TOP 100 SOCCER SITES
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| Arsenal match presents Martin O'Neill with sternest test as Aston Villa manager As he peers into 2010, Northern Irishman will know that he faces the sternest test of his time in charge of Aston Villa. telegraph.co.uk |
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 |
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 |
How the FA made me learn Russian Even typing this I can sense the Premier League lawyers advancing up my garden waiting to plunder my hard driveThe FA is turning us all into paedophiles. Yes, paedophiles. I stand over that last phrase. In fact, I hope they also used that as a headline. It's clearly ludicrous and overwrought, but who doesn't like a sensational banner across their work now and again?In all honesty, the FA is making us behave like paedophiles in a manner that completely excludes the actual paedophilia bit, but bear with me, it is still a worthy comparison.Last Wednesday, my club played in a game that was broadly declared as having overturned an 11-point deficit to go top of the table. Even though the game was dramatic, the achievement was a little less so, given that we went from one game in hand to one extra game played, so you could say we actually overturned a five‑point gap. Either way, people got to sing the "We are top of the league" song, Chelsea's game in hand or not, so there were a lot of happy punters in the stadium.I was not one of them. As a blessed relief to those who feel this column has taken on a strong red and white hue recently, I wasn't even at the game and can offer little comment on the events that occurred. No cheerleading for Wenger's boys this week. For the best of reasons, I spent the evening at home, and there I got to enjoy the game as it was meant to be enjoyed; on an illegal stream from Scandinavian telly. And when that signal went down, Singaporese telly. Truly it is the greatest league in the world. If they didn't keep blocking our access to it.On Wednesday, I was in front of a computer with a bank of windows open, most of them on different, dubiously sourced streams of the game. They offered brief chances to watch the action before crashing, and having to be reloaded. During these reload periods I was reduced to taking all my information from the other window I had open, which was a live text update from other fans watching other illegal feeds.I can't decide if this is a phenomenally cool thing to be doing, like Dennis Hopper in Speed, watching the bomb on the bus and the news coverage of the bomb on the bus at the same time; or a really tragic thing to do, like a man in his pants sitting in the kitchen watching football in Russian in two–minute bursts.Things I have learned from watching football like this: Cyrillic looks complex at first but when you're looking for Arsenal v Bolton, you can pretty much guess what " " means. This means I am much less impressed by Jason Bourne, for example. All those sequences where he effortlessly moved to Russian while negotiating a high-speed chase through the Moscow underground system? All he was doing was squinting his eyes.I could have resorted to more official means. The club's website, for example, was carrying radio commentary along with intermittent still images of the game, which was like having a court illustrator pass scribbled impressions of the action underneath the door to you. You know the way getting a postcard from your mates never quite makes their holiday come alive for you? Try watching a still of Matt Taylor lining up a penalty, followed 60 seconds later by a shot of the teams kicking off again.And this is how we honest football fans get to ape the behaviour of the lowest of the low. All we want to do is watch the match. It's already sold out. Given the chance we'd happily use a subscription sports channel. With none of these routes open to us, we turn to the more furtive corners of the net, knowing full well that the Premier League's voracious hunter‑killer RightsBots are tracking down and closing the sites even as we watch. With our most useful sites only one step ahead of the authorities at all times, we find ourselves privately swapping addresses. This one is great, we whisper, I don't think the authorities are on to it yet. Where is it based? Who knows?I may even be breaking some code of silence by writing about this here. Even typing this I can sense the Premier League lawyers advancing up my garden waiting to plunder my hard drive. I was just researching a book, I'll cry, as they take my laptop away.All I know is that on Wednesday, we play Villa. It's not on the telly. Not here. Yet again, I'll be siting in kitchen, flying through cyberspace, in my pants. And looking for answers to the eternal question: what does my team's name look like in Arabic, or Greek, or binary?Premier LeagueArsenalDara O Briainguardian.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 |