For 90 minutes at the weekend, all of us went back in time a couple of years, to a period when one football team so eclipsed all others that they were being considered not just the best side on the planet at that moment but one of the greatest ever to play the game. The Barcelona side which won two Champions Leagues in three seasons, who in 2009 won all six trophies in which they were competing, and who’s side was filled with genuine winners, in particular the backbone of a Spanish…
Author: James Forrest
I love football, but there’s something about the game that’s pretty hard to deny. Football, above and beyond any other sport, is incredibly good at ignoring problems. Its leaders are incredibly good at wishing they’d go away. I’m writing a lengthy piece for this site on the continuing trials Scottish football is enduring as the supporters look for answers, and leadership, on the issues that continue to swirl around Ibrox, and in the introduction to that piece I praised the role of the English FA in getting to the bottom of serious problems that faced the game south of the…
So is this how it ends? With a whimper? With a team languishing mid-table, out of the title race by November? Does the career of one of the most interesting, and successful, managers in the history of the game really come crashing down like this? Jose Mourinho has been at the top of the global game almost from the moment he first took over at Porto. In a few short years he’d turned that club into European Champions. He’d already gained a reputation as an inspirational coach with a healthy self-regard. He called himself The Special One. It was arrogant,…
Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea took another battering, on and off the pitch, over the last few days as this weekend’s Premier League matches saw them defeated, again, this time to West Ham. They followed that up with a penalty kicks defeat at Stoke, in the League Cup, although like most of the other top clubs that’s a tournament they pay little heed to. A lot of people think Jose is hanging on by a thread, but Chelsea would do well to question whether anyone else could get more out of these players. Where he might have a problem is with the…
Being from Scotland, and being a Celtic supporter, I have followed the story of British football’s most dysfunctional club, the one at Ibrox, keenly. Some of what has happened there is without parallel anywhere in the game, except perhaps for the rash of arrests and indictments at FIFA, but only someone who knows nothing about the sport at all can be unaware that one club in the UK has a story of crisis to mirror theirs; Leeds United. This week they’ve sacked their manager. Clubs do that all the time. But he is the fifth in seventeen months, and even…
Is it only me who hates international weeks? Perhaps it’s a Scottish thing. All too often, our performances are the kind you watch from behind your hands, but only if there’s no room behind the sofa. The match against Poland was a case in point; you could feel the tension mounting up as the game wore on. The last minute equaliser was coming as surely as Glasgow rain. Even without it, I dread these spells away from club football. You spend most of your time worrying that key players will get injured. If you’ve suffered a defeat, or a major…
Kane and Rooney finally scored. Sanchez hit a hat-trick and Newcastle blew it … again. It was a big weekend for in the EPL, with wins for Manchester United, Arsenal, Crystal Palace, Stoke, Southampton and, of course, Liverpool and Spurs. In the latter match, Harry Kane ended weeks of fevered speculation about whether or not he was a one season wonder with his first goal of the current campaign against a lacklustre Manchester City, who’re going through something of a mini-crisis at the moment, having lost three of their last four games. This one was a real pasting, a 4-1…
As this is my first proper opinion piece on this site, I’m gonna clear a few things up about the articles I’m going to publish here. First, when it comes to the Premier League I have no dog in the fight. I’m a Scot and a Celtic fan, but I love football and I write about it passionately and honestly. I hope over the course you’ll like what I put out there, but I’m saying this now to avoid allegations of bias. I don’t favour one team over another; I simply write about what I see. I thought long and…
Steve McClaren said, after this game, that trying to turn around Newcastle’s shocking form was “a little bit like a car crash.” He isn’t kidding. Right now it resembles a motorway pile-up, and one with a high likelihood of casualties. They flirted with relegation last season, and but for Sunderland also dropping three points and conceding a goal more they would, right now, be bottom of the EPL having spent the kind of money in the transfer window that fans have been crying out for these last few years. A statistic for you; Newcastle’s wingers did part of their job…
Things are pretty grim up north at the moment, with Sunderland and Newcastle suffering a ghastly start to the season, and one that neither side was able to better at the weekend. In this match, played in front of a Bournemouth support who are much happier with the start they’ve made than the away fans – this match gave them 7 points from the first six matches – Sunderland were on the back foot right from the start. For the home fans, things couldn’t have begun better, with two goals inside the first nine minutes, with the first coming from…