italy’s case in 2006 – in the semi-final.

Reasons for Brazil to be cheerful...

Brazil’s victory over Italy dispelled some of the gloom surrounding Dunga’s team. At lunch the other day with Jonathan Wilson, the football writer and author of the seminal tactical tome Inverting The Pyramid, he suggested another reason for the selecao to be optimistic.

Pausing over his croque monsieur, he pointed out that the team that won the World Cup usually had the best full-backs in the world.

Fab full-backs: The secret to World Cup success?

The record shows he has a point:

2006 Italy: Grosso, Zambrotta
2002 Brazil: Cafu, Roberto Carlos
1998 France: Thuram, Lizarazu
1994 Brazil: Jorginho, Branco
1990 Germany: Berthold, Brehme

The weakest pair of World Cup wining full-backs is 1994. But Ray Wilson and George Cohen were no slouches in 1966, Paul Breitner and Berti Vogts shone in 1974 and, in 1958, Brazil ushered in their golden age with Djalma Santos and Nilton Santos.

Djalma was the more defensive of the two but he was an effective attacker down the right, while Nilton was one of the best full-backs ever. If he had played in a more televisual age, he would be as famous as Roberto Carlos. Still, in 2010, any nation with Maicon and Daniel Alves at the back is going to have a chance.

With Sergio Ramos and Joan Capdevilla, Spain are hardly under strength in this position. The sooner Capello perfects his pairing – on pure talent it would have to be Micah Richards and Ashley Cole – the better.

And finally…

The owner of my favourite football tache, Artur Jorge, has a fantastic Wikipedia page which ends: “God knows where he is now.”

You would have thought that with a moustache as luxuriant as a small forest, it would be hard for Jorge to vanish. But the veteran coach, who won the European Cup in 1987 with Porto, was last heard of in 2006/07 coaching Creteil, who now languish in France’s Division Three.

Any sightings will be rewarded with a free copy of the latest Champions.

Artur Jorge sports his famous face fungus

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What Chelsea need most... (and it isn’t a quick fix)

2009-02-13T14:00:00Z

If you consider many of the great European clubs, they have one thing in common... one, possibly two, transformational managers who, in partnership with a board or a strong chairman/owner, laid the foundations on which a successful club must be based.

The glorious exception to this rule is Real Madrid. But Santiago Bernabeu, the club’s greatest president, was almost a surrogate transformational coach in the 1950s, seizing the opportunity provided by the European Cup, signing a galaxy of players and inspiring a style of play that became a club trademark.

The transformational manager pattern works if you consider Ajax (Rinus Michel; Louis Van Gaal), Arsenal (Herbert Chapman in the 1930s and Arsene Wenger in the 90s), Inter (Helenio Herrera in the 60s), Dinamo Kyiv (Valeriy Lobanovsky), Liverpool (Bill Shankly in the 60s), Manchester United (Sir Matt Busby in the 50s and Sir Alex Ferguson in the 90s) and Milan (Arrigo Sacchi in the late 80s).

These managers are usually of a certain age when they take on their transformational challenge. Herrera was 50, Shankly and Wenger were 46, Ferguson 45, Sacchi 41, Michels 37, Busby 36 and Lobanovsky 35. They create a successful model which, all being well, could last 20-30 years.

But at some point, typically around 25 years, this model will become rusty and uncompetitive and need to be partially or wholly reinvented.

Have Chelsea waved goodbye to their best chance of sustained success?

United’s failure to modernise the Busby model in the early 1980s coincided with a Bart Simpsonesque period of underachievement that persuaded the club to gamble on a tenacious, relatively unknown Scottish manager called Alex Ferguson.

Dinamo Kyiv, Inter and Real Madrid still have their reinventing to do – and their volatility may, ultimately, have more to do with this challenge than the calibre of coaches or players they hire.

Chelsea have not had such a manager. Even if Hiddink was so inclined – and Russia let him go – he may, at 62, be too old to inspire the kind of root and branch transformation the club needs to become an enduring, great power in European football.

Chelsea have the players, the backing, and much of the infrastructure – notably a £20m training ground in Cobham – but they don’t seem, from the outside, to have developed the division of responsibility and boring structural stuff that underpins a club with the longevity of an Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United or Milan.

Nor, under Abramovich, have they developed a ‘Chelsea way’ of playing football in the way that Wenger’s Arsenal and Ferguson’s United have.

What Chelsea need, above all, is a gifted, inspirational manager in his 40s who pledges his long-term future to the club.

That could have been Mourinho. It could still be Ancelotti, who only turns 50 this summer. But it almost certainly won’t be Hiddink even if he does become the first Chelsea coach to win the UEFA Champions League.

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King Arthur Mourinho, Archangel Guus & Perry Groves

2009-02-11T10:00:00Z

Hiddink, schmiddink. Most of the Chelsea fans I spoke to wanted one man to replace Scolari. The one man Roman Abramovich will never appoint. The outlaw Jose Mourinho.

When Mourinho and Abramovich parted 17 months ago, the Special One stormed out challenging the billionaire to find someone who could do a better job. Accepting that challenge has already cost the Chelsea owner £32.5m in pay-offs alone.

Guus Hiddink may be Abramovich’s best shot – he has at least won the European Cup, in its old guise. And if he wins the trophy with Chelsea, he may yet banish the ghost of Mourinho.

The key word there is ‘may’. Mourinho is Chelsea’s king in exile, a legendary Arthurian kind of ruler whose glorious, yet too brief, reign ended in betrayal, conspiracy and deceit. Arthur, so myth has it, is resting in the mysterious Isle of Avalon, awaiting his country’s summons in hour of dire need.

Mourinho is more visible, making headlines in Serie A with Inter Milan but still, so some fans secretly dream, liable to make a messianic return to Stamford Bridge to lead the Blues to glory. In truth, it could only happen if Abramovich sold the club.

The Arthurian complex is not unique to Chelsea. In hours of need, Bayern have invariably sent for Franz Beckenbauer. Barcelona’s Arthurian hero hasn’t vanished into a mystical, parallel universe; Johan Cruyff is available on the end of a phone if either Pep Guardiola or Joan Laporta need his sage counsel.

"Scuse me mate - which way's Stamford Bridge?"

In a remarkably short time, Mourinho became part of Chelsea’s soul. And he may, unlike Arthur, have bowed out at the right time. The knights of the round table/three musketeers solidarity he had inspired had begun to crack, replaced by what Cruyff’s mentor Rinus Michels identified as a syndrome where players, under pressure, begin to play, as he put it, “as if they are a kingdom of their own”.

Michels noticed this tendency in underperforming Barcelona sides – he even used it, as Köln coach, to beat the Blaugranas 4-0 at Camp Nou in the 1980 UEFA Cup.

Koln had lost the first leg 1-0 in Germany but Michels told his players that if they got just one goal, the Barcelona players would get nervous, forget what they had to do for the team and start playing for themselves. And so it proved.

Golden Guus
Guus is, of course, pronounced Goose, an immense boon to headline writers who have exhausted their stock of Phil-tastic puns. If Hiddink’s Chelsea triumph in Rome this May, he’ll be Golden Guus.

If he loses his rag at half-time when they are 1-0 down against Wigan, at least one back page will cry out: “Wild Guus”. A succession of drab 0-0 draws will be greeted with “Grey Guus”. If Chelsea lose 4-0 to Juve at Stamford Bridge, it will surely be a case of “Guus cooked”.

Hiddink is a great coach but he might want to reflect on Simon Barnes’ fine words in The Times. “Chelsea have reached the limit of human possibility in their quest for the right man. The logical next step is to hire an archangel… So Chelsea fired Luiz Felipe Scolari.

"You may be good enough for Brazil, but if you think you're good enough for Chelsea, you've got another think coming. You come here with your fancy talk about winning the World Cup, but what about the Carling Cup, eh? How many times have you won that?”

As the Sports Illustrated archive points out, firing Scolari is in the club’s great, masochistic tradition. In the 1930s, the idea of the Blues winning silverware was considered so unlikely a vaudeville performer called Norman Long performed a comic novelty song entitled The Day That Chelsea Went And Won The Cup.

On such an unlikely day, Long side-splittingly suggested, a pigeon would hatch a guinea pig and the sun would come out in Manchester.

"I'd hatch a what in the where now?"

Hiddink’s job is to ensure that someone doesn’t remake this satirical masterpiece and entitle it The Day That Chelsea Went And Won The Champions League.

And finally…
A useful corrective to the cult of the boss is offered by football academic Stefan Szymanski here. He suggests that fans can judge players as well as coaches. Not sure about that.

When Thierry Henry arrived at Highbury, for example, many Gooners (including Nick Hornby) thought Wenger had splashed out millions on a pacier Perry Groves.

Still, Szymanski’s piece is worth reading even if, ultimately, I felt, as Roy Walker says again on that insurance ad: “It’s good, but it’s not right.”

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NEWS: Chelsea fire World Cup winner Scolari

NEWS: Big Phil suffers rare coaching setback

NEWS: Scolari the victim of Terry penalty miss

BLOG: Why Scolari couldn't save The Damned Chelsea

TALENTSPOTTER BLOG: Is Scolari's sacking too late to save Chelsea's season?

Blizzards, bursting bubbles & barmy Benitez

2009-02-04T10:00:00Z

The snowman scarf count in Shepperton this week is Chelsea 3 Arsenal 1.

Meanwhile, away from Blizzard Britain, football continues to suggest that it is full of, to paraphrase the classic Elvis’ gospel song Run On, long tongued liars, ramblers, gamblers and back biters.

Red divide

Explaining why he sold Robbie Keane, Rafa Benitez said: “We still have [Ryan] Babel, [David] Ngog and Dirk Kuyt as well as Torres. It is a risk but the situation was not good and we needed to do something.” 

Here are the stats on the strikers supporting Torres: 

Ryan Babel: 76 games, 13 goals, 0.17 goals a game. 

David Ngog: 9 games, 1 goal, 0.11 goals a game.

 Dirk Kuyt: 128 games, 32 goals, 0.25 goals a game. 

Luckily, Torres’s stats are: 68 games, 41 goals, 0.60 goals a game.

Who needs Robbie Keane when you've got David Ngog

Compare this to Manchester United’s firepower.:

Dimitar Berbatov: 25 games, 11 goals, 0.44 goals a game.

 Cristiano Ronaldo: 271 games, 106 goals, 0.39 goals a game.

Wayne Rooney: 218 games, 89 goals, 0.41 goals a game.

Carlos Tevez: 80 games, 29 goals, 0.36 goals a game.

Most tedious metaphor of the week

Don’t know if you caught Mihir Bose’s report on BBC’s 10 o’clock news about the Premier League's bubble bursting.

To save you searching for it online, here is the item in a nutshell.  

1. The Premier League’s bubble may be about to burst. 

2. Quite a few Premier League clubs are effectively up for sale. 

3. See point 1.  

That was it.

And what graphic device did they use to illustrate the point that the Premier League’s financial bubble may be about to burst?

That’s right. A bubble.

Presumably the BBC think us incapable of understanding the point about financial bubbles bursting unless we are constantly looking at bubbles. Big ones, cuddly ones, like the bubbles we blew as kids.  

Look out! It's going to blow...

The device might have been vaguely witty if they’d shown West Ham in a bubble. Instead, Fulham were cocooned in one as gentlemanly Roy Hodgson tactfully did his best to make the story seem half valid.

It was an odd item to run on the day the Premier League announced it looked set for another record TV deal, a daft whim.

Presumably the bubbles came from the same graphic whiz who decided, at the height of Olympics fever, that we couldn’t understand a story on Britain’s economy without our performance being rated gold, medal or bronze.

(Obviously, we now know, thanks to the IMF, that if economic performance were an Olympic event, Great Britain wouldn’t get out of the heats).

I can’t wait for Mihir’s next report. His searching expose of the difficulties facing Fabio Capello’s England will be presented, in its entirety, from a cage at Whipsnade Zoo occupied by three lions. Hey, we can all dream can’t we?

Backhanded compliment of the week

Arsenal nut Christian Skindballe’s defence of Nikolas Bendtner, quoted in Arsenal’s official newsletter would be a bit more rousing if it didn’t include this sentence:

“People need to remember you don´t have to like the person to appreciate the talent and contribution.”

Gamble of the week

Andrei Arshavin’s arrival at Arsenal had me wondering: has any Russian footballer ever really done the business when playing for a foreign club?

Arshavin: Will he break the mould of Russians flopping abroad?

When Rangers bought Oleg Salenko, joint Golden Boot winner at USA '94, the Russian striker did more shooting mucking around in Paul Gascoigne’s garden than he did on the pitch.

Midfield schemer Aleskandr Mostovoi was so popular at Celta Vigo the fans dubbed him “The Tsar of Balaidos.”

Can’t think of too many other Russian stars in exile but feel free to suggest a few.

I hope Arshavin is the catalyst Arsenal needs because the Premier League is poorer without the Gunners on song. This season has – thanks to Manchester City’s massive good fortune – been more exciting on the back pages than on the pitch.

Why Sheikh Mansour has bought the wrong club

2009-02-03T11:00:00Z

If football in the North East was a Marlon Brando character it would be Terry (“I could have been a contender”) Malloy in On The Waterfront.

In the last 30 years, only Kevin Keegan - the Geordie Bonnie Prince Charlie - has looked capable of delivering some long overdue glory.

It wasn’t always like this, as the 1908/09 league table shows. That season Newcastle were convincing champions, Sunderland finished third and Middlesbrough ninth.

Maybe the rot started with Alf Common.

Middlesbrough paid a world record fee of £1,000 to lure the striker from Sunderland in February 1905. Terrorising defences with skill and a walrus-like moustache, he scored for fun. But in 1910, he headed south to Woolwich Arsenal, a move that marked the end of a golden decade for North East football.

Common: Catalyst for North Eastern decline?

After World War I, the North East was never as great a football power.

Newcastle won their fourth and final title in 1926/27, dominated the FA Cup in the early 1950s, won the Fairs Cup in 1969 and lit up in the Premiership in the 1990s.

Sunderland enjoyed a glorious mid-1930s (winning the league in 1936 and FA Cup in 1937) but have not had masses to cheer since apart from the Bob Stokoe/Ian Porterfield/Jim Montgomery FA Cup final triumph over Leeds.

Middlesbrough, third in the league in 1913/14, have won the League Cup and have never broken a transfer record since Commons’ departure – though under Bryan Robson they set a record for the highest fee ever paid for an immobile, overweight Brazilian left-back when they acquired Branco.

The North East’s loss has, largely, been the North West’s gain, as this table shows:

Eight of the North East’s 10 league titles were won before 1915 – five by Sunderland and three by Newcastle. Sunderland’s galactical “team of all the talents” won the league three times between 1891and 1895. In 1892/93, they were 11 points ahead of Preston – an 18 point margin in today’s money.

After buying some gifted players (mainly from Scotland) Newcastle won three titles in the 1900s and reached five FA Cup finals in seven years with a rousing style of possession play that defined the expectations of generations of Toon fans.

Until the late 1950s, the Tyne and Wear teams had a decent run winning a proper trophy every so often and nurturing stars like Jackie Milburn and Len Shackleton. Then Sunderland, wounded by a scandal over payments to players, slipped out of the top flight in 1958; Newcastle followed suit in 1961.

The gap between North West and North East was cruelly exposed in the 1974 Liverpool vs Newcastle FA Cup final, a bleak counterpoint to Sunderland’s heroism in 1973, and one of the most boring, uncompetitive finals I have ever seen – with the possible exception of the 1998/99 Newcastle vs Manchester United showpiece.

1999 FA Cup final: One for the purist

Economics is partly to blame.

The North East’s dominance on the pitch in the late 1890s and 1900s was, in part, fuelled by a boom in coal, iron, steel, ships and engineering. Rich captains of industry happily funded Sunderland’s “team of all the talents.” But even in 1895/96, with results worsening, such funding was harder to find. Such crises have periodically rocked club boardrooms on the Tyne, Tees and Wear ever since.

Once, one in every three ships in the world was made on the Tyne, Tees and Wear. By the 1920s and 1930s, demand for coal, ships and steel had slumped.

The North East’s economy – like its football industry – has never really recovered. Even in the 1950s, when Toon legend Milburn was asked by cousin Cissy Charlton which club her son Bobby should join, he recommended Matt Busby’s Manchester United because they had a far better youth system.

Bobby wasn’t the last star the Toon missed: Jack Charlton, Peter Beardsley, Michael Carrick and Alan Shearer all had to make their mark elsewhere.

Economic troubles encourage prudence but Newcastle’s history is shot through with pure meanness. In 1951, directors were so delighted to win the FA Cup they bought a job lot of handbags for £17, stuffed them with newspaper clippings and gave them to the players’ wives.

In 1956, Stan Seymour rewarded defender Frank Brennan for his loyal service by slashing his wage from £15 to £8. And in 1977, when Newcastle were reasonably successful, six players nearly quit the club after contract talks stalled.

The decline is partly about quality of management over a long period. In the dugout, there has been no Shankly or Busby to lay the foundations for a great club.

In the boardroom, the directors have scored more own goals than Dennis Wise’s old teammate Frank Sinclair and have, since the 1950s, largely failed to nurture and retain a nucleus of quality players that could make a great team.

From Supermac to Gazza, they have sold stars and, too often, invested the money in the likes of Stephane G’uivarch. Newcastle’s remarkable genius for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory has, rather unfairly, made the Toon Army’s passion seem comically grotesque.

The tragic-comic result of Newcastle’s unerring instinct for self-destruction is that Abu Dhabi United Investment And Development Limited bought the wrong club. If any Premier League club stood to be transformed by halfway decent management and the infusion of a few hundred million quid it was Newcastle United.

The average gate at St James’s Park last season was 51,231, higher than for Serie A winners Inter, and nearly 9,000 more than the average at the City of Manchester Stadium.

The Toon Army deserve something to shout about

And Newcastle, unlike Manchester City, own their stadium. That’s partly why, last year, American business magazine Forbes estimated that Newcastle United was worth £220m, almost £80m more than Manchester City.

If Newcastle fans ever feel inspired to repeat the paper plane throwing feats that illuminated a dull 0-0 with Crystal Place in May 2005, they may want to make them out of dirhams, the Abu Dhabi currency, just to remind Mike Ashley what he has lost.

Sunderland and Middlesbrough do, at least, have stable ownership now. In a story littered with missed opportunities, Newcastle’s failure to find the right owner from the Middle East may just be the biggest missed opportunity of all.

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Insomnia, Dimitar Cantona & the Roy Race biography

2009-01-30T13:00:00Z

The strangely selective amnesia of Joe Kinnear...

Let’s be honest, we’ve all forgot stuff.

Bobby Robson, still revered on Tyneside, once famously referred to Lauren Robert as Lauren Bacall, often puzzled Shola Ameobi by saying: “Hello Carl” (mistaking him for Carl Cort) and, as England manager, often addressed Bryan Robson as “Bobby.”

Jack Charlton, when he managed Ireland, gave up trying to remember Tony Cascarino’s name and settled for calling him “ice cream man.” In both cases, such slips didn’t seem to matter because Robson and Charlton ensured their teams did the business on the pitch.

Joe Kinnear has no such defence. And his memory loss is perplexing.

Apparently unable to remember Charles N’Zogbia’s surname, he did manage to recall the cruel nickname "insomnia” with which Sunderland fans derided N’Zogbia.

Kinnear has suggested the player is just using the row to engineer a move. The puzzle being that, if that is the case, why was Kinnear daft enough to give his wantaway star the ammunition?

"Ere Tony, I'll have a 99... with a flake"

From Cantona to Dimitar...

Dimitar Berbatov is, as a Manchester United fan said to me the other night, “a proper player.”

The media - so keen to berate him for getting lost in games and not showing enough appetite for the fray - should cut him some slack.

I am baffled by the criticism of his sulky demeanour on the pitch. Football may be a branch of the entertainment industry but that doesn’t mean every player should be contractually obliged to play to the cameras.

The game will be much more monotonous if every midfielder or attacker is compelled to run around like Action Man and cover, as the cliché goes, every blade of grass on the pitch. Berbatov has the technique, vision and instincts to be as important to United today as Cantona was in the 1990s.

The class vs effort controversy is almost as old as football. (And having watched Brian Talbot at Arsenal in the early 1980s I know which side of the argument I come down on.)

Roy Race, when he managed Melchester Rovers, struggled with a similar dilemma. In one instalment, he wrestled with misgivings about signing a striker who only really featured in a game for two minutes but in that period scored two goals to win the match.

Berbatov: United's 21st century Cantona?

Roy, Lennie and Barry...

Roy Race brings me to the question of the great football novel. Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland (a Gatsby-esque novel in which the morose hero alleviates his mid-life crisis by playing cricket in New York) has pointed out that such a novel doesn’t yet exist.

David Peace’s Damned Utd is a superb fictionalisation of the worst 44 days of Brian Clough’s life. And the trailer for the film looks magnificent.

But there is, as far as I’m aware, no classic novel that does for football what, say, Walter Tevis’s The Hustler did for pool or Don DeLillo’s End Zone for NFL.

O’Neill recommends Barry Hines’s debut novel The Blinder about a gifted working class footballer called Lennie Hawke who struggles to juggle sport and school.

I’ve just ordered it. If it’s as good as the PE teacher/Bobby Charlton/Denis Law sketch in Hines’s more famous A Kestrel For A Knave, I’m in for a treat.

If you’ve read any great football novels please let me know. And, I must admit, I haven’t yet read the Roy Race ‘biography'.

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Serbian football crawling back from wreckage

2009-01-28T10:00:00Z

When Radomir Antic accepted, at the umpteenth time of asking, the job of Serbian national coach, many pundits assumed it was an act of sheer desperation.

His predecessor Miroslav Dukic had been ousted without managing a full competitive game after arguing with Serbian FA boss Tomislav Karadzic. But Antic decided, as he suggested in one remarkably frank interview, “football mirrors the social situation in a country.”

With fewer football executives in jail and a new government engaging with the West, rather than nursing paranoid suspicions about it, the time seemed right. And with Serbia top of their 2010 World Cup qualifying group, Antic’s faith has, so far, been vindicated.

Serbia celebrate at Croke Park

One of the smaller consequences of the break-up of Yugoslavia was that it wrecked Serbian football.

UN sanctions barred the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav team from Euro 92, USA 94 and Euro 96. The gloom was deepened when newly independent Croatia reached the semi-finals of France 98, while a very Serbian Yugoslav team were knocked out in the last 16 by a long distance screamer from Edgar Davids.

In 2006, Serbia, briefly hyphenated with Montenegro, were famously routed 6-0 by Argentina in the 2006 World Cup, conceding to a 24-pass move which showed the kind of technique, patience and guile Serbian football had once been renowned for.

But things are finally looking up for the Serbian game. This has been a good transfer window for Serbian players and clubs. Partizan Belgrade have – to use a technical term much in use among the financial cognoscenti – ‘trousered’ £8m from the sale of promising midfielder Zoran Tosic to Manchester United.

Partizan will earn more when his team-mate, attacking midfielder Adem Ljajic, joins United in 2010. After a three-day-trial, Eintracht Frankfurt gave left-back Nikola Petkovic, a star of the Serbian side that reached the 2007 European Under-21 final, a three and a half year contract.

The catalyst for this export drive was Nemanja Vidic’s arrival at Old Trafford in 2006. The reported fee – around £6m – now seems like one of the bargains of the 21st century. In football, nothing succeeds like success and the ease with which the redoubtable central defender settled had scouts wondering if they could find similar talent, at the right price, in Vidic’s homeland.

United's new recruit: Zoran 'the new Kaka' Tosic

Last year alone Chelsea paid £9m for defender Branislav Ivanovic, Hertha Berlin snapped up versatile defender/defensive midfielder Gojko Kacar for £2.5m (not bad for a player who became the first Serb to score five goals in a game for his country, against Hungary last September), Borussia Dortmund paid £2m for right-back Antonio Rukavina, Nantes bought striker Filip Djordevic and Genoa took attacking midfielder Bosko Jankovic on loan.

There is still more talent coming through. Red Star’s 25-year-old skipper Nenad Milijas, yet another promising defensive midfielder, has already been linked with CSKA Moscow, Borussia Dortmund, Hertha Berlin and Roma.

20-year-old left-back Ivan Obradovic only made his first team debut for Partizan in April 2007 but he has already been given the captain’s armband and scored his first goal for the national team. Partizan and Red Star are also rumoured to be tracking two U21 stars: midfielder Dusan Tadic and striker Danijel Aleksic.

If this money enriches Serbian football, rather than a few directors, the boom may continue. At the very least, such sales might prevent the kind of financial problems which turned the climax of the 2007/08 season into a byzantine, bureaucratic mess.

FK Zemun couldn’t compete in the UEFA Cup because their finances were so dire. Their place was given to Borac Cacak whose Intertoto Cup spot was given, after four teams turned it down, to OFK Beograd.

The relegation battle wasn’t any prettier. Mladost Lucani were relegated because they were broke. This meant one bottom-three side had to be reprieved. Eventually, 11th placed Banat Zrenjanin were saved because they had more supporters than 10th-placed Smederevo, who were so livid they appealed, to no effect, to UEFA. Hopefully, this season such issues will be decided on the pitch.

Serbian fans could yet hold their national game back. Partizan were expelled from the 2007/08 UEFA Cup after fighting. Partizan supporters may be nicknamed the gravediggers but there’s no need for them to dig their own club’s grave.

Partizan fans threatening to hold club back

Racist fans still disfigure the Serbian game – though the authorities are probably working harder to combat this than they are sometimes given credit for. Last November, 26 Borac Cacak supporters were jailed after wearing Ku Klux Klan outfits and shouting abuse at their own Zimbabwean player.

Serbians have always played football with a swagger that the rest of the world can find offputting. One of Antic’s tasks, as national coach, is to use that arrogance to his team’s advantage. But his biggest challenge, he admits, is to end the culture of “the typical ‘yes, but’ excuses in the Serbian game.”

Ironically, the very process many Serbs laboured to prevent – the complete break up of Yugoslavia – may, ultimately, liberate the nation’s footballers.

If Antic can end the “yes, but” culture, 2010 could be Serbia’s best World Cup ever. Not that that’s saying much.

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Every wannabe football tycoon needs a history lesson

2009-01-23T15:00:00Z

The worst thing that could happen to the German-Swiss investors allegedly researching a bid for Chelsea is that they fall prey to one of the popular delusions that have destroyed countless wannabe football tycoons.

The most powerful of these is the belief that, with the right calibre of management, a club’s performance can be transformed – and that cash, gazillions of it, can expedite this transformation.

Investors who know little about the heritage of the game – or the club they buy – are prone to exaggerate the impact they can have on a club’s status, a tendency you might call “Bigger than Real Madrid” syndrome.

  "£100m for one player!? You'll have to make do with a cheque..."

Some new owners can’t even spell due diligence, let alone do it. But the Swiss/German/Gulf investors eyeing Chelsea will examine the club’s finances in detail.

If they’re trying to decide how much money they might have to spend if they acquired Chelsea, they should analyse one set of figures in particular depth: the number of trophies Chelsea has won.

By my reckoning, if you throw in a couple of Full Members Cups and Division Two titles, that comes to 21 – nine less than Jock Stein won in his career.

With speculation rising over the depth of Roman Abramovich’s continuing commitment to Chelsea, the idea that he has mysteriously ‘failed’ has become a cliché.

This is utter rubbish. If you take the long view, Abramovich has led one of the most sustained, successful, challenges to the established order in the history of European football.

True, he has not won the UEFA Champions League, but three semi-finals and a runners-up spot in five years is pretty decent. And the back-to-back Premiership titles, largely overlooked now, are an impressive feat.

Apart from Liverpool and Manchester United, the only other club to win consecutive English titles in the last 50 years is Wolves (1957/58 and 1958/59).

The lists of champions in France, Germany, Italy and Spain show how hard it is for new contenders to emerge. Since 1929/30, only six clubs (Atletico Madrid, Athletic Bilbao, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Real Sociedad and Valencia) have won La Liga more than once.

Serie A is a little more open: 104 titles have been shared by 16 clubs but three (Juve, Inter, Milan) have won 58% of those. In the Bundesliga, only Bayern, Gladbach and Hamburg have won successive titles.

France is different. Lyon, who have won Ligue 1 seven times in a row, were a mediocre Ligue 2 club when Jean-Michel Aulas took over in 1987.

Aulas has transformed Les Gones but it still took 15 years to win the first title. Aulas isn’t as rich as Abramovich but is operating in a league where the average club budget for players is just £40m.

Aulas: Transformed Lyon from mediocre to miraculous

Football can seem a fast moving business. But at the very top, continuity, not change, is the norm.

Abramovich acquired a club with a reputation, as one fan put it, for flashy underachievement. Some half a billion pounds – and six years – later, he has made them serious contenders. By football’s standards, that is some feat.

But if Chelsea want to become the world’s most charismatic, marketable club, Abramovich – or the potential new owners – may have years to wait and untold millions more to spend. (And, if Manchester City are to become the new Chelsea or, as Robinho suggested, as big as Real Madrid, they may find the eventual price tag steeper still.)

Many clubs have golden ages (Huddersfield in the 1930s, Kilmarnock in the 1960s, Napoli in the 1980s), and the game’s great powers endure spells in the doldrums (Milan in the 1980s, Manchester United in the 1970s and Liverpool in the early 1960s) but, over the long term, the usual suspects generally win the big European leagues.

Chelsea have had a golden noughties but will it last?

A 2008 study by the University of Navarra ranked Chelsea as the world’s fourth most popular club ahead of Real Madrid but behind such traditional aristocrats as Milan, Manchester United and Barcelona.

To go from fourth to first, the Blues need major silverware – they’re three European Cups behind Barcelona and Manchester United – and, the Navarra study suggests, to nurture their own global Messi(ah).

(Note to Manchester City’s new owners: the allegedly iconic signing of Thierry Henry may sell a few sky blue No14 shirts, but the real breakthrough will come when City bloods an Henry of its very own.)

When Chelsea’s owners have unearthed their own Messi, and conquered Europe a time or three, there’s the small matter of stadiums. The club needs a theatre of dreams to compete with Camp Nou, the Bernabeu, Old Trafford and the San Siro.

Stamford Bridge: It's good, but it's no San Siro

It’s the difference, in essence, between playing at a cathedral named after a legendary double World Cup winner like Giuseppe Meazza and having a ground where hospitality areas are named after David Speedie and Nigel Spackman.

Chelsea could become the biggest club in the world. So, though the odds are longer, could Manchester City. All they need is a fair wind, to discover the new Messi and an owner so determined to achieve this goal that they’re willing to stick with it even if they don’t see much change from a billion.

And there’s always a risk that, like a chagrined Bond villain, they discover that talking about world domination is easy. Achieving it is the hard bit.

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Oi Kaka, fancy becoming the new Denilson?

2009-01-20T13:00:00Z

The law of unintended consequences may complicate Real Madrid’s interest in Cristiano Ronaldo. If Kaka, the fourth best player in the world (according to FIFA) is worth £103m, how much is CR7 worth?

The rumoured Real offers – £50m, £60m, even £80m – for Ronaldo once seemed generous but now, post-Kaka, look a bit paltry. Indeed, what’s to prevent City outbidding Real?

Whoever wins the election to replace interim Real president Vicente Boluda might want to reconsider this strategy anyway.

The history of such deals – where one club bets the farm for a galactically talented player – suggests they fail as often as they succeed. Zinedine Zidane’s £46m move to Real was a treat for fans and gave us one of the greatest goals to grace a UEFA Champions League final. But Zizou arrived in 2001, conquered Europe in 2002, and by the end of 2003 Real had begun to implode.

Zizou wallops home in 2002 final at Hampden Park

For every masterly record signing – Cruyff to Barcelona, Maradona to Napoli, Gullit to Milan – there are loads of deals which went awry.

The Kaka/City circus must have fascinated a 39-year-old recently retired attacking midfielder called Gianluigi Lentini. His world record £13m move to Milan in 1992 was dubbed “an offence to the dignity of work” by the Vatican and after a bad car crash in 1993 he never recovered his old form.

Perhaps Kaka wasn’t swayed by his Christian beliefs at all. Maybe he just glanced at the history books and decided that risking he might become the new Denilson wasn't worth it – not even for a sheikh’s ransom.

Much has been made of Robinho’s exit from Manchester City’s Tenerife training camp. I wouldn’t worry too much. I suspect the imminence of Craig Bellamy has prompted the hyperactive young genius to return to Brazil to buy some industrial strength golf clubs.

Same as he ever was?

“He has seen a lot of football and I’m sure he has a plan.” That was how Fulham defender – and Norwegian skipper – Brede Hangeland greeted the return of Egil ‘Drillo’ Olsen as caretaker national coach.

Critics – many of whom coach top flight clubs in Norway – worry that Olsen’s plan is, as Talking Heads might say, the “same as it ever was”: zonal defence and long diagonal passes for a striker to nod into the box.

But Drillo’s return has done something useful: excited interest in the national team which, under Age Hareide, had begun to slip off the media’s radar. The April 1 friendly against Finland may sell out.

Olsen: "Hello boys... I'm back"

Olsen’s wellies, Marxism and the ability to identify the height of every mountain on earth should make for entertaining press conferences.

Jim White sees Olsen’s return as proof of football’s unerring ability to reward failure. But Drillo did manage the most successful Norway team ever – the national side won 30% of their games before he took over and 70% while he was in charge – and he is still only 66. LarsArhus’s stats show why so many Norwegians still hope he may get the job permanently.

And finally…

PR email subject of the week: “Aston Villa FC hero flies Air Malta.” I kid you not.

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Why the transfer market is like a brothel...

2009-01-16T10:00:00Z

Bricks and brothels

The football transfer market is like a brothel: no man can enter it and emerge with his reputation for probity intact.

So Arsenal, who have often threatened to report Real Madrid for trying to pilfer players, hope to sign Andrei Arshavin, a player who during Euro 2008, completely unprompted by a journalist, waxed lyrical about his desire to play for Barcelona and is now quoted as saying that if this transfer falls through he will remain a Zenit St Petersburg player only “on paper.”

Arshavin would be a brave move given that Russian players have hitherto had about as much impact on English football as Liechtenstein on the development of naval warfare.

Arshavin: Aiming to break mould of rusty Russians in England

If Arsene Wenger is desperate to sign a Russian, he might find CSKA Moscow’s 18-year-old playmaker Alan Dzagoev better value. Those hard to impress folks at Gazzetta Dello Sport say Dzagoev, Russia’s Young Player of the Year in 2008, could be even greater than Arshavin and he’s young enough to be moulded by the Arsenal boss.

The Kaka/Manchester City stuff makes me want to put a brick through the transfer window. The January transfer window ought to be sponsored by the football media. It cushions their return from the festive season. They can fill any yawning space with idle speculation of the “Villa grab Bergkamp” variety – a Daily Mirror scoop from the glory days of 1995.

Eastern (lack of) promise

Gornik Zabrze, Ujpesti Dozsa, Spartak Trnava… where, to quote the blonde in the defunct Australian tourism ad, the bloody hell are you?

No eastern European team from outside Russia has reached the last 16 of the UEFA Champions League since 2003/04 when Sparta Prague lost to Milan. Last season, there were no Bulgarian or Hungarian players in the tournament at all.

Dzagoev: "Arsene, up here... pick me"

There were 10 Poles but no Polish clubs – the last representatives from the footballing nation that gave us Lubanski, Lato and Deyna to grace the group stages were Widzdw Lodz in 1996/97. Wisla Krakow, who have won the Polish league five times already this century, have come closest since: in 2005/06 they beat Pana 3-1 at home but lost 4-1 in Athens in the third qualifier.

Poland’s economic resurgence – and the patronage of telecoms billionaire Boguslaw Cupial, who has backed Wisla – has not yet been reflected in the Champions League.

One club from the other side of the former Iron Curtain I expect to challenge in the Champions League is Dinamo Zagreb.

The Blues have a productive youth system and a sensible transfer policy. Adrian Caiello, the 22-year-old Argentinian holding midfielder who was in Inter’s sights, is a good acquisition and Miroslav Slepicka, the striker just arrived from Sparta Prague, looks a decent bet. The fees aren’t outlandish and the deals don’t hog headlines but Dinamo Zagreb are making progress.

Miroslav Slepicka: "My ball, give it to me, it's mine..."

Their UEFA Cup campaign peaked too early with a win over NEC but they’ll be back. It would help if they had some better luck in the Champions league qualifiers. In four seasons, they have had to face Arsenal, Dynamo Kyiv, Milan and Werder Bremen.

All they need now is some continuity on the bench: former goalkeeper Marijan Vlak is their fourth coach in 2008.

Incidentally Gornik Zabrze are bottom of the Polish Ekstraklasa, Ujpest are second in the Hungarian top flight and Spartak Trnava are third in the Slovak Superliga.

Zico

The best Brazilian footballer that Peter Gabriel very nearly wrote a song about (all together now… “Zico, oh oh Zico”) has left Bunyodkor, the most famous team in Uzbekistan, after just two months to replace Valeriy Gazzaev at CSKA Moscow.

The club’s owner, oil millionaire Isok Akbarov, still has one Brazilian legend – Rivaldo – on his books and his team are still unbeaten in – and top of – the Uzbeki league. But talk of persuading Johan Cruyff to give up his role as the footballing conscience of Barcelona to manage Rivaldo and chums seems a tad ambitious.

And finally…

As football effects go, is the “Juande Ramos effect” now more powerful than “the Harry Redknapp effect”?

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Champions League pub trivia preview

2009-01-12T10:00:00Z

Roll up! Roll up! it’s the pub quiz, triviatastic guide to the last 16 of the 2008/09 UEFA Champions League.

Which is the only team Lionel Messi has scored against in the knockout stages?
Celtic, in the last 16 in 2007/08. Since 2004/05, Messi has featured in eight knockout games but has scored just twice – both goals coming against Celtic when Barca won 3-2 win Glasgow.

When the UEFA Champions League nears the business end, even great strikers struggle to do the business.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic is yet to get off the mark in the knockout stages, a duck he would love to break against Manchester United. In four Champions League seasons with Chelsea, Didier Drogba’s knockout haul stands at just five goals.

Cristiano Ronaldo’s strike rate – six in 12 knockout games, including the header in the 2008 final – looks prolific in comparison.

Messi bags only knockout stage goal to date at Parkhead

What was so significant about the 2003/04 quarter-final between Deportivo and Milan?
Because Milan were the last reigning champions to make it as far as the last eight. In the last four years, the holders have always been knocked out in the last 16.

Who was the last non-English team to eliminate a Premier League side in the Champions League?
Milan, when they beat Liverpool 2-1 in the Athens final. In 2007/08, Arsenal were eliminated by Liverpool who lost to Chelsea who lost to United. Will Premier League sides be as dominant in the closing stages this year?

Which striker is in the best Champions League form?
Statistically, it has to be Karim Benzema whose strike rate – 12 goals in 17 games in the competition – shows why Lyon are so desperate to hold on to him. And the frightening thing is that the 21-year-old knows he can be even better if he can work on his physical stamina.

You can understand Real’s obsession with Cristiano Ronaldo - he is the very definition of a ’galactico’ – but Benzema might represent better value for money. Lionel Messi’s not in bad form either: he has scored a goal every 63 minutes he’s been on the pitch in the tournament this season.

And – free plug alert – he’s on the cover of the next Champions talking about Ronaldinho, Guardiola and what really goes in the Barcelona dressing room.

Inzaghi double beats Liverpool in 2007 Athens final

What do Frank Lampard and Karim Benzema have in common?
They are the only players to score against Manchester United in the 2007/08 knockout stages. For a club with a reputation for attacking football, United have turned into right misers in Europe. This season, United – and Juventus – have had the tightest defences, both shipping just three goals in the group stages.

How many coaches have won the European Cup with two different clubs?
Just two: Ernst Happel with Feyenoord in 1970 and Hamburg in 1983, and Ottmar Hitzfeld with Borussia Dortmund in 1997 and Bayern in 2001. So if Mourinho could win it with Inter, he would join a very select group.

What record is up for grabs in the San Siro?
United have now gone 19 Champions League games without defeat. That equals the record runs of Ajax (between September 14 1994 and April 3 1996) and Bayern (March 14 2001 to April 10 2002). So just a draw in Milan will earn this United team another place in the record books.

United aiming to break record in same stadium where they last lost

Which is the only city to have won the European Cup with two different clubs?
Milan. Inter (winners in 1964 and 1965) have a chance to catch up on the Rossoneri (winners in 1963, 1969, 1989, 1990, 1994, 2003 and 2007), who are in the UEFA Cup.

Atleti, slight favourites in their tie against Porto, could change that stat. If they win, Madrid will have two winning clubs and have won 10 European Cups to Milan’s nine. This isn’t the outcome that Real fans dream of when they talk of “la decima.” Atleti are one of eight teams who could do something no side has done since Borussia Dortmund in 1997: win the trophy for the first time.

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Shocks, stalkers and streakers

2009-01-05T11:00:00Z

“Jeff Stelling will be going mad,” my father-in-law Den said, after Michael Nelson majestically headed Hartlepool United into a 1-0 lead in the FA Cup Third Round against Stoke City.

Stelling’s response was uppermost in the minds of jubilant Pools fans as they streamed out of the Victoria Ground on a bitter, bright January afternoon. “He’ll be doing his nut,” said one, while another rang his missus: “We won 2-0. Put the telly on and see what Jeff Stelling’s doing.”

Stelling was, indeed, doing his nut in the studio, insisting Pools’ 2-0 dismissal of Stoke was the “shock of the day.”

It was a delightful shock for my father-in-law who, as we strolled down to the ground had noted: “The way Pools are playing we could get beaten by anybody.” The week before Pools had been whopped 4-1 at home by League One’s bottom side Crewe.

Jeff: He feels good etc

Stoke boss Tony Pulis made seven changes in personnel but left the team’s game plan intact. Stoke’s play was brutal, direct and swift, a campaign of aerial bombardment which would have thrilled Charles ‘Route One’ Hughes, Norman Schwarzkopf and Bomber Harris.

The characteristic Stoke move of the afternoon was for someone – occasionally even goalkeeper Steve Simonsen – to hit a long diagonal aerial ball to the left touchline, hoping it would be deflected off an opponent into touch, so Rory Delap could throw it into the box. If that didn’t work, the Potters grudgingly settled for a corner.

The plan succeeded. For four minutes. They hit the post. After that, the first half was 50/50.

Pools upped the pace in the second half. In the 48th minute, Nelson soared above Stoke’s defence. 1-0. There was poetic justice in the fact that the Potters were beaten in the air. After that, although Delap shot wide of the post when he could have scored and Liam Lawrence schemed from the flank, Stoke never really convinced.

The second goal by young David Foley was sensational. The sun glared over the Stoke goal and the ball, struck from 25 yards, floated in a kind of haze. As it neared the goal, time seemed to slow and the ball looked as if it might swerve too far, but it nestled into the top corner as the PA played Tom Hark and the Pools fans danced.

In fairness, Stoke were woefully short of strikers but Pools lost full-back Antony Sweeney to injury early on, have missed their most creative attacker James Brown nearly all season and played Joel Porter upfront though he didn’t look fully fit.

The injury that deprived Pools of the ineffective Michael Mackay brought Foley into play and, late on, as Stoke attacked, Foley and winger Matty Robson were a constant threat on the break.

With Sam Collins magnificent at the heart of Pools defence, Stoke’s aerial bombardment became increasingly ineffective but, even though the Potters caused more trouble around Pools’ goal with the ball on the ground, they never convincingly changed tack.

In one curious move, the Premier League side strung together 12 or 13 passes on the ground until, possibly in sheer bewilderment, a Stoke player hoofed it straight to an opponent.

Pulis’ success in steering Stoke to the top flight is impressive and so is the team’s work ethic and organisational discipline. But a less basic playing style might be required to build on that success.

The clue, really, lies in the name of the game: football is a game to be primarily played with feet and ball, not the hands of Rory Delap and the heads of his teammates.

The giant-killing got cursory treatment on ITV. In a highlights programme where adverts for furniture sales were occasionally interspersed with snippets of football action, Pools didn’t even get both their goals replayed. Maybe ITV willl make amends when the Hammers come to town in the fourth round.

Hartlepool heroes Nelson and Foley

One final mystery at the Victoria Ground. One bloke walked in front of us scanning the rows of seats with a puzzled, anxious expression. I assumed he was looking for someone. Till he walked past again. And again.

Was he plain-clothes security I wondered? Or a stalker suffering from short-term memory loss? I have seen his ilk at many other grounds. Can anyone explain what these blokes are doing?

Ouch, that’s gotta hurt

“Ooooohhhhhh.” 1,900 Nuneaton Town (nee Boro) fans winced in unison as the young male streaker, making his escape at the Bedworth Oval, got tangled up in what looked, from our vantage point, like a holly bush. He reappeared briefly later but wasn’t quite so fleet of foot as he scarpered into town.

Bedworth United vs Nuneaton Town in the BGBG Football League Midlands Division on December 27 was more than a game. It was a derby with all the usual accoutrements: fan segregation, slightly OTT police presence, players who had crossed the line and could be branded “Judas!” and dire ditties about the opposition.

The twist this year was that Nuneaton Borough, after amassing absurd debts, have been reconstituted as Town, enabling frustrated Bedworth fans to chant “You’ve got no history.”

Outnumbered probably 5 to 1 by Boro/Town fans, Bedworth supporters spent much of the afternoon speculating, in song, exactly how much brown matter Nuneaton consisted of. Boro/Town hit back, when superiority on the pitch had been converted into a 2-0 lead, by taunting them about the score.

Justin Marsden put Nuneaton ahead, which was ironic as the fans next to me had been screaming at coach Kevin Wilkin to take him off. Marsden is one of those Nuneaton players – the great Trevor Peake was another – who infuriate some fans because they sometimes play the ball into spaces where their team-mates ought to be but aren’t.

The players seemed less affected by the hysteria than the supporters. As we strolled off, smug with our 2-1 win, the volume and venom of the insults hurled at us suggested it wasn’t just the streaker whose pride was stung that cold afternoon.

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The blacksmith, the bobsleigher and the architect

2008-12-31T12:00:00Z

The festive season is a time for cheap nostalgia. And the nostalgia in this blog is free, give or take the cost of your broadband connection and electricity.

For reasons that largely elude me, I'm honouring some greats who had the misfortune to play before the global melodrama we call the World Cup had been invented, an era full of tennis playing centre-forwards, goalscoring blacksmiths and bobsleighing strikers.

The goalscoring blacksmith
As a kid, I read about Joe ‘Ten Goal’ Payne, who once scored 10 in a game for Luton. The definitive account of Payne’s heroics is now online, but his most famous feat was matched by a Danish striker called Sophus Nielsen.

On the Danish national team site Nielsen looks more of a bruiser than his half-namesake Poul. In October 1908, Sophus starred in the Danish team that beat France 17-1. After six minutes, Nielsen was on a hat-trick. He scored the next seven in the 39th, 46th, 48th, 52nd, 64th, 66th and 76th minutes. Not bad for a part-time blacksmith.

A blacksmith, yesteryear

Two years later, he and his brother Carl, an unemployed carpenter, decided to travel Europe as journeymen. They only made it as far as Kiel, where they agreed to play for Holsten Kiel after the chairman promised to employ them as blacksmith and joiner.

Before and after his time in Kiel, Nielsen was prolific for Frem, a working class club in Copenhagen long sponsored by the metalworkers union.

The bobsleighing Belgian Rossoneri
Louis van Hege won gold at the 1920 Olympics with Belgium's football team, came ninth in the bobsleigh at the 1932 games and scored 98 goals in 91 games for AC Milan. There’s a nice photo of him on this Milan site looking like a schoolboy who has been told to wait outside the headmaster’s study. Van Hege lived to the ripe old age of 86, dying in 1975.

"Going down, GO-ING DOWN, going down..."

Belgium’s gold in 1920 was controversial. In the Antwerp final, the Czechs were so incensed by the English officials that they walked off the pitch. Their letter of protest, ignored by the IOC, noted: “During the match, Belgian soldiers were introduced to the crowd until they circled the pitch and because of their provocative presence our players were unable to play their normal game.

"As a result of the very regrettable incident at the end of the match when there was a pitch invasion led by the soldiers and our national flag was insulted we will not participate until we have received an apology from the (Belgian) soldiers.”

That must be the very opposite of what Ernest Hemingway meant when he defined courage as “grace under pressure”.

The oppressor of the Norwegians
They called him “Tist”, short for “gratist” because he snuck into games without paying as a kid. But whatever income Poul Nielsen deprived Danish football of as a youngster, he more than made up for as a striker for club (KB) and country.

Outside Denmark, Nielsen is largely forgotten – he hung up his boots in 1927. But his picture on the Danish national team website makes him look like a sly poacher of goals, and he was: he scored 52 goals in 38 caps. From October 1911 to June 1916, he was never off the scoresheet for Denmark.

In an astonishing 10-game run, he scored 23 goals, including six in a 10-0 thrashing of Sweden in 1913. And he'll never be forgotten in Norway, where defenders of a certain age still flinched at his memory years later: in 11 games against Norway, he scored 29 goals.

The gentleman player
Who is England’s all-time record goalscorer? Bobby Charlton, surely.

And yet on RSSSF.com, that online cavern of football statistics, you’ll see one Vivian John Woodward credited with 73 goals in 53 England games between 1903 and 1914. But a footnote points out that 44 of these goals were scored for England’s amateur team in fixtures that were deemed full internationals by England’s opponents.

There’s a thorough biog of Woodward here. He was a gentlemanly, posh kid, told by his father to concentrate on tennis and cricket, but he was so good at football that he made his debut as a centre-forward for Clacton Town at the age of 16.

Contemporary accounts suggest he was the complete attacker, a superb dribbler, passer, striker and header of the ball who could play as centre-forward, inside-right or inside-left and score with either foot.

He kept up his tennis; in 1912 and 1913, he even reached the final of Wimbledon. He was also a dairy farmer and an architect, who designed the main stand used in Antwerp for the 1920 Olympics.

Those Olympics, that stand, but not that man

A glorious career – with Clacton, Spurs, Chelmsford, Essex and England (he twice won Olympic gold with the amateurs) – had an inglorious aftermath. In 1953, he was found in a nursing home in Ealing, bedridden and paralysed, complaining that “no one who knew me in football has been to see me in two years”.

It was the kind of scandalous neglect that would hasten the demise of another gentlemanly England hero – Bobby Moore. Still, Woodward’s plight moved the FA to respond. They sent him a TV set.

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Ibra, Best and a Boxing Day bonanza

2008-12-23T09:00:00Z

His Zlatanic majesty

The 2008-09 UEFA Champions League draw was a bit of a peach. Not only does it offer Rafa Benitez and Claudio Ranieri the chance to stroll down Memory Lane, it pits Ferguson against Mourinho or, more importantly, Ibrahimovic against Ronaldo.

Inter’s boss – now known as SuperMou to denizens of the Italian football media – has suggested that the Swede is better than the artist formally known as CR7.

From a technical perspective, he may have a point. Ibrahimovic has been in astonishing form this season in Serie A, setting up goals with flicked passes and scoring with strikes that would have impressed Hamish Hotshot.

Cynics insist that Ibra is just a very gifted YouTube player. That's unfair but it’s easy to see why the charge is being made.

A player of his gifts should be able, more often, to take a game by the scruff of the neck and control it, in the way that the likes of Best, Cruyff – and even Cristiano Ronaldo – have all done.

"Think you can do better?"

In big games in Europe, Ibra has sometimes seemed distracted or oppressed by the pressure; it’s almost as if his picture of the game has been distorted. And his goal tally – nine in 39 Champions League matches – isn’t worthy of a player with his gifts.

Now, against United, would be the perfect stage for him to prove to Europe that he can, as all the true greats have done, dominate a game when it matters.

Best on Best

Rereading Gordon Burns’ Best And Edwards, I am startled by how good it is.

Burns doesn’t quite succeed in bringing the great Duncan Edwards into focus – maybe, given his tragically short career and the power of his myth, that just isn’t possible unless you’re prepared to take the kind of risks David Peace took in his brilliant novel about Cloughie, The Damned Utd – but Burns brings fresh insight into the more protracted tragedy of George Best’s decline and fall.

The irony at the heart of Best’s tragedy is that through sheer talent, looks and charisma, he had conquered the world by he time he was in his early twenties. And then discovered that the only person he really wanted to spend anytime with was himself.

After all, who else – apart from, say, Elvis and The Beatles – could understand the strange laws that governed his existence? The women – even the Miss Worlds – seem a distraction, a useful time killer.

In Burns’ narrative, Best seems only finally to achieve a kind of peace when he semi-retires to a pub in Chelsea where he is protected by the regulars and landlord and settles into a regular, alcoholic routine.

"Yes, Zlatan, I do"

I interviewed Best once, for FourFourTwo, back in the mid-1990s. And it struck me then, although this required no special insight, that he was different to most of the other celebrities you interview.

He didn’t set out to light up, or dominate the room. He just sat, rather quietly, on the sofa, telling a few lovely anecdotes as one of his old matches flickered on the TV set.

Only when his younger self ghosted past the Southampton defence in black and white did he show much emotion, jumping from the sofa and saying “God I was f***ing quick” and pointing at the screen as if I might not believe him and had to be confronted with the evidence.

After I interviewed him, everyone I knew asked me two questions. Did he turn up? And, was he drunk? To which I answered yes and no – although it was rumoured that after I left he went on a bender.

I did notice that, as the interview progressed, the little mini-bottles of champagne were increasingly in demand and Best, despite the frantic urgings of his PR man, was stubbornly refusing to eat any sandwiches.

Afterwards, I struggled to connect the young Best, whose talent still shines on YouTube, with the man I met. Burns’s book has probably given me more insight into Best than anything else I have ever read – even more than Eamon Dunphy’s sublime A Strange Kind Of Glory.

And finally…

As my contribution to the festive spirit, I thought it would be worth recording the results from Division One (Premier League in newspeak) on December 26 1963. This works best if you imagine James Alexander Gordon reading them as you read them.

Blackpool 1 Chelsea 5
Burnley 6 Manchester United 1
Fulham 10 Ipswich Town 1
Leicester City 2 Everton 0
Liverpool 6 Stoke City 1
Nottingham Forest 3 Sheffield United 3
West Bromwich Albion 4 Tottenham Hotspur 4
Sheffield Wednesday 3 Bolton Wanderers 0
Wolverhampton Wanderers 3 Aston Villa 3
West Ham United 2 Blackburn Rovers 8

Here’s hoping for another 66-goal fest on Boxing Day.

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Surplus strikers, hat-trick Hans & belated Golden balls

2008-12-15T11:00:00Z

Strikers on the dole
Being a striker has always been an insecure profession. They have long been afflicted by mysterious fluctuations in form, a variable quality of service from team-mates and ridiculous expectations from fans and directors.

But their trade is now more uncertain than ever. Across Europe, from youth teams to first teams, coaches are increasingly reluctant to attack with two forwards. Many strikers in their 20s will face a stark choice... retrain or retire.

Stick someone else up here gaffer, I'm lonely

Why has this happened?
First, it’s the culmination of a trend which has seen teams shift from such cavalier formations as 1-1-8 in the 1870s to 2-3-5, 3-3-4, 4-2-4, 4-3-3, 4-4-2 and now 4-2-3-1 or 4-5-1 or even 4-6-0.

The offside rule hasn’t helped. Uncertainty over how the law will be applied has prompted many teams to defend deep, squeezing the space strikers thrive in.

In response, even attack-minded managers find it more productive to have players running defences from midfield or from the flanks. The brutal truth is that two strikers, permanently stationed up-front, are much easier for central defenders to manage. It is far trickier to defend when any one of five midfielders – or either full-back – can run into the area from nowhere.

A lone striker doesn’t necessarily mean a team is playing defensively. Their attacking intent will have more to do with the balance between screeners and creators in midfield, the space they are encouraged to play in and whether either or both full-backs are encouraged to bomb forward.

As Spain showed in the Euro 2008 final – and the recent World Cup qualifier against Belgium – teams can be more threatening if they just play with one striker, providing they have the right calibre of passing and running in midfield.

At Euro 2008, Spain passed the opposition to death. After losing to Spain in the quarter-final, Christian Panucci complained he was exhausted because: “they never played it long.”

"Stop passing it you little sod. I'm knackered..."

The popularity of one up front will, effectively, halve the number of positions available to strikers on the team-sheet.

This concern was raised by Andy Roxburgh, UEFA’s technical director, after the U19 European Championship this summer: “By restricting the strikers’s representation to 10% of the outfield workforce, are we laying the foundations for senior national team coaches to complain, as some did at Euro 2008, about a lack of goalscorers?”

The old-fashioned penalty box predator – think Pippo Inzaghi or Michael Owen– is already an endangered species. After all, the last two Golden Boots have been won by free-scoring midfielders Francesco Totti and Cristiano Ronaldo.

The next generation of strikers will need to multi-task, like the industrious Carlos Tevez. But there is a risk that something – the lethal instincts of a striker like Inzaghi – may be lost to the game for good. Young players hoping to be the new Inzaghi might want to retrain as goalscoring midfielders.

Who needs Hans?
The idea that strikers are out of fashion would strike Red Bull Salzburg fans as ludicrous.

This season they have had the privilege of watching Marc Janko score 29 goals in 20 league games. He has hit five hat-tricks. The 25-year-old, just voted Austrian Footballer of the Year, has already broken the club’s record for goals in one season – and still has half a season to play.

Salzburg goal-machine Marc Janko

His goals have earned Salzburg 15 points (out of 46) and in one astonishing performance as a second half substitute, he scored four in 24 minutes as his side turned a 2-0 defeat into a 4-3 victory.

Barring injuries, the 25-year-old Leonardo da Vinci fan could break the great Hanks Krankl’s record of 41 goals in the Austrian league, set back in 1976.

By Juve!
Jorgen Juve is still Norway’s all-time top international goalscorer. His haul of 33 goals in 45 games in the 1920s and 1930s is impressive, even by the freescoring standards of the era.

What is truly astonishing is that Juve only played 22 of those games as a centre-forward. He made his debut as a right-back, was switched to No.9 against the Netherlands (scoring a hat-trick), bagged 31 in his first 25 internationals and was then redeployed to right-back or centre-half for the last 20 games.

Versatility was a curse for Juve whose strike rate when played as a No.9 – 31 in 22 matches – is better than Gerd Muller’s.

Belated Golden balls
It’s Yuri Zhirkov I feel sorry for.

Nominated for the 2008 Ballon d’Or, and getting exactly no votes, the left-back was the true architect of Russia’s surprising demolition of Holland at Euro 2008.

Unsung hero Yuri Zhirkov, No.50 in FFT's Top 100 list

Almost as tricky as Ronaldinho, Zhirkov works as hard as Deco in his Porto prime. His poor showing is especially galling given that, only last year, the Mexican keeper Guillermo Ochoa received one vote even though he has never played any club football in Europe, while Iraqi striker Younis Mahmoud bagged two. Not bad given that he has only played for Iraqi and Qatari clubs.

Mahmoud was my own, sadly ignored, tip for FourFourTwo’s latest 100 Best Players in the World poll. Still only 25, his talent already transcends mere geography.

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Champions League: Stats, jibes & Dutch pranksters

2008-12-13T10:00:00Z

There’s one UEFA Champions League stat I haven’t been able to track down... how many passes Arsenal didn’t complete against Porto.

For Manchester United fans, hoping to retain the UEFA Champions League trophy, the key numbers, as Mystic Meg might say, are four and 18. The last four winners have all gone out in the next round and it is now a mere 18 seasons since Milan became the last team to be crowned European champions twice in a row.

"I predict rain..."

Here’s the tournament in statistics, with a few cheap jibes, Dutch pranksters and movie references thrown in.

29 months. The average tenure of a Real Madrid manager. Which compares unfavourably to the average tenure of Liz Taylor’s husbands: 41 months.

0 Dutch teams in the last 16. Ajax didn’t even qualify and PSV didn’t make the UEFA Cup. This might be just as well as the only time PSV won it, in 1977/78, their replica of the trophy was stolen, an episode highlighted in this classic YouTube clip from April 2007 in which comedian Theo Massen returns the UEFA Cup he had stolen as a prank live on a Dutch TV talk show.

12 match unbeaten run Aalborg have staged under Bruce Rioch’s successor, Allan Kuhn. Rioch, Schuster and Marius Lacatus are the three Champions League coaches to lose their jobs already. Kuhn won’t keep the job. He’ll stay on as assistant to Magnus Pehrsson.

2 of the last five winners clasped the cup with the big ears to their bosom despite coming second in their group: Porto in 2004, Liverpool in 2005. Two is also the number of games Manchester United won to top Group E.

Coach Kuhn celebrates Aalborg draw at Old Trafford

7 points dropped on their travels by Chelsea in the UEFA Champions League compared to 0 – up until December 12 – in the Premier League. Martin Samuels has been vociferous in The Times suggesting that minnows like Cluj have no place in this competition. A better question might be: why can’t Premier League sides, with much greater budgets, push Chelsea as hard as Cluj?

The Romanian champions’ team ethic, technical competence, fearless approach and tactical discipline stifled the Blues in Transylvania. And, for 10 minutes at Stamford Bridge on Tuesday, after Cluj equalised, you could smell the fear.

2.57 goals a game on average in the 2008/09 group stage, compared to 2.79 in 2007/08. Barcelona averaged three a game in Group C.

5 seasons since an east European team made the last 16. Lokomotiv Moscow and Sparta Prague were the last teams from the other side of what used to the Iron Curtain to make the knockout round – back in 2003/04. Five teams – Atletico, Bayern, Juventus, Liverpool and Manchester United – have reached the last 16 undefeated.

1 game won by a Scottish club in Europe this season. Yes, Celtic’s 2-0 over Villarreal was the first – and only – victory. The fact that no Scottish side is left in Europe is not good news for the nation’s UEFA co-efficients or for the Scottish Cup winners/finalists.

6 seasons in a row the Champions League has been won by the team that knocked out the team who knocked out Real Madrid. This remarkable run started in 2003 when Juve beat Real in the semi and then lost to Milan at Old Trafford. (A big thanks to Champions staff writer Sheridan Bird for this uber-stat.)

Roma knock out Real, before losing to Man United...

40 percent chance that Chelsea will face a team managed by a former member of staff. The Blues might like to face Panathinaikos, coached by the man mountain Henk Ten Cate who looked, last time I saw him in the flesh, like the result of a scientific experiment involving the genes of Tom Jones and Graeme Souness.

They might be less keen to do battle with Juve, coached by Claude ‘Tinkerman’ Ranieri who, with his new winter-proof hooded coat, looked like a monk in the movie The Name Of The Rose.

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The football ABC: Adolf, Bruno and Chelsea

2008-12-04T15:00:00Z

Hitler, The Times and Schalke

Having fallen for the Hitler diaries, you would have thought The Times would check its facts before declaring here that Adolf Hitler was the worst famous football fan ever and informing readers that “the Fuhrer had a soft spot for Schalke who, funnily enough, were German champions six times between 1933 and 1945.”

Hitler’s soft spot was so extensive that, until the 1936 Olympics, he had never watched a football match. Agonising over which sport to grace with his presence at this showcase, he opted to watch Germany vs Norway.

After six minutes, the Norwegians were 1-0 up and Goebbels noted: “The Fuhrer is very agitated. I almost unable to control himself.”

Hitler’s agitation overcame him in the 85th minute when, utterly against the run of play, Norway scored a second and he stormed off in a huff. As Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger notes in his book Tor!, this defeat so turned the *** against football that they didn’t even bother to ask the German FA to fire the manager Otto Nerz.

Nerz (centre) rests easy

If Hitler liked Schalke so much, why didn’t he ask Nerz to build the German team around them? In 1925, the Gelsenkirchen club had pioneered a short passing game known as the Schalke Kreisel (literally "spinning top").

Yet Ernst Kuzorra, that team’s greatest player, only won 12 caps for Germany. Nerz, bizarrely, didn’t like the Schalke style, preferring the fast, physical attacking style of English football.

Sometimes, the influence of politics on football is not as simple as it appears. Yes, Schalke were German champions six times between 1934 and 1942. But they did so chiefly because they had one of the strongest teams their country has ever produced.

Bruno, Bruno!

Sorry Harry, but the Bruno in question isn’t Frank, it’s the Portuguese genius Bruno Aguiar whose class in the middle for Hearts was key to their 2-1 triumph over Rangers. Aguiar carved Rangers open with set pieces and his speciality – a long free-kick curled into the area at the opposing keeper with height and pace – was just too much for the Gers.

Aguiar celebrates; Hibees are less chuffed

In the pre-match interview I could only just make out what Hearts’ Hungarian boss Csaba Laszlo was trying to say. But he must get his point across to his players: in two years as Uganda coach, he helped them climb 76 places in the FIFA rankings. And if he can find a striker in January, Hearts could become the third force in Scottish football

Conquering Wembley

At Alwyns Lane, Chertsey, Wembley Town’s coaches were grumbling about their team’s deficiencies on set pieces.

On a damp, dark, freezing Saturday afternoon, Chertsey Town, the most unpredictable team in the Combined Counties League premier division, beat struggling Wembley Town 3-1 to end a poor run which had seen them win one in five.

The third goal, a superbly worked corner benefitted from some zombie-like defending by the visitors.

Wembley, who played in the famous old Ajax strip, were gifted a late penalty. Even that couldn’t damp Chertsey’s spirits. Their coach Matt Paterson shouted at Aaron McLeish, a pacy forward who can dazzle with his dribbling, “Go and get another!” McLeish shook his head and moaned: “I haven’t got one yet. Should have had a hat-trick.”

Wembley Town were formed in 1946, partly because it seemed a bit rubbish for the famed home of the hallowed turf not to have its own football team. The Lions, as they are known, don’t play at Wembley but at Yale Farm.

I was curious to hear if they had any interesting songs – a variation on “Whatever will be will be/We’re going to Wembley” perhaps – but the away fans were too sparse and too miserable to sing.

No such thing as a free credit crunch

Unexpected benefits of the credit crunch, No.1: Roman Abramovich has had to shrink Chelsea’s scouting network. This will, the press suggests, mean curtains for Frank Arnesen, the club’s sporting director, slammed for failing to produce a Blue Fabregas or Rooney.

Arnesen (left): Hard done to?

Spotting and developing the right young players is still a dark art. Even Arsene Wenger, better at it than most, bumbled on Jose Antonio Reyes, although the Spaniard had been watched 45 times by Arsenal before they bought him.

And although Abramovich recognised that to become a proper football club, Chelsea had to grow its own talent, the pressure on his managers has made it hard for them to do an Arsene and play the youngsters in the Carling Cup.

Many of Arnesen’s signings may fail – that's par for the course in youth development – but have any really had a decent chance to prove they could be the new Wayne Rooney?

Good Times with Tony

Having slagged The Times off, I’ll close by doing something I try to as little as possible: agree with their columnist Tony Cascarino.

But in a column bemoaning the style of many mid-table Premiership clubs he noted: “Here's the standard Premier League substitution: if you are behind, bring on a forward; if you are winning, take off a forward.”

The Big Four may look likely to reach the last 16 of the UEFA Champions League but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that we have all become master tacticians.

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Champions League Round-up: From Dani to Danny

2008-11-27T12:00:00Z

Damn Zenit. Especially Dani, a ridiculously talented player whose inability to distinguish between the back of the net, posts and crossbars has sunk my outside tip for the 2009 UEFA Champions League.

He and his team-mates squandered opportunities with a recklessness that even the late, great John Belushi might have found over the top.

Group A

Crisis what crisis? The media hysteria that surrounds football has now created a situation where Chelsea are only two successive draws away from a "crisis."

What rubbish. If they beat Cluj at home, as Bordeaux did, the Blues qualify. And if Bordeaux draw in Rome – and Chelsea lose to the Transylvanians – Big Phil’s boys still go through courtesy of their head-to-head record against the Girondins.

Scolari wasn’t the biggest loser in Bordeaux. That must surely be the genius at Milan who decided Yoann Gourcuff could head offski. Bordeaux could buy the silky visionary for just £12.5m this summer.

Gourcuff runs rings round Chelsea's back-line in Bordeaux

Group B

In The Times, Gabriele Marcotti was inspired by Gianluca Vialli’s suggestion that Jose Mourinho is a Nietzschean superman. So if it’s true that whatever doesn’t kill the Special One makes him stronger, he’ll be all the better for the 1-0 defeat by Panathinaikos.

On the other hand, the bloke that came up with this kill-you-stronger theory was Ernest Hemingway. And he shot himself.

Anorthosis have to beat Pana in Athens to make the last 16 which may, for all their heroics, be a victory too far.

Group C

A record win for Shakhtar marks Basel’s second 5-0 defeat in Group C and earns the Ukrainians a UEFA Cup slot. Shakhtar coach Mircea Lucescu suggested the direction of his team’s attacks had “puzzled the big and slightly slow Basel players.” Catty. But true.

Paulo Bento, the Sporting coach, was frank about his team’s shortcomings against Barca. Not aggressive enough, dawdling too deep with the ball, and poor in the first half. Although it was 5-2, this was no rout. When Sporting fought back to 3-2, even Pep Guardiola looked worried.

History is against Barca. The last four teams to win this competition in a year ending in nine have all had red in their shirts. And the only other team – Real – wore white. Sorry Pep.

Messi pops in Barca's third in 5-2 win at Sporting

Group D

This is an intriguing one. Liverpool and Atletico have both qualified. Their head-to-head record is identical but Atletico’s goal difference is one greater than Liverpool’s. If the two sides finish on the same points, goal difference and goals scored, Liverpool will top the group because they have the better UEFA co-efficient.

Group E

Caca made Aalborg’s night. Celtic were unlucky but they were also, after they went 1-0 up, not very good.

And, to their credit, Gary Caldwell and Gordon Strachan effectively admitted as much. By the way, that’s Caca the Brazilian who scored out of nowhere against Celtic – not Citizens Against Crap Advertising, an Ohio pressure group.

Scottish clubs have performed so badly in Europe this season that fitba may lose the automatic European place awarded to the Scottish Cup runners-up when they lose to a team that has already qualified.

The best player in the fourth successive 0-0 between Villarreal and Manchester United was Yellow Submarine keeper Diego Lopez, who made two stunning saves. I expect United, at home to Aalborg next, to finish top.

Late Caldwell own goal ensures Celtic's away misery goes on

Group F

Claude Puel’s 'Operations Champions League' is back on.

To top the group, Lyon need a 0-0 draw in the Stade Gerland. Gutted for Fiorentina because Cesare Prandelli is such a lovely bloke and they have played better than their meagre points tally would suggest. Sporting director Pantaleo Corvino says the Viola may sell players in January.

Good to see Bayern stabilising under Klinsmann. As the legendary Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger points out in Tor!, his seminal history of German football, the German game stagnated in the late 1990s when Berti Vogts didn’t have the guts to challenge the past in general and the sweeper system in particular.

Klinsmann – and his former deputy Joachim Low, now running the national side – are trying to change fussball, eliminating the win at all costs mentality that disfigured the game when Jupp Derwall was national coach and not relying as heavily on the traditional German virtues: solid defence and team spirit.

Change will take time but the alternative – the cynicism of the 1990s – is far worse.

Group G

In the first 35 minutes of their home game against Porto, Fenerbahce produced their best football of the season. No, I haven’t gone mad, that’s what their coach Luis Aragones reckons. He then added: “In football, if you don’t take your chances and the other side do, you will lose.” Luis the philosopher prince!

Porto, who did play their best football of the season, could have had four. The Dragons need to beat Arsenal in Portugal to go top and with the Gunners’ season already having more highs and lows than Amy Winehouse, anything can happen.

Lisandro Lopez double sends Fenerbahce packing

Group H

Zenit have proved Aragones’ point and now return to the UEFA Cup. Juventus have sailed through what looked like a tough group and only need a point at home to BATE to finish top.

Man of the matchday in the tournament this week was probably Gourcuff. Mind you, PSV striker Danny Koevermans scored again, as the Dutch lost to Atletico. PSV have only managed four goals and Koevermans has scored all of them. Some record.

Any PSV fans who are feeling a bit down might enjoy this.

The Farmers crop up about two-thirds of the way through.

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Battered Bulgars, bereft Belgians and miserable Maltesers

2008-11-20T10:00:00Z

The human teleprinter here, with utterly off the cuff reactions to last night’s other results – i.e. not England’s or Scotland’s.

Serbia 6-1 Bulgaria.

Hristo Stoichkov, Yordan Letchkov, Trifan Ivanov, Dimitar Penev, Georgi Dimitrov: your boys sure took a hell of a beating.

What has happened to Bulgarian football? I grieve for the nation that beat Germany 2-1 at USA 94, probably the most enjoyable World Cup game of my life. (Too young to remember 1966. Just.)

I still remember Terry Venables sagely predicting: “I fancy the Bulgarians here.” How right he was. Stoichkov was immense, a one-man Total Footballer who even turned up at right-back. And now this.

Losing 6-1 is bad enough. But Savo Milosevic missed two penalties – and still managed to score twice in his last appearance for Serbia. If The Sun splashed this the headline would presumably be “Serbs 6 Twerps 1.” Or, indeed, “Silly Bulgars.”

Milosevic says a tearful goodbye

Greece 1-1 Italy.

The Italians aren’t as frenzied about friendlies as the English, so Marcello Lippi will be chuffed to have equalled Vittorio Pozzo’s record of 31 matches without defeat as Azzurri coach. And Luca Toni scored, which was nice, as that bloke said in The Fast Show.

Azerbaijan 1-1 Albania.

Decent result for the Albanians. I watched Wales play Albania in Tirana in 1995, on a surface of lunar craters lightly dusted with grass and sand. That was 1-1 too.

Albania was just emerging from Stalinist isolation and a gang of middle-aged autograph hunters huddled at the airport, one of whom came up to me, brandishing a notebook and pen, saying: “Mark Hughes?” I briefly contemplated pretending to be Sparky – I had 78% more hair then – before mumbling that the man himself wasn’t with us.

He briefly contemplated asking Neville Southall but, intimidated by the size of Big Nev’s ghetto blaster, beat a hasty retreat.

Luxembourg 1-1 Belgium.

Arguably the humiliation of the night. Six years ago the Belgians gave Brazil their biggest scare of the 2002 World Cup. Now, they can’t even hold onto a 1-0 half-time lead against the Grand Duchy. Nice way for the duchy to celebrate their 100th anniversary as a footballing nation.

Incidentally, the term Benelux was coined by an Economist correspondent in 1946. He thought it sounded better than Nebelux and it stuck.

San Marino 0-3 Czech Republic.

At least the microstate kept it to 0-0 until the 47th minute.

Czech keep-ball: You can't hold out forever

Denmark 0-1 Wales.

Craig Bellamy’s first international goal in 14 months earned John Toshack’s young team a deserved win against Morten Olsen’s much-fancied team. Has the Dragons' luck turned? Are there many more dragon-related puns left for the media to use in headlines?

Malta 0-1 Iceland.

The Icelandic nation may have cost the British government a billion or two with their creaking banks but they can still make the Maltese cross. That’s one gag where, even as you write it, you can hear the ghost of Basil Brush crowing “Boom boom!”

Ireland 2-3 Poland.

Leo Beenhakker’s boys, who have been in the stocks since Euro 2008, return to Poland with a morale-boosting win while Giovanni Trapattoni’s Ireland, though a tad erratic on the night, continue to suggest that their coach is certainly not, as he memorably suggested years ago in Germany, an idiot.

Trap: "So that's E... equals... M... and C..."

Montenegro 2-1 Macedonia.

A pride-swelling victory in the Balkan derby for the mountain state who hadn’t won in five. The ghost of Alexander the Great will probably sink a few bottles of wine and rage drunkenly at the plight of his old kingdom, felled by a dodgy penalty.

Macedonia’s Slovenian coach Srecko Katanec will get a drubbing as he again left out Goce Sedloski, the team’s inspirational skipper, for questioning his tactics.

The Sun headline here would surely be The Full Monty.

Slovenia 3-4 Bosnia.

Maybe Katanec ought to flee Macedonia and get his old job back. Quite a result for Miroslav Blazevic, the coach of Bosnia, best known for guiding Croatia to third place at the 1998 World Cup and not doing very much since.

Ukraine 1-0 Norway.

Seven without a win now for the Norwegians, who haven't won this year, a feat they last managed in 1983. Ukraine could have scored more. Beleaguered Norway coach Age Hareide better hope that Valerenga’s young striker Moa Abdellaoue really is the new Solskjaer.

"Ooh! A ball!"

Fiji 2-0 New Zealand.

A cracking result here that must unnerve the All Blacks before they take on England in the egg-chasing at Twickenham.

Trying to discover when Fiji lost won a game, I found this on rsssf.com: Thanks to Hans Schloggl, the record of Oceania’s greatest football rivalry – Christmas Islands vs Cocos Islands. For those who think this is a link too far, the Christmas Islands have won eight out of 10 – a ratio I thought only happened when cats’ owners were tested for pet food ads.

Northern Ireland 0-2 Hungary.

On this form the green and white army may just, as Nigel Worthington warned afterwards, lose to San Marino.

France 0-0 Uruguay.

In 1974, the great forecasting guru Herman Kahn predicted that the UK was finished and that France would dominate the 21st century. Kahn obviously hadn’t factored in the force that is Raymond Domenech.

"Pah!"

Germany 1-2 England. OK, I know I promised not to but... if fawning was an Olympic event, Clyde Tyldesley would win gold for Great Britain. That man can fawn over any distance – 5000 metres, 90 minutes...

If I faced England in South Africa, my tactical plan would be simple. Draw England out and hit balls that force John Terry to chase back towards his goal. It isn’t his forte.

He was honest enough to own up last night. But that wasn’t a fluke. I still remember him scrambling after Fernando Morientes when Monaco stuffed Chelsea in 2003/04. And Morientes, even then, wasn’t that pacy.

If the World Cup was held now two things would happen: Sepp Blatter would faint and England would probably win it. The only fly in the ointment is that, in recent history, the World Cup has rarely been won by the form team.

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How do minnows stop being muppets?

2008-11-15T12:00:00Z

Inter, schmInter.

If Jose Mourinho really is The Special One, we should ask Silvio Berlusconi to pass a law that the Portuguese genius must spend the next two years coaching the national team in the Most Serene Republic of San Marino.

Giampaolo Mazza has managed this microstate’s football team since 1998, making him the longest serving national team manager in Europe.

And unlike David Rodrigo, his counterpart at Andorra, he does not confuse the defensive arts with martial arts. San Marino’s part-timers set out to play football. They’re just not – with a population of less than 31,000 – very good at it.

Gualtieri takes 8.3 seconds to net against England, 1993

San Marino were abysmal when Mazza took over in 1998 and, with only one victory in the last decade (a 1-0 triumph over Liechtenstein in a 2004 friendly) they are only slightly less abysmal today.

They are officially the worst European national side. They have amassed a pleasingly round, but statistically insignificant, zero points in the FIFA rankings where they trail in joint 200th place, with the likes of American Samoa (who lost 31-0 to Australia in 2001), Montserrat and Timor-Leste.

In competitive games, San Marino have drawn two World Cup qualifiers (against Turkey in 1993 and Latvia in 2001) and one Mediterranean Cup tie (against Lebanon in 1987). Every other game they have lost. Being drubbed 13-0 by Germany in the Euro 2008 qualifiers set a new record for the Euros – and a new low for San Marino.

It is hard for these small footballing nations to make the transition from utterly atrocious to merely mediocre. Yet Mazza may feel his team are progressing. In the Euro 2008 qualifiers, they only lost to Cyprus, Ireland and Wales by a single goal in their home stadium, the Stadio Olimpico.

It’s easy to sneer at the attendances for San Marino’s home games. For example, Wikipedia estimates that 2,500 of the crowd of 3,294 watching the Ireland game in February 2007 were Irish.

But 794 home fans is 2.6% of the population, equivalent to 1.5m watching England at Wembley. And that day San Marino were level until Stephen Ireland scored in the fifth minute of injury time to secure a victory greeted in one Irish paper with the headline: “Minnows 1 Muppets 2”

Although Sanmarinese midfielder Massimo Bonini won the European Cup with Juventus in 1985, the current squad includes only two professionals in record international goalscorer Andy Selva and keeper Aldo Simoncini.

Selva’s strike rate – eight goals in 41 games – is almost miraculous. In 46 Euro qualifiers the whole team has scored just six goals. A more typical return for a San Marino striker is Marco De Luigi’s haul of no goals in 17 caps. De Luigi deserves some credit for sheer perseverance.

Ireland saves, err, Ireland to break San Marino hearts

So how do San Marino improve?

Short of The Special One’s surprising arrival, there are no easy answers. The Sanmarinese champions Murata have featured, albeit briefly, in the UEFA Champions League qualifiers and had the Brazilian veteran Aldair and Massimo Agostini - the Italian striker whose Serie A career never really soared even though his nickname was Condor - on their books. (Agostini is now coach.)

In a very small way, the presence of such stars may replicate the effect the arrival of stars such as Dennis Bergkamp, Ruud Gullit and Gianfranco Zola had in the exciting, but uncultured, Premiership in the 1990s. And the money from forays into the qualifying rounds of the Champions League and the UEFA Cup will be useful.

And the Sanmarinese game has something English football still lacks: a brand new technical centre, courtesy of a grant from UEFA’s Hat-Trick programme.

The odds on San Marino scoring a hat-trick on the pitch are still incredibly long. But they have shortened slightly.

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Matchday 4: Strong men, wronged women and tongues

2008-11-10T10:00:00Z

Firstly, an apology.

This blog would have been posted much earlier but my computer blew up twice. But I managed my anger, forcing myself to adopt that “I’m more disappointed than angry” look that Trevor Francis always wears on Sky Sports. Anyway, to business... here's my thoughts on Matchday 4.

ARSENAL'S TERRIBLE BEAUTY

For a team that play the beautiful game, Arsenal can be very hard to watch.

Against Fenerbahce on Wednesday, they played as if they were in a Nike advert: tricks, flicks, clever back-passes. But when they neared goal, there was a strange reluctance to do the basic things – like shoot and cross the ball – that win games.

One of the qualities on which footballers should be judged – but rarely are by pundits – is the quality of their decision-making. And judged on that alone, Arsenal were woeful against a Fenerbahce side that could, with more conviction and a less defensive formation, have snuck three points on the break.

Robin van Persie’s skills are sublime, but on Wednesday his decision making was poorer than a journeyman’s pro. The only player who showed a real instinct for the kind of common-sense decisions that win games was Cesc Fabregas and, late in the second half, presumably depressed by what was going on around him, even he faltered, repeatedly passing into nowhere or to an opponent.

"...and not just for passin'"

There were a few boos at the end. I’m not sure where I stand on booing. It doesn’t do the team much good. On the other hand, if I watched that every week, I’d be tempted.

It reminded me of the Arsenal of 1982/83, only that team had a good excuse – they were mainly rubbish. Wenger’s team are far more gifted, with superb technique, but they seemed, against Fenerbahce, to have forgotten how to play a match.

The papers have been quick to suggest that time is running out for Wenger, but what do they know? It’s possible that Wenger has been conducting a cunning, secret experiment to see whether a football team can prosper, at the very highest levels of the game, without a functioning defensive midfielder.

The short answer is no. Now that experiment is done and dusted, that nice Gabriele Marcotti has even given him some advice on finding an enforcer.

IT'S A KNOCKOUT!

Alessandro del Piero’s astonishing renaissance has clinched Juve’s place in the last 16. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think the-sticking-your-tongue-out celebration will ever catch on.

The Bianconeri are joined by Barcelona and Sporting Lisbon, while Manchester United and Villarreal are just a point shy of the 16. Zenit could still make it if they beat Real Madrid at the Bernabeu – which, with the way the blancos defended against Juve, is eminently possible.

Put that thing away before the wind changes

Aalborg are nearly done for. But how weird is their European campaign? The Danes’ form has been so bad it earned Bruce Rioch the boot yet in two games against Villarreal, who have one of the tightest defences in Europe, they score five goals!

Group B is turning into a bizarre, epic contest. Inter are all but home and dry but the race between Panathinaikos, Werder Bremen and Cypriot debutants Anorthosis Famagusta is wide open.

To qualify, Werder have to beat Anorthosis away (they could only draw with them in Germany) and then, to be certain, beat Inter at home. But the Cypriots are unbeaten at home and will go through if they beat Thomas Schaaf’s fabulously unpredictable side in Nicosia.

Shakhtar Donetsk’s umpteenth failure to reach the last 16 may finally have done for their coach Mircea Lucescu if rumours of an approach to Juande Ramos are true. The curse of late goals – remember Barcelona 2-1 Shakhtar? – struck Shakhtar’s domestic rivals Dynamo Kyiv this week. At 1-1 in Kyiv, two minutes into injury time, they hit the post and Porto scored off the rebound.

WOMEN'S ISSUES

Sad to see Clare Tomlinson serving time on Sky Sports News, the gulag of sport on TV. Can we please have her back, standing in front of the results board on Sky Sports Champions League nights?

I'll be back: Name the co-hosts in this 1998 SSN pic

And sad, too, not to hear more of Jackie Oakley, the first woman commentator on Match of the Day. Her voice did get a bit screechy describing goalmouth action, but no more so than Jonathan Pearce’s. Maybe she’s having voice coaching. I’d recommend she tried to sound a bit less like Pearcey and more like Nina Simone.

FUNNY OLD GAME

With a perverse unpredictability typical of their season so far, Arsenal rack up a victory over Manchester United in which Samir Nasri, who had looked as useful against Fener as a chocolate fireguard, scored twice by having the nous to take an early shot at goal.

I heard the score at Chertsey Town’s Alwyn Lane ground. The Curlews, as they are known, are the great entertainers of the Combined Counties League, beating Hartney Wintney 6-0 last time I watched them and, on Saturday, missing a penalty as they went down 4-0 to Colliers Wood.

Three of the goals were gifts, the third set up by a suicidal pass under pressure back into the penalty area. Chertsey’s last three games have produced 18 goals – they only scored six of them – and some invigorating melodrama.

So, a bit like Werder Bremen, then...

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No time for losers in east and north Europe

2008-11-03T09:30:00Z

The fat lady has sung in Belarus, Finland, Latvia, Norway and Russia. These league titles have now been clinched by BATE Borisov (for the fifth time), Inter Turku (for the first time), Ventspils (for the third year in a row), Stabaek and Rubin Kazan (who both won their respective leagues for the first time ever)

It’s at this point, traditionally, that triumphant fans sing “It’s been no bed of roses, no pleasure cruise…” and so on.

But for Stabaek, the Queen anthem certainly doesn’t apply. Their season had been a bed of roses, climaxing with a deeply pleasureable title-clinching 6-2 trouncing of Valerenga. I’ve bored people rigid about Stabaek here so it’s time to move on, as Tony Blair used to say.

Rubin Kazan won the Russian title courtesy of a last minute winner from the evergreen Serbian striker Savo Milosevic who, at 35, must be the most durable largely one-footed striker of the last 15 years.

The players have already been given gold-embroidered skull caps, a Tartar tradition, by their grateful board. The club’s only previous silverware was the La Manga Cup but they will make their UEFA Champions League debut in 2009-10, hopefully still under their coach Kurban Berdyev, memorably described here by Jonathan Wilson as a Turkmeni Harry Redknapp.

Rubin's Redknapp is flung skywards

Rubin’s triumph, as Wilson notes, is only marred by persistent rumours of match-fixing in the Russian game. There is no evidence that the new champions have benefited – just predictions in betting circles last May that the boys from Kazan were bound to win the title.

BATE’s triumph was more predictable than Rubin’s, but coach Viktor Goncharenko’s reaction was untypical. Confessing it would be “virtually impossible” to keep this squad together or to motivate a team that has won everything in Belarus, he admitted: “We have already started looking for replacements. Mentally, I’m prepared to start building a new team.”

Ventspils have now won three Latvian titles in a row, 11 short of Skonto’s run of record-breaking championships, yet, according to UEFA.com’s Mikhail Korolev, their Ukrainian coach Roman Grigorchuk is already pondering how his side can emulate the likes of BATE and Anorthosis and prosper in the Champions League.

That might sound a tad ambitious, but they only lost to Norwegian champions Brann on away goals in the second qualifying round this season.

Grigorchuk: Pondering, even as we speak

That same hope has inspired Inter Turku who won their first Finnish title under Job Dragtsma, yet another expat Dutch coach. Dragtsma was less bullish than Grigorchuk, possibly because the club will probably mark its triumph by selling talismanic skipper Jos Hooiveld to AIK Solna, the Swedish club supported by former UEFA president Lennart Johansson.

Inter Turku’s success was built on a miserly defence which conceded just 12 goals in 26 games. According to the anorak’s paradise rsssf.com this is, if you judge it on goals per game, the seventh best performance by a defence in a European league season.

Inter Turku’s 0.46 goals per game conceded is slightly better than Torino’s in 1976-77. But it is still some way short of Cagliari’s 11 goals in 30 games – 0.37 goals a game – when they won Serie A in 1969-70.

And the most famous player in that side? The legendary Luigi Riva... a striker. No time for losers, indeed.

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Matchday 3: Trains, ship's whistles and Jeremy Beadle

2008-10-23T09:00:00Z

Fewer goals, no great surprises, and one sound thrashing: Wednesday was not a vintage night of Champions League football. It was if the clubs were hungover from Tuesday’s champagne football.

Barcelona and Chelsea are effectively through to the last 16, but best entertainment of the night was Shakhtar coach Mircea Lucescu’s post-match rant about his players’ lack of aggression.

GROUP A
Chelsea 1-0 Roma
Bordeaux 1-0 Cluj

Roma showed enough quality, intelligence and nerve against Chelsea to placate those irate fans who recently chased coach Luciano Spalletti around the training ground.

As Spalletti noted afterwards, the result didn’t change the situation much: Roma need at least six points from their last three games.

Bordeaux were better against Cluj, especially in the second half, but only won thanks to a fluky own-goal and will surely need to be more fluent in attack in Romania to progress. Yoann Gourcuff continues to mystify Milan fans with his impressive form for the Girondins.

Though they lost, Cluj are making history. No team associated with trains has really impressed in this competition since Lokomotiv Moscow reached the last 16 in 2003/04.

I found this short and not entirely pointless meditation on the intertwined destinies of football and railways, which you may enjoy. The key word there being ‘may’.

There's always been a close relationship

GROUP B
Inter Milan 1-0 Anorthosis Famagusta
Panathinaikos 2-2 Werder Bremen

Inter only beat Anorthosis 1-0 but looked convincing enough, squeezing the Cypriots into their own half for most of the game. Adriano headed the winner, his second of the campaign, but Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Ricardo Quaresma could both have got on the scoresheet.

Anorthosis showed a spirit their 2,000 travelling fans appreciated, but lacked Inter’s quality. Maicon is the best Brazilian full-back since Roberto Carlos and Esteban Cambiasso is one of the most flexible, intelligent midfielders on the planet.

Werder Bremen’s last four Bundesliga games have featured 27 goals, so the only surprise about their 2-2 draw with Panathinaikos in Athens was that it wasn’t even more free scoring.

The Green-Whites haven’t had the rub of the green in the Champions League in the last few years. Keeper Tim Wiese’s attack of dropsy against Juventus robbed them of a place in the last eight in 2005/06 and in 2006/07 they finished third in their group with 10 points.

So when Dimitrios Salpingidi’s shot cannoned off the bar, with Pana 2-1 up, Werder coach Thomas Schaaf must have thought his luck had turned. His entertaining side are unbeaten in Group B but, after three draws, still trail Anorthosis. Three points in the return against Pana is essential.

It says on Wikipedia that every Werder Bremen goal is celebrated with the toot of a ship’s whistle. Dunno if I believe that.

"Honk! Parp! Hooray!"

GROUP C

Basel 0-5 Barcelona
Shakhtar Donetsk 0-1 Sporting Lisbon

Basel boss Christian Gross will really be looking forward to visiting Camp Nou after this 5-0 thrashing. The Swiss had lost to Sporting despite being the better side, but this game was over as a contest after Leo Messi scored in the fourth minute.

That goal was made by Dani Alves’s brilliance and, although most of the plaudits will go to two-goal Bojan Krkic, Gross felt Alves was largely responsible for his side’s humiliation: “We couldn’t stop him at the back. His influence was far too great.”

With Barcelona essentially through, the race for the runner-up spot was thrown wide open with Sporting’s surprise victory in Donetsk. Shakhtar deserved at least a draw; as their coach Lucescu put it: “Sporting had one chance and they took it.”

He was unsparing in his verdict on his team: the midfielders were “sluggish”, central defenders “nervous”, the strikers didn’t play to their usual level, and he even found the subs “disappointing”. Shakhtar have the quality to win in Lisbon; assuming they beat Basel at home, that could see them reach the last 16 for the first time in nine attempts.

But after two home defeats, do they have the spirit?

"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take this any more!"

GROUP D
Atletico Madrid 1-1 Liverpool
PSV 2-0 Marseille

Simao Sabrosa has now foiled Liverpool – the club that tried to buy him for £8m in 2006 – twice in two games. He scored as Benfica humbled the Reds 2-0 at Anfield in the last 16 in 2005/06 and his 83rd-minute strike snatched a point for Atleti this week.

True, he had a little help from Alvaro Arbeloa, whose run across to Jamie Carragher and Diego Forlan left the goalscorer in a prairie’s worth of space. The BBC review of the Benfica game back in 2006 had the headline: “Benitez rues poor finishing”. The more things change, the more they stay the same?

PSV old boy Eric Gerets’ return to Eindhoven with Marseille was truly miserable. True to form, he didn’t gloss over his side’s deficiencies: “I’m going to talk with the players because in the second half I saw everyone make mistakes. I was glad when the game was over.”

PSV coach Huub Stevens was chuffed by the victory but knows he is still, barring major upsets, in a battle for a UEFA Cup spot with l’OM.

While researching for my interview with Stevens last week, I discovered that when PSV (with Huub at the, er, hub of the defence) won the UEFA Cup in 1978, their replica of the trophy was stolen by the Dutch comedian Theo Maassen. Why didn’t the late Jeremy Beadle ever do something like that?

"Will this do?"

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Fabulous finishes, heroic comebacks and rockin’ Robben

2008-10-22T10:00:00Z

Has Spain’s triumph at Euro 2008 inspired coaches to play attacking football? Or are defenders and goalkeepers seriously rubbish?

In truth, it’s a bit of both (and yes, two of the goals looked offside) but after a night in which 36 goals were scored in eight UEFA Champions League games, who’s complaining?

Group E

Villarreal coach Manuel Pellegrini’s beautifully judged verdict on his side’s 6-3 triumph over Aalborg was “It was a dark night defensively but I enjoyed the goals we scored.”

His opponent Bruce Rioch was more exhilarated saying: “To come here, score three and concede six is amazing.” Joseba Llorente’s second half hat-trick took 17 minutes, eight minutes longer than Mike Newell took to score his treble against Rosenborg in 1995/96.

Llorente helps himself to hat-trick in 6-3 goal-fest

If Group E keeps going by the form book, Man United will need to win or draw 1-1 at the El Madrigal on matchday five to come top. The Yellow Submarine’s home record in the Champions League is Played 8, Won 4, Drawn 4 so United will have to be at their best to earn a point against a runner-up in the knockout stages.

And remember the last four winners of this tournament have all gone out in the last 16.

Group F

Home defeats against Bayern and Lyon mean that, with head-to-head coming into play if teams are level on points, Steaua are all but out of it.

Bayern look secure after beating Fiorentina 3-0. Viola coach Cesare Prandelli philosophically noted: “Mistakes are part of football. Otherwise every game would be 0-0.” Lyon have half a brilliant team – the attacking half – and have already salvaged four points with second-half comebacks and head to Florence on matchday five for a game that could decide their fate.

Schweinsteiger celebrates getting Bayern back on track

Group G

Arsenal emphatically ended Fenerbahce’s 15-game unbeaten run in Europe. Arsene Wenger was sufficiently cheered to drop his recent Grinch who stole Christmas persona in which he seemed to suggest that clubs buying players they couldn’t afford and Sunderland trying to stop his team winning were both somehow immoral.

It’s obviously going to be heaven (Sheffield United, Fener, the second half against Everton) or hell (Fulham, Hull, the first half against Everton) this season for the Gooners and nowt in between.

In Porto, the Hulk, deployed as a second-half striker, was less incredible than the free-kick by Olexandr Aliyev, a 33-yard belter that sealed Dynamo Kyiv’s first away win in the tournament in over four years.

Porto coach Jesualdo Ferreira complained that Dynamo only came to defend, playing the match like part of a two-legged cup tie, but he now needs his side to win away in Kyiv and Istanbul if they are to progress.

Walcott pops in No.2 of five Gunners goals in Turkey

Group H

Zenit St Petersburg’s profligate finishing cost them two more points against BATE, the Belarusian champions, Dick Advocaat grumbled: “I cannot score goals myself. I did when I was younger but not now.”

BATE striker Vitali Rodionov, who hit the frame of the goal from an absurd angle, looked especially useful. The Russian champions, with a point from three games, should be out of it, but a win in Borisov could change all that.

Juventus vs Real Madrid was a truly odd game. A makeshift bianconeri team won – the opening goal from Alessandro Del Piero was a stunner – but with so many injuries, it’s hard to tell how strong Claudio Ranieri’s team will be in the knockout stages.

Del Boy curls home stunning opener for Juve against Real

In the battle of the talismanic veteran skippers, Del Piero outshone Raul who barely featured. Although all the talk was about a crisis at Juve, it was Real who, despite a late rally, looked out of sorts.

Arjen Robben was brilliant and, once again, left the pitch so immaculate he looked like the ‘after’ shot in a Daz advert. How does he do it?

Johnny Haynes: Fulham's big headed pass master

2008-10-20T10:00:00Z

“What are you effing up to?”

That was how England and Fulham maestro Johnny Haynes often rebuked team-mates who had just screwed up. Sometimes, he wouldn’t say anything, just stand, hands on hips, in an accusatory manner.

Sometimes, a legend’s impatience and imperfection are more telling than all the misty-eyed, nostalgic tributes. Haynes’ perfectionism once earned his best mate and Fulham room-mate Tosh Chamberlain a booking for calling him an “effing bighead.”

“What are you effing up to?”

Asked by Michael Parkinson what he remembered most about his career, Haynes replied: “One season we scored 100 goals and didn’t come top. We couldn’t work it out until someone pointed out we had conceded 100 goals.”

Haynes was the England captain between Billy Wright and Bobby Moore but, outside west London, is less famous than either. The statue unveiled outside Fulham’s Johnny Haynes stand last weekend should signal the long overdue re-evaluation of a player Pele called the greatest passer of the ball he had ever seen.

Reverse passes, cross passes, 40-yard passes, passes into space he couldn’t see to a team-mate who, he intuitively knew, should be running on to receive it – these were all in Haynes’ repertoire.

George Cohen, Fulham’s World Cup winning full-back, remembers one moment of genius at an otherwise forgotten charity match: “The ball came to him at speed on a wet, slippery surface but with the slightest of adjustments, one that was almost imperceptible, he played it inside a full-back and into the path of an on-running winger.

I looked at our coach Dave Sexton on the bench and he shook his head as if to say 'fantastic.' Haynes could give you goose bumps on a wet night in a match that didn't matter.”

An Arsenal fan as a boy in Edmonton, growing up on Spurs’ doorstep, Haynes joined Fulham after a sensational performance for England Schoolboys either because his best mate, Chamberlain, was on the Cottagers’ books or because big clubs thought he was too slight to make it.

Either way, he blossomed at Fulham. Like Totti at Roma, Haynes never seemed tempted by offers from big clubs (Spurs, Milan and Roma assiduously sought his signature). In 18 years at Fulham, he made 658 appearances and scored 158 goals, leading them out of the old Division Two in 1958. In 1958/59, he scored 26 goals in 34 games, a prolific goalscoring midfielder before Bobby Charlton and Frank Lampard reached their peak.

Wallop! Lincoln City on the receiving end in 1958

If there is a blot on his reputation, it is his performances for England in two World Cups.

In 1958, he played through the pain in Sweden with blistered feet as England disappointed. In 1962, England lost their opener against Hungary because the Hungarians, noting that England had no Plan B, marked Haynes out of the game. In the quarter-final, Garrincha’s brilliance undid England, who lost 3-1.

That would prove to be his last international. A car crash two months later damaged his cruciate knee ligaments and, out for a year, he didn’t fully recover as a player, never showing the form that would force Sir Alf Ramsey to recall him.

Losing in the quarter-final to Brazil was a respectable exit but, for once, England had realistically expected so much more. In 1960/61, with Haynes as skipper, England’s record was P9, W7, D1, L1, F45, A14. The most famous result in that run was the 9-3 demolition of Scotland (in which Haynes scored his last two goals for his country) but a 3-2 victory over Italy in Rome in May 1961 was probably more significant for a side that aspired to win the World Cup.

But it never happened for Haynes. Instead, his admirers must dwell on the day, in October 1958, when he exorcised his frustration at being knocked out of the World Cup by the USSR by scoring a hat-trick against them as England won 5-0.

"Have I really got to pose like this forever?!"

After gazing at sculptor Douglas Jennings’ fine statue, I watched Fulham take on Sunderland from the back of the Johnny Haynes stand. Neither the statue – nor the presence of several of Haynes’ illustrious team-mates (including Jimmy Hill, who did a Mr Universe pose to wind up the Sunderland fans at half-time), inspired Roy Hodgson’s black and white army.

Jimmy Bullard, who can pass in a fashion Haynes might approve of, had an off day. The maestro would probably have been more impressed by Kieran Richardson who struck two sublime free-kicks. The first hit the post three times but somehow never went in. The second soared into the net but was bizarrely disallowed because of some shenanigans in the wall.

As the final whistle sounded, there were a few disgruntled boos from the home fans. As Fulham retired to the dressing room, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they heard the ghost of Johnny Haynes grumbling: “What were you effing up to?”

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Dictators, Scolari and Rio the statesman

2008-10-17T12:00:00Z

Hello, good evening and welcome to our version of That Was The Week That Was. It’s been a great seven days for football dictators, Scolari and the new, statesmanlike Rio Ferdinand.

Football dictatorship of the week

Constitutionally, the republic of Uzbekistan is a democracy, but it regularly features in such top 10 lists as The World’s Most Repressive Societies.

But the regime takes its football seriously and the 1-1 draw with Japan in Tokyo may bump the country back up the FIFA rankings: it currently lies at number 70, just ahead of Zambia and behind Costa Rica.

Uzbekistan’s surprising away point was partly down to Zico, the former Japan national coach who now manages Bunyodkor, one of the richest Uzbeki clubs, where his most famous charge is Rivaldo.

The former World Player Of The Year decided he owed it to himself and his family not to snub a £7m offer to play in Uzbekistan – and was so enthusiastic about his new home he persuaded Zico to join him.

This Brazilian flair came too late to save Bunyodkor’s Asian Champions League campaign; they lost 3-0 to Adelaide United in the semi-final first leg. Still, for a club that’s only three years old, that’s not bad going.

Their ‘secret’ talks to land Eto’o, Puyol and Iniesta didn’t pay off this summer. But they might be luckier when the transfer window reopens.

"'Ere Ron, you heard from this Uzbek bloke?"

The Stans – Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, not to mention Madeupistan (sorry, couldn’t resist the opportunity to pitch in with an old Lee Evans gag) – are on a roll, unlike China which, despite its economic momentum and passion for the beautiful game, remains considerably worse at football than the Brazilians are at table tennis.

Debate of the week

The Gerrard/Lampard boreathon – sorry, debate – is a classic illustration of what scientists call ‘the White Christmas effect’, the tendency which leads many listeners, advised by a DJ that they are about to play White Christmas, hears the song even if it is played at very low volume or not played at all. (The subject is discussed in illuminating detail by Oliver Sacks in his new book Musicophilia – see here.)

The Frank 'n' Steve issue trundles on, in part, because we are predisposed to assess their respective performances in a certain way. I have a slight preference – for Gerrard – but no supreme confidence that I am right.

I remember in the 1970s watching Ken Goodwin, a squat, nippy Nuneaton Borough winger who looked a bit like Kenny Sansom might look if he’d been through the crusher, and turning round to my mate Martin and saying: “He’s having a good game, isn’t he?”

Martin chuckled and pointed out that the game had only kicked off five minutes ago. That seems, to me, to sum up most football analysis – it is as much about what or who we like as it is about lucid, reasoned argument about the game.

Ken Goodwin (artist's impression) (possibly)

Flowers of the week

Roses were laid in Turin this week to mark the 42nd anniversary of the death, in a car crash, of Gigi Meroni, the iconic genius known as La Farfalla Granata (The Purple Butterfly) and the Italian George Best. For flair, hairstyle, and the punishment he took from defenders, Meroni matched Bestie.

He would be much better known but his move to Juve fell through because Gianni Agnelli feared that Torino-supporting Fiat workers would go on strike. Meroni was only 24 when he died; if calcio had a James Dean, it would be Meroni, remembered online here and the object of many homages on YouTube.

Book of the week

Luiz Felipe Scolari: The Man, The Manager by Jose Carlos Freitas (Dewi Lewis Publishing) won't win any prizes for literary style, but I found bits of it illuminating. Freitas has known Scolari well and the most interesting revelations to me were as follows.

i) Roman Abramovich’s shortlist for the Chelsea job was very short indeed: the only names on it were Scolari and Marcello Lippi.  

ii) When the Portuguese FA rang to offer Scolari the coaching job, he initially pretended to be one of his kids because he was fed up of being pestered by PSG.

iii) As Portugal skipper, Fernando Couto was so scary, none of his teammates dared to leave the table without his permission.

Couto: "You. Sit. Now."

Metamorphosis of the week

From the man who gave us Rio’s World Cup Wind-Ups to elder statesman declaring the circus is over, Rio Ferdinand has been acquiring dignity at a frightening rate. Was it all this extra gravitas that slowed him down against Kazakhstan? He was casually strolling back toward the penalty area as Mr Cheryl Cole hoofed England into danger.

Plug of the week

Was at PSV yesterday interviewing Huub Stevens – who, among his other gifts, does a surprisingly good impersonation of Rafa Benitez on the touchline. For more on Huub, read the next Champions, due out on 19 November (providing our fancy new production systems work).

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Norwegian Blue: far from pushing up the daisies

2008-10-07T15:10:00Z

You may be relieved, or disappointed, to discover that Monty Python and the controversial parrot have no place in this blog. The Norwegian Blue in question are Stabaek, surprise leaders of the Norwegian Tippeligaen.

Once chiefly famous for being monopolised by Rosenborg, the Tippeligaen is now as wide open as Dodge City before the gunfight at the OK Corral.

Three different teams – Valerenga, Rosenborg and Brann – have won it in the last three seasons and, with three rounds left, Stabaek are six points clear, poised to win their first league title after 96 years of trying.

If titles were won by popular acclaim, Stabaek would already be champions. They have averaged more than two goals a game, have a goal difference of +30 and played the most entertaining football in Norway.

(It’s probably worth noting here that Egil Olsen’s notorious long ball game does not – and never has – typified the Norwegian club game, which has always been subtler, more technical and strong on the counter-attack.)

Guided by a quiz show host, advertising guru and motivational speaker called Ingebrigt Steen Jensen, Stabaek have risen from fifth-division mediocrity 20 or so years ago.

They first made the top flight in 1995 (and in 1998 won the Norwegian Cup, their first and so far only piece of silverware) but were relegated in 2004.

Under new Swedish coach Jan Jonsson, the Blue’s recovery was aided by the prowess of 34-year-old Swedish striker Daniel Nannskog, whose goals powered them to second in the league in 2007.

Nannskog: The old 'uns are the best 'uns

Nannskog has scored 78 goals in his first 101 games for Stabaek, feeding brilliantly off Icelandic striker Veigar Pall Gunnarson – who, aside from being his partner’s provider in chief, averages a goal every other game.

Nannskog and Gunnarson have had some stellar support from Alanzinho, the Brazilian whose mazy dribbling has perplexed defences, midfielder Johan Andersson and versatile, enterprising 25-year-old centre-back Morton Skjonsberg who will surely soon make his full Norway debut.

Stabaek are based in Baerum, Oslo’s poshest suburb. If they do win the title, the triumph will provide a fitting farewell to the council-owned Nadderud stadium. From 2009, the club will play its games nearby at the new multi-purpose Telenor Arena, which many say will be the most spectacular football stadium in Norway.

There are two ways Stabaek’s dream move could turn into a nightmare. This season is remarkable because Rosenborg, Viking Stavanger, Lyn and Valerenga have all had off years. How often is that likely to happen?

Rosenborg had lost four games out of nine before their new coach, Erik Hamren (who won the Danish title with Aalborg), took over. They have looked steadier since and should seriously challenge next year.

The other risk is that Gunnarson and Alanzinho move on; the Brazilian has just extended his contract, though that’s no guarantee. The Icelandic striker, now 28, is said to be ready for a move.

And Nannskog, at 34, may not have many free-scoring seasons left. Rivals wonder if Stabaek have the strength in depth to cope with the loss of a few of their aces.

Alanzinho: Crazy name, crazy guy

Supporters are looking on the bright side. As the Stabaek Support unofficial fansite says: “Football isn’t just about winning. The most important thing is partying, drinking, smoking, listening to rock and roll, f**king, fighting and watching football. We do this until we’re 90. And then we join the Aldermannsliga, the club for elderly supporters.”

They have no doubt their team will be champions. Even if they stumble, it won’t dent the fans’ belief. As they say on their website: “We could present tons of statistics proving that Stabaek are the best team in Norway in the 21st century, but we will not. Statistics attract nerds and we don’t want nerds around wasting our bandwidth.”

Fair enough. Besides, no matter what the future holds for Stabaek, it’s refreshing to see a team entertain its way to the brink of success.

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Obama’s a Hammer, yo-yo clubs and the best team name ever

2008-10-06T07:00:00Z

Obama’s Hammer blow for McCain...
“The beautiful game is democracy in action and reflects American ideals and values like teamwork and diversity.”

So says the campaign website Soccer Fans For Obama. There is a dearth of posts on the site. There aren’t even any comments from West Ham United fans. Obama was a 10,000-1 shot for the manager’s job at Upton Park and is an Irons fan – according to The Sun – in part because of the enthusiastic advocacy of the Hammers by relatives in Kent.

Obama may be to bowling what Simon Cowell is to modesty but journalists watching him kickabout before one of his daughter’s games reckon he’s got nifty feet. Mind you, in this picture he looks reluctant to give it some welly. Still, John McCain is probably a gridiron man and Sarah Palin’s a hockey mom so maybe, come election day, soccer fans will lump for Obama.

If the election’s tight, could exiled Hammers with a vote swing it?

"We lost 3-1?... at home to Bolton?!"

Italy won a European final this year – and nobody noticed...
It was the kind of result I’d love to hear James Alexander Gordon read out: “Croats in Serbia 0, South Tyrol 1.”

The South Tyrol football team may be full of players who speak German and Ladin (a minor Romance language) but the lads from this northern Italian province know how to keep a clean sheet. That 1-0 win secured Europaeda 2008 – the first ever “soccer tournament for the autochthonous, national minorities in Europe” held this June in Switzerland – for South Tyrol.

Spare a thought for Denmark’s North Frisians, who lost 46-1 to the ‘Roma in Hungary’ and blew their ethnic local derby, getting stomped 19-1 by ‘Germans in Denmark’. With score-lines like that, Setanta should buy the rights for the next Europaeda.

Now that’s what I call a yo-yo club...
Barry Town, Manchester City and Nurnberg share one dire, statistical niche: they have all been relegated the season after winning the title.

City trailblazed this extreme form of football yo-yoing by winning the league in 1931 and going down in 1932 but it is so popular in Scandinavia that the indispensable www.rsssf.com has dubbed this phenomenon Nordic nonsense. Four Swedish clubs, three apiece from Denmark and Norway have all done this. Few relinquished the aura of title-winners as quickly as UDIB in Guinea-Bissau. The reigning champs were relegated after failing to turn up for the first two matches of the 2004 season.

By far the greatest team name...
Five English teams have won the title in their first season after being promoted to the top flight. They are Liverpool (1906), Everton (1932), Spurs (1951), Ipswich (1962) and Nottingham Forest (1978). In Trinidad and Tobago, newly promoted Joe Public won the 2006 title. Joe Public, for me, is by far the best football team name in the world. Ever.

Lausanne-Sports is a more prosaic club name. But the Swiss side have one unique claim to fame: they have won promotion and the championship in the same season.

In 1931/32, the Swiss league system was almost as confusing as the Rubik’s cube. Instead of one top flight, Switzerland had Group A and Group B, both consisting of nine teams. The winners of A and B automatically qualified for a final round while the runners-up played each other to compete in that round. Bizarrely, Lausanne-Sports qualified for the final round as winners of the league below Group A and B. The four then played a traditional group. Lausanne and Zurich, level with four points, played off in a final which Lausanne won 5-2 to become champions.

This gloriously convoluted system didn’t last. By 1933/34, attempts to pioneer football rhomboids and hexagons had been replaced with the safe, dull, but simple pyramid.

Joe Public (Red) in action vs New England Revolution

And finally…
Lionel Messi has been voted the best player in the UEFA Champions League this season by readers of Marca and Gazzetta. The surprise inclusion on the list is Juve’s starlet Giovinco who came eighth. His teammate Alessandro Del Piero came fourth, some feat for a player who has been written off every season since his cruciate knee ligaments were ruined in 1998.

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Smells like team spirit at Bayern

2008-10-03T11:00:00Z

Mumsy Scottish troubadour Lena Martell’s philosophy was “one day at a time, sweet Jesus.”

Football managers officially take one game at a time. Yet after this week’s results, some coaches are privately spinning different scenarios.

Marseille’s Eric Gerets has already revised his team’s target: this season it’s the UEFA Cup. I would bet anyone a fiver that the words ‘squad rotation’ have flashed through Rafa Benitez’s mind. And Cluj manager Maurizio Trombetta wouldn’t be human if some part of him wasn’t fantasising about returning to the Stadio Olimpico next May.

Matchday two has already whittled down the 32 contenders. Aalborg, Bordeaux, Marseille, Panathinaikos and PSV need a miracle to progress. My thoughts on Group A-D are here. Here is how I see Groups E to H.

Group E
Scott McDonald struck the near miss of the season against Villarreal, a wondrous volley from a brilliant lay off from Aiden McGeady that just failed to dip under the bar and earn Celtic the away point their 55 minutes of good play deserved.

The Bhoys away record since 2003 – in the tournament proper – now reads Played 16, W0, D1, Lost 15.

Although Gordon Strachan tried to deny it, this record must weigh on players’ minds. On the road, they have lost to FC Copenhagen, Shakhtar, Benfica (twice) and Artmedia. And against Villarreal, their defensive wall seemed to have forgotten how to jump. The funny thing is I wouldn’t be surprised if they grabbed their next away point at Old Trafford.

Celtic's wall forgets to jump... Senna scores

Villarreal are, for me, the new Liverpool, the team nobody wants to meet in the knockout stages. It is now 11 years since Borussia Dortmund became the last team to win the UEFA Champions League for the first time. Villarreal and Chelsea look the teams most likely to rewrite history this season.

Deeply trivial bonus: the last team Celtic beat away from home in the UEFA Champions League or European Cup proper was Shamrock Rovers in 1986. The Bhoys beat the Irish champions 1-0 in Dublin.

Group F
Sometimes, deciding what’s really going on at a football club is a matter of reading signs. For those who like to notice such things, the joy with which Bayern’s players ran to the touchline to celebrate Ze Roberto’s equaliser with under fire coach Jurgen Klinsmann suggested that, whatever else is wrong with Bayern, it has nothing to do with team spirit.

It might have to do with strikers who can’t score goals. Although Miroslav Klose’s cross made the equaliser, he hasn’t scored from open play in the Bundesliga since March. (And the goal before that was last November!)

Pile on! Nirvana for Bayern as Ze Roberto levels vs Lyon

Luca Toni has scored consistently in the Bundesliga but against Lyon showed the kind of form that undermined Italy’s cause at Euro 2008. The commentators took the view that his desperate lunging, jumping and stretching meant he was destined at some point to score.

To me, it looked more like a striker who had lost the art of timing his runs. Ruud van Nistelrooy’s goal against Zenith was a masterpiece of anticipation. Against Lyon, Toni never looked like he was anticipating the play, or running into space where the ball might fall.

Bayern should have won 2-1 – Klose was denied a certain penalty in the first half – which would have been good for confidence. But Klinsmann, with four points from two games, is in a better place than Claude Puel, Lyon’s new coach, who has two points from two games and needs at least four points from the next two against Steaua who, as they proved against Fiorentina, are no mugs.

Cesare Prandelli’s analysis of his team’s performance was fair. As he admitted, the Viola were so frustrated by Steaua’s ability to keep possession, they often reverted to inaccurate long balls. Fiorentina looked tired and Prandelli will hope that, like most Italian teams, his side becomes sharper as the group stage progresses.

Group G
Lucky, lucky Arsenal. Could they have asked for an easier group?

Fenerbahce are still regrouping after Luis Aragones replaced Zico, Dinamo Kiev’s record on the road is almost as dismal as Celtic’s (in their last nine group games away from home they have drawn two, lost seven and shipped 18 goals) and Porto have defensive frailties which Theo Walcott ruthlessly exposed on Tuesday.

The Arsenal game inspired the best post-match interview of the week. Asked what the 4-0 win said about Arsenal’s ability to win the tournament, Robin van Persie’s reply was succinct, sweet and sensible: “Nothing.”

Walcott runs Porto ragged at the Emirates

Group H
With no points from two games, Zenit St Petersburg are down but not out. Only an Arsenal-style profligacy in front of goal deprived them of victory against Real Madrid.

That was Real’s first win on the road in the tournament since October 2006. But Zenith seem perfectly capable of winning in Madrid and Turin so, for me, this group is still wide open.

BATE look least likely to progress but could still have a huge influence, if they take points off Real or Zenit in Borisov.

Dubious statistical bonus: if BATE striker Gennadi Bliznyuk scores in any game, he will become Belarus’ record goalscorer in UEFA club competitions. He has already scored 10 – seven in Champions League qualifiers – to equal Georgi Kondratyev’s record.

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Minnows 2 Elitists 0

2008-10-02T16:00:00Z

This is where I suck up to Michel Platini, the UEFA president who, indirectly, keeps me in a job.

When he suggested opening up the UEFA Champions League to teams that the British press, with characteristic open mindedness, dubbed “minnows,” there was much dire prognosticating that this utter folly would lead to the kind of 10-0 thrashings not seen in Europe since English teams stopped facing clubs from Luxembourg.

The records of Cluj and BATE, from such unfashionable parts of the football world as Transylvania and Belarus, have exposed this as hollow, misconceived elitism.

Teeny, tiny little Cluj celebrate making light work of Roma

Cluj and BATE have now tested Chelsea, Juve and Roma. And, in Cluj’s case, given the media a welcome cue for a whole host of bite/vampire/teeth related headlines and intros.

To be honest, both sides look more competitive than such established regulars as PSV and Marseille.

You would expect me to say this, as editor of the official UEFA Champions League magazine, but that doesn’t make me wrong. After a fascinating week’s results, here is the first part of my view on the state of the tournament. (Groups E-H will follow Friday. Promise)

Group A
Against the Cheeky Girls’ hometown team, Chelsea had more of everything – possession, corners, shots on target – except goals. In truth, 0-0 wasn’t bad. It could have been worse. Petr Cech rescued Chelsea after the magnificent Alvaro Pereira took advantage late on as Jose Bosingwa fell asleep.

Cluj coach Maurizio Trombetta, appointed this summer, has done a magnificent job. But, even though Cluj are joint top with Chelsea, he insists, “our target is still to finish third.”

Chelsea huff and puff their way to goalless draw in Romania

Bordeaux, pointless after two games, may miss out on the last 16 after the Beast – Julio Baptista – inspired Roma to comeback and win 3-1 in France.

Totti hopes to be fit for the upcoming double header against Chelsea which, judging by the thickness of his knee brace, Drogba seems unlikely to be. The nightmare scenario for the two group favourites is that Cluj do the double over Bordeaux and have 10 points after four games.

Note for stattos: this was the first time Chelsea haven’t scored under Scolari.

Group B
It hasn’t taken long. This Tuesday, Gazzetta dello Sport was asking whether Mancini’s Inter were better than Mourinho’s. And as Inter drew 1-1 with Werder, the first angry whistles from home fans resounded around the half empty San Siro.

But Inter still look favourites in Group B. They can almost bank on three points at home to Panathinaikos and face Anorthosis at the San Siro next.

The bigger question is what shape Inter will be in as the knockout stage starts. As Roy Hodgson suggested on Sky Sports, it is possible that Mourinho still doesn’t know his best XI.

Decisions, decisions

The three strikers – Ibrahimovic, Adriano and Balotelli – looked less fluent against Werder, over 90 minutes, than the more traditional 4-3-3 (with the Swede as lone striker, supported from the flanks) deployed in Athens.

Still, it was good to see Adriano, in flashes, looking more like a genius and much less like the Mr Blobby who was so immobile at the 2006 World Cup.

Only Anorthosis and Werder can seriously hope to qualify alongside Inter. On matchday five, Bremen travel to Nicosia for a match that could decide the issue. Form and pedigree favour the Germans but Anorthosis have now drawn or beaten Anderlecht, Hertha Berlin, Olympiakos and Spurs at home.

Group C
Being outplayed by Shakhtar Donetsk for 88 minutes, yet snatching victory through the brilliance of Lionel Messi will not convince Pep Guardiola’s critics his Barcelona are improving. Still, six points from two matches puts Barca in pole position and it’s hard to see them failing to make the last 16.

Messi to the rescue as late brace buries Shakhtar

Who joins them could become clear after the Sporting-Shakhtar double header. These ties will be intriguing tactical contests. Paulo Bento’s men often make opponents struggle by dictating the pace and will look to slow the game to suffocate Shakhtar before going on the offensive.

Although Shakhtar coach Mircea Lucescu fumed about Barcelona’s gamesmanship, his real concern must be Shakhtar’s propensity to ship late goals.

This week’s disappointment reminded many fans of their exit to Sevilla in the 2006/07 UEFA Cup. Leading 2-1 in the fourth minute of added time, they heroically contrived to lose 3-2 in Donetsk.

Group D
Believe the hype. Sergio Aguero probably is the best striker in the world right now. His goal against Marseille showed speed of thought, technique, determination, focus, a low centre of gravity and predatory instincts.

Although Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez insists it’s still all to play for, this already looks like a two horse race between Fernando Torres’ old team and his current team.

Aguero on target again as Atletico steer past Marseille

After Aguero, the best player at the Calderon was Mamadou Niang. 29 this month, the Senegalese striker has scored goals in industrial quantities in the last year: 18 in 29 Ligue 1 games – and four in 10 European matches – in 2007/08.

He already has three in four European games in 2008/09. Niang paired well up front with Danijel Lluboja and Mickael Pagis at Strasbourg and, if the goals keep coming, could be worth £15m next summer.

At Anfield, the player I was most intrigued by was PSV’s Nordin Amrabat. Only 21, he normally plays on the wing but looked lively, cheeky and talented given the thankless task of playing alone up front in a transitional PSV side that, at times, played five at the back.

Note for stattos: Gerrard’s 100th goal for Liverpool was also the Reds’ 100th goal in the Champions League.

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Cowards, loony Toons and lucky Luciano

2008-09-26T10:00:00Z

I didn’t realise how bad Newcastle United’s crisis was until I read that the club had asked Keith Harris to smooth its sale.

Were billionaires in the Middle East/India/Nigeria going to be impressed by a man brandishing a green duckling wearing nothing but a nappy and a safety pin?

Reading on I soon realised this was another Keith Harris altogether but Newcastle couldn’t be in any greater disarray if a ventriloquist – or an excruciating little duck called Orville – was running the show.

"I think we'll go 3-1-6 this week with Nicky Butt in goal..."

In the media, every story produces an equal and opposite reaction. So the backlash against all the stories about how rubbish Mike Ashley is saw some papers blame the fans.

Apparently, their hysterical attitude, their absurdly inflated expectations and their delusion that Newcastle United are a “big club” is at the root of the present crisis.

For most Newcastle supporters, their absurdly inflated expectations boil down to this:
1) They’d like the team to play some decent football
2) They’d like to win a trophy occasionally.

If you’re paying £935 for a season ticket, it doesn’t sound too much to ask, does it?

Newcastle United hog so many column inches it seems spurious to comment further. But surely even Ashley and his advisors must realise that each passing week of relegation form shaves another few million off the asking price?

Lucky Luciano?

Roma coach Luciano Spalletti had to jump over the fence at the training ground the other day to escape irate fans, disgusted by defeat to Cluj.

The reaction may seem extreme, but the loss doesn’t leave Spalletti much margin for error in UEFA Champions League Group A. If they beat Chelsea home and away, they can win a maximum of 15 points.

But if they lose and draw or lose both, they could end up with 12 or 9. In other words, Roma need to do the double over Bordeaux and beat Cluj away to keep their fate in their own hands. If Chelsea hoover up all 18 points, nine could be enough for Spalletti’s stylish team.

"What! We have to beat Bordeaux twice?"

In Group C, Shakhtar have a different problem. Their away victory to Basel was far more convincing than the 2-1 scoreline suggests – coach Mircea Lucescu slammed his players afterwards for showboating – but they have won as many games in the Champions League as they have in their first eight games in the Ukrainian league.

Shakhtar’s five Brazilian stars are accused of only being motivated by Champions League games. There is even talk of Lucescu, who has won three titles in four years, losing his job.

Which would be ironic because, in a reasonably open group, they probably have their best chance of qualifying for the last 16 for the first time. To make certain, they need to beat Basel and Sporting at home and hope that Barcelona walk away with the group.

Punches and tea jugs

The death of Jimmy Sirrel, 86, the legendary Notts County manager, reminds me of my favourite football psychology anecdote.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, County relied on Newcastle-born striker Trevor Christie for goals. When Christie hit a barren streak, coach Howard Wilkinson insisted on using his subtle psychological wiles on the player. None worked and general manager Sirrel insisted, finally, he was going to sort this his way.

Curious to see how the legendary Scot would handle the issue, Wilkinson followed him into the dressing room. Sirrel walked up to Christie, punched him in the stomach and said: “Big man, you’re an effing coward.”

That afternoon Christie scored twice.

Jimmy Sirrel 1922-2008

His players regarded Sirrel with a mixture of fear, affection and awe. As Les Bradd, County’s record goalscorer told The Times, “We certainly feared him on matchdays, particularly when he was throwing jugs of tea at us.”

Sirrel’s glory days are fondly remembered here with an interview on Left Lion that proves what an entertaining, unpretentious bloke Sirrel was. I especially like his observation that Cloughie “could be a bit bombastic about his football.”

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Inter, Chelsea and the third incarnation of Jose Mourinho

2008-09-17T13:30:00Z

The rehabilitation of Jose Mourinho, the world’s most charismatic coach, took a giant step forward in Athens on Tuesday night.

Inter’s efficient 2-0 win over Panathinaikos was exactly the kind of result the Nerazzurri so seldom produced in Europe under Roberto Mancini. With only one game played – and their other rivals drawing in Bremen – Inter already look odds on to win the group.

Bookies have Inter as fourth favourites to win the Champions League. Those odds owe more to Mourinho’s reputation than Inter’s recent European form, which has varied from barely competent to terminally mediocre.

So why do I say rehabilitation? Because this season could define Mourinho’s career.

He is loved and loathed by the public, and adored by the media for his ability to give good soundbite, but the audience he really needs to impress is that small elite – there may be no more than 50 of them – of presidents, tycoons and billionaires who can afford to hire Mourinho and who run the clubs with a realistic shot at winning the trophies he craves.

"Who, little old me?"

His exit from Chelsea enraged and disappointed fans. But chairmen and presidents, while making allowances for the Byzantine intrigue at the court of Roman Abramovich, instinctively sympathised with the Chelsea owner.

If his Inter mission ends with similar fireworks, Mourinho will find his next job that much harder to come by. He's still only 45, too young to settle for a seven-figure salary coaching in the Middle East.

So the Mourinho we see at Inter is a third incarnation of the coach. At Porto, he was a miracle worker, conquering Europe through team spirit, tactical ingenuity, meticulous preparation and a touch of gamesmanship.

At Chelsea, that team spirit, ingenuity and meticulousness was backed by Abramovich’s millions as Mourinho proved, for a season or more, that he could build the same esprit de corps among a squad of superstars and focus ruthlessly on winning.

At Inter, with a squad that hasn’t changed much, he is trying to prove his coaching alone can make the difference and that he can win in style.

What hasn’t changed is the way Mourinho sets out his team. Against Panathinaikos, Zlatan Ibrahimovic excelled in the classic centre-forward role that made Didier Drogba famous at Chelsea.

"You the man!" "No, you the man!" "Yes, I am, actually"

Ibrahimovic is better and worse than Drogba. Better because he can, like Messi, destroy an opponent with the ball at his feet. Worse because he has yet to achieve the kind of consistency Drogba showed when he banged in 26 goals in 2006/07.

Ibra can be brilliant or awful. But brilliance is gaining the upper hand. Last season he scored 22 in 33 matches, including five in seven Champions League games, although he was inconspicuous as the Nerazzurri were outfought and outplayed by Liverpool.

The hug between the Swede and Mourinho after the star had made Adriano’s goal in Athens suggested that coach and Inter’s reigning enigma have already bonded. So maybe this season we will finally see the great Zlatan.

Supporting the Swede in Athens were Ricardo Quaresma and Mancini, switching flanks. Ibrahimovic made both goals: he created the first with Drogbaesque persistence and, with a selflessness Drogba has not always exhibited, passed perfectly for Mancini to finish first time.

His through pass for Adriano to seal the win was even better. The rejuvenated Brazilian was able to blast the ball into the net first time without even changing his stride.

In midfield, Javier Zanetti and Patrick Vieira had licence to roam while Esteban Cambiasso swept up efficiently in front of the back four. Much of the time, the centre-backs Ivan Cordoba and Marco Materazzi and left-back Maxwell were asked to defend Julio Cesar’s goal while right-back Maicon bombed forward.

Brazil nuts: Maicon (left) and Mancini make merry

Lawrie McMenemy once said that every great team contains four violinists and seven roadsweepers. Mourinho’s Inter roughly fits that mould, with Ibrahimovic, Mancini and Quaresma as violinists, the fiendishly versatile Cambiasso and Maicon able to sweep up and play the fiddle, and the other six firmly focused on roads and brushes.

Are they good enough to win the competition? Possibly. Inter should get better as injuries ease and players get to know Mourinho’s approach. They do not have the awesome efficiency of his Chelsea side, but they are genuinely entertaining – Quaresma, Mancini and Sulley Muntari have injected some much-needed pace into a team that could be too deliberate in attack.

And against Panathinaikos, they showed much of the stubborness that defines Mourinho’s teams, something which Nerazzurri fans have been desperately hoping to see in Europe.

So the special one is most definitely back. And if he wins Inter’s first European Cup in 44 years he will, as Bobby Robson once said of Neil Webb, be “special special”.

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Suburban euphoria greets England triumph

2008-09-12T09:00:00Z

When Wayne Rooney slotted home England’s third, even the cynics in the pub started to believe that England would earn at least a draw.

At half-time, with England 1-0 up courtesy of the Stanmore Pelé, someone had started up a chant of “We’re on the way with Fabio Capello’s army” but stopped after that line, mumbling: “It doesn’t quite scan does it?” When the Stanmore Pelé got his hat-trick, no one sang, they just roared with joy, relief and disbelief.

3-0. Phew, we'll get at least a draw out of this now...

The evening had started unpromisingly with The Times declaring “England captain John Terry fully alert before Croatia clash.” Obviously, it was nice to be assured that the skipper wasn’t comatose but somehow the revelation didn’t engender the kind of optimism I needed to watch the Three Lions.

Things went from bad to badder with the revelation that Virgin Media’s TV service was down in the Shepperton area so I would not, after all, be watching it from my worn brown leather sofa.

Against my better judgement, I was forced to watch it in a pub and drink Kronenbourg.

I know you’re thinking, he protests too much. But last time I watched an international in a pub, I was obliged to make conversation with a drunken Scotsman who kept calling me “John!” and the last time I watched England in a pub we drew with Switzerland 1-1 in the opening match of Euro 96 and the disappointment went straight to my liver.

It took a whole day of washing up to restore domestic harmony.

But I bought a pint and chose a table. Setanta was doing its level best to entertain us with insightful analysis.

“What do you think Fabio Capello said to them in the dressing room?” Chris Waddle was asked. “Stand up and be counted,” said Waddle. I briefly imagined the players being told to stand up so they could be counted, like troublesome pupils on a school awayday or like soldiers in the Falklands counted in and out by BBC reporter Brian Hanrahan.

The counting must have gone well because, to my relief, there were 11 England players on the pitch when they kicked off.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm England

Waddle was at his magnificent mumbling best and, in the crowded bar, I could only make out random words like “quality,” “problem,” “Heskey” and “temperament.”

When David James got his first touch, I was dismayed to see he had shorn his locks. I have no statistical or scientific evidence for this, but in my gut I am convinced that, if you’re a Croatian striker bursting through on goal, you are much more likely to be put off by the sight of a goalie sporting the most outrageous blaxploitation haircut since Richard Roundtree stopped playing Shaft.

It’s one thing to have a keeper who fills the goal, but a keeper whose hair fills the goal is surely even better.

Inspiring as the action was, the cameramen felt obliged to pan around the stadium to show us such treats as Fulham’s Jimmy ‘Bullardinho’ modelling a hairstyle that was thoroughly Macca (McManaman not McCartney) and Bernie Ecclestone, sitting next to his partner who looked like Cruella da Vil’s grandmother.

Bernie seemed immune to the general euphoria but then, as the man who owns Formula 1, he’s probably not used to registering excitement at sporting events.

At one point, England had 86% possession, a dominance which so frustrated the Croatians they eschewed their silky counter-attacking game and adopted tactical plan B: kicking lumps out of people.

This strategy hasn’t really worked for anyone but Andorra – who are secretly allowed a quota of bad fouls per game by officials on the grounds that they aren’t footballers but plumbers, postmen and physiotherapists – where the system is quasi-officially known as The Ruffle, after the intended effect on the opposition.

When Croatian defender Robert Kovac was sent off, there was a brief chorus of “Goodbye-ee, goodbye-ee!”. There’s something about England’s football team that seems to evoke world wars. When Croatia snatched a consolation to make it 3-1, one of the wags by the bar did a Corporal Jones and started shouting “Don’t panic! Don’t panic!”

Croatia's old guard take 'getting stuck in' too far

Then the Stanmore Pelé struck again, shortly before getting a congratulatory smile and handshake from David Beckham who came on for six minutes.

Of course, we mustn’t get carried away, we must take each game as it comes (the alternative – taking games in batches of six – would be confusing for fans, players and media) and it was only one night.

But, as Frankie Vialli said in that suspiciously high-pitched voice of his, oh what a night.

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Borges, Borring and Billy the Fish

2008-09-10T07:00:00Z

European football in 12 paragraphs...

Ironic slogan of the week

Newcastle United’s invitation on its homepage: “YOU could be Newcastle’s best signing of the season.” Although, wait zenaba minute, that’s not ironic, it’s true. Anyone of us could be… even Fulchester United’s keeper Billy The Fish.

World Cup shock of the week

Romania 0-3 Lithuania in Bucharest. Austria’s 3-1 triumph over a discontented, disorganised France, courtesy of a couple of Philippe Mexes errors, isn’t on the same Richter scale as Lithuania’s triumph.

Lithuania upset the odds in Romania

Jorge Luis Borges inspired headline of the week

“Toon battle with Spurs over Poyet”. This is the football equivalent of the Argentine fabulist’s famous characterisation of the Falklands War: “Two bald men fighting over a comb.” And, like so many of these headlines, it has since been denied by the interested.

Most predictable headline

Kaka: “I never want to leave Milan.” Can’t Manchester City, Chelsea, Doncaster Rovers et al just leave him alone? The poor lad has said this every day – or something similar – for the last year. Think of the wasted carbon footprint involved in just running a story in which the only significant change is the name of the spurned club.

Maxim of the week

“Under normal circumstances, anyone buying a football club will end up looking an idiot within a year.” Hats off to The Times' Simon Barnes for this one. You can read his deliciously entertaining rant here.

Green shoot of recovery

For the first time in 10 years Belgium have opened their qualifying campaign for a major tournament with a win. Okay, the Red Devils did only beat Estonia (ranked 121st by FIFA) 2-1 but it was enough to have coach Rene Vandereycken crowing: “This is the best squad I have worked with so far.” Damned with faint praise? Perhaps. But Belgium do, as uefa.com point out here have some decent young players emerging. So promising are these youngsters that a bunch of legends like Paul Van Himst and co have rallied behind them with a “We believe” campaign. Maybe Banks, Hurst and Charlton (Jack or Bobby) could do something similar for the Young Lions of 2008?

Borring but important

The thumb-sucking one’s arrival at Manchester City dominated Britain’s back pages but in Denmark a 23-year-old midfielder called Jonas Borring has just left OB to join Midtylland for what is said to be the largest ever fee paid by one Superliga club to another. It has been one hell of a summer for Borring who starred as his new club gave Manchester City a scare in the UEFA Cup and was called up to the Danish national team for the first time. Definitely one to watch.

Jonas Borring? Not in the slightest

Football legend in need of a new business card

Dennis Wise. Needs to hand in cards that read “director (football) Newcastle United” and order new ones that read: “director (shambles) Newcastle United”.

The sack race

So far, Stefano Colantuono (Palermo), Kevin Keegan (Newcastle), Alan Curbishley (West Ham United), Oleh Protsavov (Dnipro Dnipropetrosvk), Zdenek Zeman (Red Star Belgrade), Itzak Shum (Beitar Jerusalem), Michael Der Zakarian (Nantes) and Ioan Andone (the coach who led Cluj to their first ever UEFA Champions League campaign) have all lost their jobs, either being fired, replaced or leaving on principle.

Season’s greetings

From Albania, where after 45 minutes on the opening day of the season, the score in all six matches was 0-0. Luckily Shkumbini Peqin ran amok in the second half of their game and beat minnows Bylis Ballshi 4-1.

Manchester United crisis!

But only, alas, in Gibraltar where the Red Devils’ less illustrious namesakes finished fifth – and bottom – in the First Division.

Prophetic book title

Kevin Keegan Against The World, co-written by Mike Langley (published in 1979).

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Why are footballers so unfit?

2008-09-04T14:00:00Z

Or, if Roger Federer can stay in good shape for Wimbledon every year, why are so many top footballers missing crucial games because of torn adductor muscles, torn cruciate ligaments or mumps?

Or, to put it another way, why haven’t the hordes of sports scientists, nutritionists, fitness gurus, osteopaths and physiotherapists that advise the big clubs, dramatically reduced the level of injuries?

In 2002, a UEFA study suggests 29% of the players in Japan/Korea incurred injuries. Others, like Beckham, were struggling for match fitness before the finals started.

To take one extreme: a top flight English footballer in the 1980s was notorious for his 39-pint weekends, consumed in three major binges: Saturday night, Sunday lunchtime and Sunday night. As a result, he often missed Monday training and, making up for lost time on Tuesday, often pulled a muscle or three.

Today that footballer would simply not be able to function. Yet the revolution in diet and fitness that has swept across English football has not made his successors much more robust. They may, in fact, be the unfittest professional athletes on the planet.

If any club has come to epitomise the scientific approach to football in England, it is Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal.

We don’t read about the Wenger revolution quite as often as we used to but as this extract from Jasper Rees’s biography of The Professor shows the shift from egg and chips to pasta and steamed veg was just one of a host of initiatives which, for a while, transformed the fitness of the Arsenal squad.

Wenger even introduced something called plyometrics, a muscle strengthening process with a truly excruciating name. Yet last season the club suffered 60 injuries, five more than the average suffered by clubs in a UEFA study.

I’m not having a pop at Arsenal in particular. But just as the end of the Cold War was supposed to yield a peace dividend, I’m sure clubs investing in the regimes described above expected a dividend in terms of player fitness. So where is it?

A UEFA study suggests that a player will typically suffer two minor injuries every season and a major injury every three years. And it offers scant comfort for English clubs.

A Ligue 1 team suffers 16 injuries every 1,000 hours of play. A Premier League team will suffer 44 injuries per 1,000 hours. Which, even my dodgy Grade B GCSE Maths tells me, means that injuries at English clubs are very nearly three times as common among English teams as in France.

Some will argue that the crowded fixture list has cancelled out any gains from better diets and smarter fitness regimes. That might actually be true in Arsenal’s case: they had a young, small squad of 24 players in 2007/08 and, as Stefan Vasiliev has noted, five of those weren’t the finished article in terms of first-team football.

But most squads have grown and squad rotation is a fact of life, whereas, in 1965/66, Liverpool won the league using just 14 players.

The game is much faster than it was. That’s true. But does that really wipe out every benefit to be had from not drinking 39 pints a weekend, not eating steak and chips before a meal or, in the extreme case of Chelsea’s legendary keeper William ‘Fatty’ Foulkes, not eating all your team’s fried breakfasts?

I have read, 1000 times, that English football has experienced a scientific revolution. And, so far, the revolution hasn’t delivered. Indeed, I read the other day that drummers are now fitter than footballers.

So instead of buying books like Eat To Win, maybe coaches should be looking for that unlikeliest of volumes, Drugs, Cymbals And Booze: The Keith Moon Guide To Transforming Your Performance.

Zizou, Zenit and Zzzmiley faces

2008-09-02T07:00:00Z

I was at a party with Zinedine Zidane last week.

Granted, Zizou never knew I was in the same room as him – a brush past on the way out was the closest we came to actual contact – but I am still so sad that my pulse raced as he walked past.

Zidane was one of the guests at the party UEFA throws in Monaco to kick off the European club football season. He wasn’t the only star on hand.

"I think it was number five what did it..."

At one point, Eusebio, Michel Platini, Prince Albert and Eusebio were all in a huddle, with His Serene Highness locked in a lengthy conversation with UEFA technical director Andy Roxburgh. Perhaps Albert, who plays at left-back for his own team, was getting a few tips on the art of defending.

The serious business – the draw for the 2008/09 UEFA Champions League group stages – had been done and dusted by then. My favourite part of the event isn’t the ceremony but the post-draw edition of La Gazzetta dello Sport. The Italian pink’ un has a charming tradition of summing up the fate of Serie A teams with an array of smiley faces.

So on Friday, its verdict was as follows: smiley faces for Inter and Roma, a face stuck in the kind of grim, neutral mode which was Blakey’s habitual expression in On The Buses for Fiorentina and a miserable frown for Juventus, trapped in a group with Real, Zenit and Belarus champions Bate Borisov.

Smiley faces for Inter & Roma, but not for Juve or Fiorentina

Gazzetta might have felt obliged to add a few teardrops if they had delivered their verdict after the Super Cup. Zenit were simply majestic against Manchester United, their passing, running off the ball, and mastery of angles suggesting that it would not be entirely daft to have a flutter on them to emulate Porto and win the UEFA Cup and UEFA Champions League in successive seasons.

The only weakness visible on the night was a certain uncertainty at the back when handling set-pieces. Their surprise Portuguese signing Danny looked a revelation, with a remarkable solo goal.

Inside the Stade Louis II, Zenit fans outnumbered United fans by upwards of five to one. To the supporters in blue and white, the result seemed as much of a triumph for their country as for their club.

Zenit: Worth a flutter to repeat Porto's 'UEFA Double'

Victory was greeted by loud, repetitive chants of “Ra-si-ya!” a powerful reminder of the rising tide of nationalistic confidence that is sweeping across Russia. It is hard to imagine United fans chanting ‘Ing-er-lund!' with as much passion if they had won.

Smiley faces in England – but not in France

In the spirit of Gazzetta, Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United should all have had smiley faces.

Barring upsets or a sudden loss of form, all three look well set for the last 16. Liverpool might have had a Blakey neutral face. On paper, the Reds should – if they play better than they did against Standard Liege – beat PSV and Marseille but Atletico Madrid, with Aguero and Forlan upfront, are a wild card. Anyone who takes a point off them on their own turf will be doing well.

Atletico: Should prove a tough nut to crack on home soil

French football wore a miserable frown as Bordeaux have to overcome Chelsea and Roma to progress, Marseille don’t have it easy and Lyon have to slug it out with Bayern, Steaua and Fiorentina in a group that looks too even to call.

Lyon chairman Jean-Michel Aulas has signalled that this season will be ‘Operation Champions League.’ But Lyon’s campaign to reach the semi-finals (as a bare minimum) isn’t off to the best of starts.

The smiliest face must belong to Barcelona.

Pep Guardiola couldn’t have asked for a better draw with Shakhtar Donetsk and Sporting Lisbon the only real threats to their progress.

Every year, in the Champions preview of the tournament – out on September 12 at most good newsagents! – we tip Murcea Lucescu’s Shakhtar as an outside tip to win or reach the semis but somehow they never make it that far.

This year we’re not tipping them at all so, football predictions being a perverse business, they’ll probably do it this time.

La decima!

Real Madrid have been dreaming of a 10th European Cup – la decima – since they beat Bayer Leverkusen in 2002.

They haven’t really come close since 2003 but this year, as Iker Casillas says in the next issue of Champions, they are more determined than ever. The possible loss of Robinho and the failure to land Cristiano Ronaldo have not dampened their resolve.

They have a chance to wreak vengeance on Juve, who destroyed them in the 2003 semi-final, in a match Zidane referred to rather eloquently as “the derby of my heart.”

Real's last Champions League triumph, in 2002

Real won’t be many people’s favourites but it would be good for the tournament, European football and the Premier League if the game’s traditional empires – Real, Inter, Bayern – struck back. Although you shouldn’t read too much into the Super Cup, maybe Zenit showed them how it might be done.

The editor’s punt

Here’s my guess at the last 16: Chelsea, Roma, Inter, Werder Bremen, Barcelona, Sporting, Liverpool, Atletico, Manchester United, Villarreal, Bayern, Lyon, Arsenal, Fenerbahce, Real and Zenit.

And the winner will be… one of them. An Inter vs Chelsea final would have some intriguing sub-plots. In the hackdom of European football, Villarreal are tipped by many as a likely surprise package. But can they do a Porto in 2004?

Why did George Soros very nearly buy Roma?

2008-08-27T14:00:00Z

The legendary speculator, philanthropist and pontificator came close to buying the Serie A club this summer just before its president Franco Sensi died after a long illness.

Though he was briefly linked with the Washington Nationals baseball team, Soros has shown no great interest in sport in general or football in particular. He is not the only American tycoon to mull an investment in Serie A: another group, TAG Partners, bid for Bologna but the takeover collapsed after the buyers were refused more time.

Soros is a know it all, but no one – even right-wing Americans whose eyes pop with fury at the mention of his name – ever thought him stupid. So, what did he see in Roma?

The answer to that question – as far as we can construct one – isn’t terribly good news for the Premier League.

Smart investors have the gift of timing, knowing when to get in ahead of the game and, more importantly, when to get out.

Soros: Targeting Italy bad news for the Premier League

If Soros was tempted by football as an investment, the obvious target would have been England, home to the world’s most lucrative league which draws the greatest global TV audience.

But who would he buy? As Kevin Keegan has pointed out, to his owner’s chagrin, catching up with the big four might cost you £100million or so. Even within the big four, a divide is opening up with Liverpool seemingly unable, albeit partly because of internal politics, to match the spending power of Chelsea and Manchester United.

There is still profit to be made in the Premier League but how much scope is there for someone like Soros to come in and transform a club’s profitability?

The answer to that may depend on your opinion of the quality of the management of British football clubs. From personal experience, I would suggest the quality is variable.

At its very worst, I am reminded of a colleague who met the director of a once high flying club to talk about a publication to be given away to reward season ticket holders’ loyalty. The deal seemed done when the club rang up to announce that, while they were perfectly happy to pay the publisher a few grand to produce the publication, they would be invoicing him £50,000 for use of the club brand.

Struck by the absurdity of the club charging him £50,000 for the right to do something for the club which the club wanted to do anyway to impress its supporters, my friend let the deal die. I remember him saying: “The worst part wasn’t the hassle, or the waste of time, it was that the director sat through the whole of the crucial meeting with his flies wide open.”

In contrast, the big clubs – with certain exceptions – strike me as well run businesses. An investor with experience of sports elsewhere might suggest a tweak here or there but they are hardly likely to transform a club’s financial performance.

In a way, the Premier League’s 39th step is a desperate admission that new sources of income must be found. The rise in gate receipts is flattening out, merchandising is vulnerable to the credit crunch and the next TV deal, despite the war between Sky and Setanta, may not deliver lots and lots of extra dosh. And this season, more Premier League clubs will, a recent survey suggested, draw on more of their overdrafts, trim squads and introduce players to the delights of performance-related pay.

So Soros has a point. If I had a few billion to spare I’d give the Premier League the swerve and look at a country which has yet to realise the fortunes to be made from corporate boxes and the world’s apparently insatiable appetite for football-themed duvet covers.

Serie A yet to be engulfed by hospitality, unlike Wembley

A country which is passionate about its football but where innovative, professional management could quickly increase revenue. And given the legal difficulties in buying clubs in France and Germany, the logical choice would be Italy or Spain. Mainly Italy really.

To give you just one example: according to a report prepared by Brand Finance and published – free plug alert! – in the April/May issue of Champions, Schalke, Lyon and Spurs all make considerably more money out of merchandising than Milan, Inter or Juventus.

It wouldn’t take a genius to turn a top Serie A club into a financial powerhouse. They’d just need a knowledge of Italy’s intricate business landscape and the smarts to apply best practice.

So don’t be surprised if Soros – or someone like him – snaps up a Roma or Bologna in the next few years.

If that happens, remember where you read this. If it doesn’t happen, feel free to forget all about it.

The good, the bad and the Eredivisie

2008-08-21T13:00:00Z

How bad is the Dutch league?

It’s a question various punters and thinkers have been mooching over in cyberspace’s most cavernous recesses.

The evidence that the Eredivisie is as dire as Police Academy 4: Citizens On Patrol is so scanty that even James Woods’ superheroic prosecutor Shark would struggle to persuade a jury.

In essence, it rests on two premises:

1. Many Eredivisie teams are so rubbish Ajax and PSV can run up cricket scores against them.

2. Because of this, Ajax and PSV, accustomed to playing only a handful of truly competitive games a season, stumble in Europe. PSV’s glorious run to the 2005 UEFA Champions League semi-finals already seems to belong to a bygone era. That’s one problem with football today. The hype is so unremitting that time – especially remembered time – is being accelerated.

Last gasp Ambrosini header sends Milan, not PSV, into CL final

The first point is actually true and should be borne in mind by any scout inclined to recommend the expensive purchase of an Eredivisie striker. Okay, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Romario and Ronaldo all came good, but there is always the risk that you’re buying the new Mateja Kezman.

In 10 out of 17 league home games last season, Ajax scored four or more goals. In four of those matches in the Amsterdam Arena, they put five or six past their hapless opponents. They weren’t as consistently free-scoring on the road but they made up for that by humbling De Graafschap 8-1.

That wasn’t even the widest margin of victory: Heerenveen beat Heracles 9-0 last October with Afonso Alves scoring seven. Alves has since moved to Middlesbrough where he has proved especially prolific against teams from Manchester. If the Brazilian striker played United and City week in week out - on last season’s form - he’d average 95 goals a season.

The goalscoring madness didn’t even end there. Heerenveen also beat Vitesse 7-0. Utrecht scored seven (against Sparta Rotterdam), while Feyenoord, Sparta Rotterdam and Willem II bagged six in a game and Groningen, Heracles, NEC, PSV and Roda all ran up five goals in a match.

Alves spanks home another for Heerenveen

The second point is also true. Ajax didn’t even make it to the qualifying rounds of the 2008/09 UEFA Champions League (knocked out by FC Twente before Macca arrived with his imperfect Dutch accent) while PSV have, post-Hiddink, done well if they reach the last eight.

But you know what? I don’t care. Stuff the purists.

In my sadder days, the highlight of my weekend was the Sunday afternoon massacre when, live on Sky Sports (as it was then), Rangers or Celtic would thoroughly demolish a minnow from the SPL.

And this season I’ll be tuning in, whenever the conclusion of successful domestic diplomatic negotiations over TV access allows, to watch Marco van Basten’s Ajax in the fervent hope they play more like the brilliant Oranje of the Euro 2008 group stages than the dismal Oranje of the 2006 World Cup.

Van Basten: Hoping to bring the good times back to Ajax

Ajax averaged a mere 2.76 goals a game last season. At home, that average soared to 3.35.

Which, to me, is kind of the point. Every year, Richard Keys and his army of cohorts bill the Premier League as the best in the world. But wouldn’t life be more enjoyable if England had the most entertaining league in the world.

In Europe, it’s hard to beat the Eredivisie (although the Bundesliga runs it close) for sheer fun. Ligue 1, where often nothing happens in the first 20 minutes of a game (and by nothing I mean no shots, no corners, no discernible attempts to score a goal) should pay heed.

“Give the people something to enjoy” was Sir Matt Busby’s motto.

In a game increasingly vexed by stupid, megalomaniacal tycoons, hysterical tabloid exclusives and the economic imperative to win, Busby’s maxim may be the game’s best hope of avoiding death by hype.