TOP 100 SOCCER SITES
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| Portsmouth struggles in FA Cup tie Portsmouth was held 1-1 at home by second tier Coventry in the FA Cup on Saturday while Aston Villa and Wigan outplayed Premier League rivals to reach the fourth round. cbc.ca |
AC Milan, Beckham top Genoa: Italian roundup David Beckham played 76 effective minutes to help AC Milan beat Genoa 5-2 and rise to second in the Serie A on Wednesday. cbc.ca |
Today in Sport - as it happened | James Dart Discuss the day's big issues, send us your favourite links, follow us on Twitter and take a look at our 2010 sport calendar8.45am: Good morning and welcome to our daily sports news blog. You probably know the drill by now, but if not, the idea is this: throughout the day we will update this page with news, links, and what's expected to happen in the hours ahead. Time permitting, we'll also try to wade in below the line, answering your questions and comments.However we'd like your input as much as possible – please send us your favourite links to stories/clips on YouTube etc and we'll flag up the best above the line. We'll have an update after the morning meeting shortly. JD9.14am: The Football Weekly crew are preparing to hide in a glass room for a couple of hours running the rule over all the weekend's football action. If you have any questions for the pod, post them below the line, pronto. PW9.55am: Northern Rock have renewed their sponsorship deal with Newcastle United, meaning they will be the club's main sponsor until the end of the 2013-14 season. Northern Rock chief Gary Hoffman said: "We remain mindful of our responsibilities under government ownership and only consider those advertising and promotion channels that deliver a high return on investment and good strategic fit."Good to know tax payers' money is being put to good use ... PW10.03am: Alastair Cook has been confirmed as England's captain for their upcoming tour of Bangladesh and UAE, with Andrew Strauss being rested. Geoff Miller, the national selector, said:"Andrew Strauss has provided outstanding leadership for the team in both forms of the game over the past 12 months and the selectors feel it is important that he takes a break ahead of an extremely busy programme of international cricket leading up to and including the Ashes series in Australia and the ICC Cricket World Cup in 2011."Do you think that it is a wise move? And what of the rest of the squads:Test squadAlastair Cook (capt) (Essex), Ian Bell (Warwickshire), Stuart Broad (Nottinghamshire), Michael Carberry (Hampshire), Paul Collingwood (Durham), Steven Davies (Surrey), Graham Onions (Durham), Kevin Pietersen (Hampshire), Liam Plunkett (Durham), Matthew Prior (Sussex), Ajmal Shahzad (Yorkshire), Ryan Sidebottom (Nottinghamshire), Graeme Swann (Nottinghamshire), James Tredwell (Kent), Jonathan Trott (Warwickshire), Luke Wright (Sussex).One-day squadAlastair Cook (capt) (Essex), Tim Bresnan (Yorkshire), Stuart Broad (Nottinghamshire), Paul Collingwood (Durham), Joe Denly (Kent), Eoin Morgan (Middlesex), Matthew Prior (Sussex), Kevin Pietersen (Hampshire), Liam Plunkett (Durham), Ryan Sidebottom (Nottinghamshire), Ajmal Shahzad (Yorkshire), Graeme Swann (Nottinghamshire), James Tredwell (Kent),Jonathan Trott (Warwickshire), Luke Wright (Sussex). JD10.20am: Morning meeting update:• Follow-up to the anti-Glazer fan groups contemplating writing a letter to Sir Alex Ferguson, asking him to resign in protest at the Man Utd owners' regime. Do you think that, in practice, this sort of campaign could ever work?• We'll have an eye on the latest takeover news at West Ham and Portsmouth's court battle against an outstanding tax bill.• Thierry Henry is due to face Fifa's disciplinary commitee in relation to that handball.• The Africa Cup of Nations continues. We'll have MBM coverage of Angola v Algeria at 4pm, with an accompanying Jonathan Wilson blog on the hosts.• As mentioned below, Alastair Cook is going to fill in as captain of England in Bangladesh/UAE while Andrew Strauss recuperates. Vic Marks will be blogging on this later in the day.• The Australian Open kicked off overnight with an easy win for Andy Murray. Full coverage of day one can be found here.• Wales are due to announce their Six Nations squad later today.• And also on the sportblog today: the Football Weekly podcast, plus Sid Lowe, Paolo Bandini and Raphael Honigstein's European reports, and Barney Ronay's five things we learned this weekend feature. JD10.33am: Thanks to Alexrules, below the line, for this one: Duisburg v Frankfurt at the weekend and the latest appearance of the 'ghost goal'. It also provides a brief linguistics lesson, if you ever wanted to know what 'the blindest referee in the world' is in German. JD11.13am: Where would we be without our tennis couples? After her victory over Nike's own Maria Sharapova, Maria Kirilenko is tipping her boyfriend Igor Andreev beat world No1 Roger Federer. As Reuters puts it: Maria Kirilenko and her boyfriend Igor Andreev wanted to start 2010 with a bang. She said: "Before the matches he said that we can start the year loud. And I have already started the year loud, I think. So now it's his turn. Of course, it's going to be tough, but in the first round you never know what's gonna happen." PW11.29am: Do you fancy winning a trip to the Dubai Desert Classic courtesy of Emirates Airlines? Then enter our great competition to watch four days of thrilling golf action in the sun-soaked Emirate. PW11.55am: A quick transfer window line: Hull City have signed Amr Zaki from Zamalek on loan until the end of the season. According to the club's official website:The player has missed the Africa Cup of Nations through injury but is now fit to recommence full training and should be available for selection for the home game against Wolverhampton Wanderers onwards.The club has paid a significant loan fee to bring Amr back to the UK but his goal-scoring record with Wigan Athletic last season would suggest that he will be a considerable asset in our fight to move up the Premier League.JD12.25pm: It's enough to put you off marriage for life. The Castleford coach Terry Matterson has revealed all about how he lost a finger during the squad's pre-season trip to France."I saw a ball by a tree the other side of the fence and went to retrieve it but it was higher than I thought and I had to put my hand on to push myself off. I got down and threw the ball back but then looked down and the finger was gone. It was a shock. I looked around for it on the ground but couldn't find it and then it was a bit of a blur."I couldn't climb back so I had to put my hand through the fence for our physio to strap it up. The boys then saw the finger stuck on top of the fence and they put it in ice. The specialist said it was too difficult to put it back on." PW12.54pm: Being a Premier League striker is becoming a bit of a perilous job. Berbatov has a dodgy knee, Torres is fragile all over and now Roberto Mancini expects Roque Santa Cruz to be sidelined for a month with his latest calf injury. PW12.57pm: There's been a corker of a match in the Rod Laver Arena. Alisa Kleybanova played some stunning shots, including a cute chip from the baseline at deuce in the final game of the match, to beat home favourite Jelena Dokic in straight sets. Is this the year when women's tennis becomes interesting again? PW1.15pm: Bad news for Ghana. Michael Essien is definitely out of their match against Burkina Faso with the knee injury he picked up in training. PW1.30pm: Paul Rees has blogged on an intriguing weekend in the Heineken Cup. Here's a taster: "The Heineken Cup makes for an unforgiving environment. The Guinness Premiership may like to promote itself as the most competitive league in the world, but Europe's premier club tournament is unquestionably on a higher level. Decision making has little margin for error, something teams who have established themselves in the tournament over the years, such as Munster, Leicester and Toulouse, appreciate." PW2.05pm: The first of our European football blogs has landed, with Paolo Bandini impressed by Luca Toni's return to form with Roma. Plus Jonathan Wilson has blogged from Luanda on how the hosts' good form so far in the Africa Cup of Nations – a draw today will put them in the quarter-finals – is encouraging the whole country to get behind them. We'll have live coverage of Angola v Algeria from 3.30pm. PW2.31pm: Dwayne Peel has been ruled out of Wales' Six Nations opener against England on 6 February, with the Scarlets No9 Martin Roberts now favourite to start at Twickenham. Here's the full squad. PW4.11pm: Some more European blog action for you: Sid Lowe tells all about how Athletic Bilbao goalkeeper Gorka Iraizoz emulated the Squid by repelling Real Madrid at the weekend, while Raphael Honigstein's been blogging on how Eintracht Frankfurt continue to punch above their weight. Some breaking news too: Fifa has announced that no disciplinary action will be taken against Thierry Henry over his handball in France's World Cup play-off against the Republic of Ireland. We'll have more on that soon ... KM4.55pm: That's all from the Today in Sport blog, but feel free to keep posting below the line on the Africa Cup of Nations, Thierry Henry's let-off and any other stories that emerge this evening. Podcast fans: Football Weekly has landed. PWJames DartJohn AshdownPenny Woodsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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 |
Man United agrees to sign Fulham's Smalling Manchester United agreed to sign Fulham's Chris Smalling on Tuesday and the defender will join the Premier League champion at the start of next season. cbc.ca |