Our new look | Sport | Guardian Unlimited. Guardian Unlimited: Sport blog: Living in fear of the Chelsea syndrome. Pitch Invasion » Lead Story » Suriname: Tragedy and Future Promise. This could very easily be the lead intro to this story: On June 7, 1989 Suriname Airways Flight PY764 took off from Amsterdam-Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands en route to Paramaribo-Zanderij International Airport in Suriname. The Suriname Airways D-8 plane crashed on approach to the airport, after the plane’s crew ignored warnings and used an inappropriate navigation signal. 176 of the 187 onboard were killed, including the international footballers Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard, Aron Winter, Bryan Roy, Stanley Menzo and Regi Blinker, who were travelling to Surinam to play for the Colourful 11′s charity team.
That the footballers actually killed on the flight were not those superstars, but rather a lesser group recruited for the Colourful 11 after the likes of Gullit and Rijkaard were refused permission to travel by their European clubs, makes it no less of a tragedy but a more obscure story. The footballers who in fact died were: Guardian Unlimited: Sport blog: Tevez and Mascherano: the chronicle of a fate foretold. England | Merseyside | Fifth Liverpool player is burgled. Dirk Kuyt has become the fifth Liverpool footballer to be burgled in less than 18 months. The 27-year-old striker's luxury home in Woolton was targeted on Thursday while he was away on international duty with home country Holland. Merseyside Police confirmed they were investigating a burglary in Woolton. The Merseyside home of Jerzy Dudek, Liverpool's goalkeeper from the 2005 Champions League final penalty shoot-out, was burgled in June 2006.
The raid at Kuyt's house is the latest to see a footballer's home targeted in the city while the players are away at a match. Burnt-out Porsche Dudek, who now plays for Real Madrid, was on holiday in Poland when thieves took his Porsche car, jewellery and a large haul of football memorabilia from across his career, including his European Cup medal. Pepe Reina was burgled while he played for Liverpool in last May's Champions League semi-final against Chelsea.
Care2 : The Petition Site : Save Al Bangura. Ms. Julie Williams, United Kingdom Apr 20, 10:00 Why are they trying to deport him now? He doesn't deserve that after all his hardship. If they want to deport someone, they should get rid of all the criminals and human traffickers who are making people's lives miserable. and not some innocent person who worked hard to get a good life for himself.
Send a green star Mr. Apr 19, 14:48 The Home Office is, I can say without an iota of doubt, certainly one of the more moronic institutions. Send a green star Mr. Apr 14, 02:36 deserves a good life here send a green star Mr. geoffrey elderfield, United Kingdom Apr 10, 05:33 For more impact, add a personal comment here send a green star Sebastian kent-morris, United Kingdom Feb 23, 04:32 send a green star Bracken Thompson, United Kingdom Feb 21, 03:11 send a green star Amu Peters, Nigeria Feb 10, 06:19 It wrong you send back man because he is black.
Send a green star Stefan Hasche, Germany Feb 04, 20:30 don`t care the nationality, every human is worth the same! Football: The death and glory of football in Uzbekistan | Football | The Observer. Last week several British newspapers carried a story about a "row" between Fifa and the Premier League over the badge on Manchester United's shirt. United had won the Fifa World Club Cup last December and the world governing body wanted them to advertise the fact by wearing a new logo. The Premier League said "no thanks". The football public here would probably side with their own competition, if they had an opinion at all. The World Club Cup might be worth something to United as it gives them the opportunity to aim for a quin rather than a quad this season, but to most fans it is an impostor, a "made-up" tournament that has no history, no integrity.
It is known only for having put a dent in the FA Cup when United prioritised their Fifa matches in Brazil over domestic commitments in 2000. It is seen as something of a joke. Elsewhere in the world, it is taken more seriously. Four years ago Bunyodkor did not exist. Other Barcelona connections abound. What is going on here? Record income but record losses for Premier League | David Conn | Football. This article is the subject of a legal complaint made on behalf of Martin O'Neill. The Premier League's 20 clubs collectively lost close to half a billion pounds last year despite making record income, a Guardian analysis of their most recent accounts has revealed. In the 2009-10 financial year, the clubs currently in the Premier League made total revenues of £2.1bn, principally from their billion-pound TV deals and the world's most expensive tickets.
Yet 16 of the 20 clubs made losses, totalling a record £484m, and the same number relied on funding from their wealthy owners. Since the owners took over their clubs, they have put in a staggering £2.3bn, by way of loans or for shares, mostly to pay ever-escalating players' wages and transfer fees. All the clubs in the top seven made substantial losses except Arsenal, whose record income of £382m, and £56m profit, were swollen by £156m made from the Highbury development. 85 million questions… | Bet of the Week. ‘Ecky thump – the world’s gone bonkers! Did anyone see that coming? I have to confess, I certainly did not! Yesterday the Premier League was lucky enough to boast one of the seven most expensive strikers of all time, in the form of a certain Mr Carlos Tevez.
Well, I assume that was the case. For the purposes of this piece, let’s assume Manchester City paid more than £31 million to secure the Argentine’s services. Historically there has been marginally less shenanigans accompanying each of Carlos Tevez’s transfers than you would expect to find in the Sky Sports studio on a cold winter’s Monday night. However, as the dust settles on one of the most eventful days in UK football history, the Premier League now not only boasts the most expensive striker to EVER play the game, but also three of the top seven. It seems that Frank Lampard Junior’s hernia problems had an even bigger impact on UK football than even Jamie Redknapp probably would have dared to suggest… Can anyone say “bubble”?!
Ah, yes. EC official's court advice in TV rights case worries Premier League | Football. A Sky cameraman in action at a Premier League game between Liverpool and Birmingham City at Anfield. The selling of rights for live matches is at issue in a court case involving a Portsmouth pub landlady.
Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian Some call her a consumer champion; others say she has opened a Pandora's box that could ruin the economic model that has made Premier League clubs among the richest in world football. The Premier League tried to prevent Karen Murphy showing illegal foreign feeds of matches in her Portsmouth pub. She took her case to the highest court in Europe and today a European Commission advocate general threatened to undermine the League's forthcoming multibillion-pound television rights auction.
At the Premier League's Gloucester Place headquarters, where every move is calibrated to oil the wheels of the most successfully marketed league in the world, they are not used to surprises. Premier League lawyers will fight the judgment. England's greatest soccer teams and American owners, a match made in hell. - By Brian Phillips. What's Happening With Barcelona's Finances? Just a few weeks ago, everything looked wonderful at Barcelona. They had won La Liga for the second season in a row, once again finishing ahead of Real Madrid. Despite their bitter rivals breaking the world transfer record twice last summer when buying Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo, they could not match the talents of Xavi, Iniesta and Lionel Messi, who was voted FIFA World Player of the Year.
Although they could not repeat the previous season’s Champions League triumph, being unable to find a way past the defensive wall built by Jose Mourinho’s Inter in the semi finals, Barcelona did subsequently provide most of the players for the Spanish team that won the World Cup in South Africa. “Glory days”, as Springsteen once sang. However, July was not so kind to the Catalan club – at least from the financial perspective. Rosell blamed the former regime for this sad state of affairs, “We have taken over a club in debt and with liquidity problems, but we are resolving them.” How can this be? Why are two holding midfielders so crucial in the modern game? « The Arsenal Column. August 4, 2010 at 12:52 pm | Posted in Arsenal | 72 Comments The efficiency that two holding midfielders provide makes them very important to have in the modern game. _______________________________________________________________________________ International competitions are always fascinating tactically if anything for the inflexibility they confront managers with.
Arrigo Sacchi, in charge of the Italy side who reached the final of World Cup ’94, stated it was “impossible” for a national manager to drill the same understanding that club level coaches are afforded due to the lack of day-to-day availability of personnel. Importance of being compact All four semi-finalists in the 2010 World Cup used some sort of double screen in front of the back four with Holland, Spain and Germany deploying a variant of the 4-2-3-1 (18 of the 32 teams played some form of 4‑2‑3‑1). Between the lines <Figure 1> Imagine the two holding midfielders positioned in a 4-4-2 as in the graphic number one.
Soccer Explains Nothing - By Simon Kuper. One night in Johannesburg during the World Cup, I was chatting with an English friend over a bottle of South African red about the impending England-Germany game. My friend is an august figure, a well-traveled political commentator, never happier than when weighing the chances of war in Iran. At first, he made some ironic remarks about the England team. But pretty soon, he couldn't resist the temptation: He stuck out his arms in imitation of the outstretched wings of a Royal Air Force plane from World War II. He was an England fan preparing for a game against Germany, and that's what England fans do. If you had to pick a game during the 2010 World Cup that looked freighted with political meaning, it was England-Germany. All this talk was fodder for wannabe sociopolitical commentators like me. That's quite a shift indeed, because the World Cup used to be a festival of geopolitics.
During these decades, geopolitics gave the World Cup spice. No longer. Crucially, soccer is changing too. The Question: Is the World Cup too big? | Jonathan Wilson | Sport. I wasn't quite as down on this World Cup as most people seem to have been, but these things are relative. I'd place it high above 2002 and just above 2006, but behind every other tournament in my lifetime, and I don't think that's just down to the weariness of age. For once, in fact, I seem largely to agree with what Sean Ingle says in this piece. What it lacked was a truly great game, a match of ebbs and flows between giants that would burn itself into the pantheon.
It wasn't just that here was nothing as good as Italy 3-2 Brazil from 1982, there was nothing even in the class of Brazil 1-1 Netherlands, Netherlands 2-1 Argentina or England 2-2 Argentina from 1998, which at the time I thought was a poor tournament. It is not just, though, about excitement and quality; there must also be consequence, which is why the third-and-fourth place game between Uruguay and Germany doesn't really count.
Crunching the numbers Compare that to the Euros. What about past World Cups? The Currents of History: What does it take to win the World Cup? | Pitch Invasion. “What does it take to win the World Cup?” Asked Henry D Fetter of The Atlantic a couple of days ago, in a post called “What It Takes To Win The World Cup.” Past results suggest that going through a period of dictatorial government is almost a sine qua non for a nation to be a champion. Brian at The Run of Play did a very good job crushing that idea. … [C]orrelation doesn’t imply causation; the fact that two things occurred simultaneously doesn’t prove that one caused the other without a mechanism to demonstrate the cause. Fetter gestures toward such a mechanism—“soccer prowess proved a national morale builder for the dictatorships of the last century”—but while it holds up in some specific cases (Mussolini, et. al.), as a general theory it’s just silly, especially considering that, as Fetter himself points out, most of the World Cup-winning countries that have had dictators since 1930 weren’t actually dictatorships at the time when they lifted the trophy.
The idea memed, nonetheless. 1. England needs to learn from World Cup failure of 'Golden Generation' - Raphael Honigstein. Fabio Capello has borne the brunt of the criticism for England's poor World Cup. Francois-Xavier Maritf/AFP BLOEMFONTEIN, South Africa -- Monday afternoon, the inquest into England's worst defeat in World Cup history will begin in earnest.
Fabio Capello will conduct a press conference in the Royal Bafokeng Sports Campus for the last time in South Africa, maybe his last time as England coach, period. The Football Association is unwilling to fire the 64-year-old -- he'd be due £12m in compensation -- but might get nervous if the press were to collectively turn against "Don Fabio. " England always needs a scapegoat and they don't come more convenient than a granite-faced Italian who's never made an effort to win friends in the media or materially improve his English. He did make some mistakes, of course: relying on a less than fit Gareth Barry -- not a defensive midfielder by trade -- to keep the fantastic Mesut Özil and Thomas Müller at bay, for example. When Will The Premier League Bubble Burst? So England have crashed out of the World Cup, the so-called “golden generation” once again failing to perform on the grand stage. Although England might have found a little form when beating Slovenia, it’s fair to say that the national team has been struggling for almost the entire length of its miserable stay in South Africa with the woeful display against Algeria being one of the worst in living memory and the defeat against Germany the worst-ever at the World Cup.
Never mind, at least English fans can comfort themselves with the thought that they will soon be watching the Premier League again – and that’s the “best league in the world” (copyright Sky Sports’ imbecilic front man Richard Keys). Or is it? While this is a debate that can never be won on football grounds, it should be rather more straightforward from a financial perspective and, happily for us, the Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance provides the comparatives. "The lion-hearted Premier League" "Good times" BBC World Service - Documentaries - The Power and the Passion. "Die Schiedsrichter" - Sport - Sport Inside. 2010 World Cup – The Ultimate Graphic and Data Resources Guide. The World Cup is coming!! One of the world’s biggest sports events, matched only by the Olympics, promises to deliver a whole month of fun for all soccer fans.
Being so important, it’s pretty natural you’ll find a lot of articles, comments, blog posts and, of course, data-visualization goodies on this matter. Infographics, editorial illustrations, interactive charts and maps, all of them deliver fun and interesting way of understanding and following this great event, so, today I leave you here with a (too long?) Round-up of those awesome resources – and may the best team win! FIFA Soccer World Cup Trophy Tour by Coca Cola The World Cup is organized by FIFA, the international supreme ruller of the sport – so, nothing more obvious than start this selection with a take on one of the resources from the official World Cup website. The Trophy Tour Map shows the worldwide trip made by the most wanted object in soccer world, giving the fans a chance to take pictures with it.
All about the World Cup. Mundial 2010 en MARCA.com. Michel Platini's victory for stability spells end to freewheeling culture | David Conn | Sport. Tony Adams, a mysterious tycoon and their grand plan for small-town Azerbaijan - Profiles, People. Motherwell 6-6 Hibernian. How Big Is Arsenal's Transfer Budget?
The Question: Why is pressing so crucial in the modern game? | Jonathan Wilson | Sport. Vast wages at the heart of Premier League's £3.5bn mountain of debt| David Conn | Sport. How the Glazer family have milked debt-ridden United for millions | Sport. The Question: How will football tactics develop over the next decade? | Jonathan Wilson | Sport. Egypt's football party gets out of hand | Mohamed El Dahshan. Football in the firing line: The Gaza Cup final. The problem is people, not football | Peter Preston. Iran football players 'banned' after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad protest.
Satan’s Instrument? The Vuvuzela and Noisemaking in World Football | Pitch Invasion. FC Barcelona Gladiator Pep Guardiola's motivatonal video Final Champions Rome 2009. Taxing Times For Football, Darling... - F365 Features - Football365 News. Football: Premier League clubs are £3.1bn in debt, Guardian report reveals | Football. Institute for Public Policy Research - Fans must come together to stop football’s gravy train. David Conn on the rise of AFC Wimbledon, now just one promotion away from the Football League | Sport. Football: Amy Lawrence on Arsenal's FA Youth Cup semi-final victory over Manchester City | Sport. The Global Game | Witch-doctoring | Bathing in chicken blood for the good of the side.
Is this the end for Tommy Smyth, possibly the most hated football commentator in history? | Sport. The Question: Jonathan Wilson asks why full-back is the most important position in football? | Sport. Trying To Face Everton's Racist Past... - F365 Features - Football365 News. Premier League: Arsenal bullish over Highbury Square development as profits rise | Football. The Half Decent Football Magazine - Real Madrid tolerate fascism. Masal Bugduv – the 16-year-old Moldovan prodigy who doesn't exist | Sport.