Search: ' Andrei Arshavin'

Cameron Carter on extreme tourists disrupting his regular football fix

You know when people tell you that things were better in the olden days: the wars were more righteous, the bank notes bigger and crinklier, bread really tasted of bread and so on? Well, we forward-looking rationalists come right back at them with higher life expectancy, 24-hour garages and Doritos, which absolutely silences the fools. But then there are some modern innovations that are so wrong that the argument is immediately lost again. Match of the Day 2 on March 15 was interrupted halfway through by Adrian Chiles to inform us that the next programme on BBC2 was High Altitude and would feature two glittering-eyed hearties ski-biking across Iceland. They actually showed these men in the snow contemplating the difficulty of their challenge. To put that into context: that’s two minutes of preview footage of a couple of extreme tourism bores biffing on about the terrible weather on an Icelandic glacier. In my quality football time.

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As national manager Guus Hiddink takes charge at Chelsea, Dan Brennan reflects on worries in Russia over what is said to be only a temporary job-share

If Guus Hiddink turns Chelsea’s season around, don’t expect too many loud cheers in Russia. The Dutchman’s decision to combine his permanent job as Russian national team coach with a makeshift one at Stamford Bridge has been met with what might best be described as resigned dismay.

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Russia has surprise new champions, from the Islamic region of Tatarstan. James Appell reports on Rubin Kazan's year of glory

When the Russian championship entered its mid-season break in May after 11 rounds, the unheralded Rubin Kazan sat atop the table. Rubin had taken many by surprise by winning their first seven matches, but few gave them any chance of remaining at the top once the season resumed in late July. In addition, during the break Rubin were rocked by the arrest of sporting director Rustem Saymanov, in connection with a triple murder committed in 1996. Then, straight after the restart, Rubin had five successive draws. The tide seemed to be turning.

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Too many papers and websites were interested in everything but the teams actually playing at Euro 2008, Ian Plenderleith discovers

England may not have played any football at Euro 2008, but their representatives did them proud. The members of the media who travelled to Austria and Switzerland could not get England off their minds. The Independent’s Nick Townsend was so taken with the Germany v Portugal quarter-final that he wondered if there was “anyone sitting at home seriously bemoaning the fact that Becks and the boys were not there to enliven things”. Fuelled by the fresh Alpine air, he mused on how the atmosphere might have been sullied by England travelling “as always, not in hope but in a heady atmosphere of lager-fuelled, St George flag-strewn expectation”.

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The home team have suffered in semis, the visitors lost at the last step in Europe and their title challenge has gone awry. One more disappointment is coming to someone in the SPL's Thursday night climax, in front of Dianne Millen

The romance of the cup. Sometimes a welcome distraction from poor league form, sometimes merely a chance for plucky minnows to be patronised, the source of memories we either can’t stop talking about or can’t bear to repeat. In Scotland, where the league is a binary battle, the cup competitions assume greater importance – and while tonight’s game is the league climax, the cups are what has truly defined the ­season for both teams.

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