Search: 'Philippines'
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Owen Amos explains how two brothers dealt with rejection in England – by becoming footballing celebrities in the Philippines
While Chelsea wait for Josh McEachran to establish himself (or be sold to Fulham), two of their other youth team graduates are doing rather well. James and Phil Younghusband, brothers from Middlesex, were released by Chelsea in 2006 and 2008 respectively. Now, they’ve got 50 caps between them, a string of sponsorship deals and – most importantly of all – 200,000 followers on Twitter. The Younghusbands have made it; they’ve just made it 7,000 miles away, in the Philippines.
The football team may not have won a game yet but Timor-Leste has a side to be proud of, as Matthew Hall writes
In his own words, Alfredo Esteves lives a different reality to many of us and that’s not just because he’s a defender for Wollongong FC in the New South Wales Premier League, a regional competition in Australia. In 2008, as well as helping Wollongong win the championship, the 32-year-old lined up alongside Cristiano Ronaldo, Edgar Davids and Raúl in an All-Stars team selected by Luis Figo for a charity. That’s not the amazing part of the story, however.
Goalkeeping fans, budding writers and followers of non-league football in Sussex all have their concerns addressed in Ian Plenderleith's website round-up
The cyber-slimming of the past few years has seen the crash of numerous financially and conceptually flimsy football internet ventures, but lately some interesting indepen- dent websites have emerged from the digital carnage. While highly financed schemes have been bounced into the Deleted Items box, a trend for small-scale, hobbyist homepages has slowly returned and yielded a few pleasant surprises.
Cris Freddi dredges up some of international football's worst mismatches. If you come from Guam, it's probably best to look away now
Gotti Fuchs must be kicking himself in his grave. Back in 1912, Germany seem to have taken their foot off the pedal immediately after he’d scored his tenth goal against Russia. There were still 20 minutes to go (around the same as when Archie Thompson hit double figures against American Samoa), but Fuchs’s tenth was their last. They probably thought enough was enough, but if they’d set him up for a couple more he would have broken the world record instead of equalling it, and they wouldn’t have fallen one short as a team. A more genteel era? Only relatively – 16-0 isn’t exactly what you’d call merciful.