TOP 100 SOCCER SITES
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| Sir Alex Ferguson: United respect managers more than City Manchester United manager says his club will always treat managers with more respect than City. telegraph.co.uk |
Madrid blanked in Copa del Rey Second-division Recreativo Huelva beat 10-man Atletico Madrid 3-0 in the Copa del Rey fifth round on Wednesdaywhile third-division Alcorcon kept its cup run alive, despite losing 3-2 to Racing Santander. cbc.ca |
AC Milan trounces Juventus Ronaldinho scored twice after Alessandro Nesta gave AC Milan the lead in a 3-0 win over Juventus on Sunday that put their side in control of second place in Serie A. cbc.ca |
Can Trevor Brooking kill the long ball? For the FA, this is not a history that can be kicked into touch and replaced with teaching five-year-olds how to juggle a grapeThis week Trevor Brooking announced that the FA's academy of the teenaged backheel at Burton-on-Trent is a step closer to opening its doors. In the process he also took the chance to air an FA-approved version of English football's great neck-flushing un-Gok-Wan-able source of personal shame, declaring that: "The long-ball game has got to become a thing of the past."We've heard a lot of this from Sir Trevor, who, in office, has turned out to be a fretful, wincing man who looks like he sometimes mutters to himself in private and makes a frustrated "gnnnnyhng" noise and swats the stapler off his desk before going to brood in his special brown orthopaedic chair and listen to Fabio laughing next door.Brooking's gripe is a regurgitation of English football's central anxiety: fear of the hoof. There is by now an accepted history of how we got here. For its first hundred years English football remained complacently the same, a bog-soaked medicine-ball-wallop played by vitamin-deficient men who died young, often by falling into a loom. Meanwhile, abroad the game "evolved", notably in Hungary and Austria where banished Englishman Jimmy Hogan invented being able to control the ball properly. In 1953 England were spanked by Hungary at Wembley, causing a big realisation. Something had to be done. But what?Fuddled, the FA brought in hair-oiled bogeyman Charles Reep, who had a book with statistics that proved the long ball was the answer: our balsa-wood and string solution to a half-century of sullen decline. So under Charles Hughes, reviled coaching guru of the 1970s, the FA went on to teach the very long ball Brooking now impugns.I've got Hughes's coaching textbook. You'd expect it to be full of bilious incantations about moustachioed men with accents you can't place. But it's actually earnest and likeable, written with a kindly tracksuited intensity. It's even got – hang on – Trevor Brooking in it! There he is, the filthy collaborator: actually teaching people, with photos, how to hoof the ball long (I refer Sir Trevor to page 53, figure 6d: "The ball is delivered into space in the right full‑back position to Brooking").But let's not gloat. Trevor's own presence at the heart of what he seeks to condemn illustrates the inescapable circularity in our shared long-ball heritage. This is not a history that can be simply dropped and replaced with teaching five-year-olds how to juggle a grape. The fact is we find the long ball stirring. We seek it out, ancestrally and instinctively. We smell it on the rain. Forget the Premier League academies and the chimera of modernism. Those frowning teenage skinheads you see representing the home nations in the Victory Shield on Sky Sports are still tall boys who like to send long, to get rid and to generally trample all over Sir Trevor's six-step mini-futsal golf ball keepie-uppie programme.Plus, there is our role in the wider world. If English players tend towards the high pass and the muscular barge this does still have a vital function. With England in the mix we know anyone who wants to win a World Cup must, at the very least, be able to defend the floated, flickable semi-hoof. This is our role: basic training. Go off and play your "attractive football" in your semi-finals, but only after we've established that this is still a contact sport and we're all keeping it non-basketball real.What are the alternatives anyway? There is still plenty to be found that is cheerless in a homogenised 11‑man pinball purged of sweat-soaked northern European blundering. I quite like, and also feel oddly irritated by, the scampering, self-righteous Velcro-touch gnomes of Barcelona. But is the future really exclusively theirs?At the Burton-on-Trent unveiling Brooking found support from Stuart Pearce who said: "We need to get in a situation where we have no more excuses." Is that right? At least our English failure has a face (in Soccer Tactics and Skills, pub. 1980, it has Trevor Brooking's face). It's a grand old excuse, an irreversibly embedded culture of hoof, an excuse with a pedigree and narrative arc all its own: our own dark and secret place where we can fret and frown and shiver and say "gnnnnyhng". Blame the weather. Blame angry swearing dad. Blame an innate Anglo-Saxon impatience. The long ball is truly the enemy inside.The FAEnglandBarney Ronayguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Germany's Simon Rolfes to miss World Cup? Bayer Leverkusen captain Simon Rolfes underwent another operation on his knee and is in doubt for the World Cup. cbc.ca |