Search: 'Frank Clark'

The best antidote to the money ruining football is a litle retail therapy spent on your fantasy league team, argues Ashley Clark

As Wikipedia no doubt reliably informs me, fantasy football was created in 1990 by an Italian technology writer, Riccardo Albini, as a casually interactive, just-for-fun gaming experience. Albini was clearly onto something. The game has proved wildly popular, lurching through a variety of vaguely unwieldy mail and print iterations (as well as David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s 1990s TV show Fantasy Football League) to blossom into the slick, ubiquitous web-based beast it is today.

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Al Needham welcomed Steve McLaren’s appointment at Nottingham Forest, but won’t miss him now he’s gone

After the initial shock and subsequent debate across the city of Nottingham, the appointment of Steve McClaren as Forest manager in the summer made a sort of perverse sense. After all, both club and new manager had a lot to prove. For the former, the opportunity to replace the moaning, awkward Billy Davies with someone who has sat at the right hand of Alex Ferguson was an irresistible punt. For the latter, the opportunity to return to a club seething with the potential to get back to where they seemingly belonged was an obvious shortcut to expunging memories of holding an umbrella and looking helpless. As a friend pointed out: “Forest have gone from having the best manager England never had to the worst manager they did have.”

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With no hope of domestic glory, Chelsea manager Carlo Ancelotti is hoping Champions League success can save his job

When Ashley Cole missed his penalty against Everton in their FA Cup tie, the Arsenal goalkeeper Wojciech Szczesny asked on Twitter: “What do you think Ashley was aiming for? Is it an aeroplane? No, it’s just Ashley throwing Chelsea out of the FA Cup.” In fairness to Cole, it wasn’t the most misguided shot he took this month.

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Jon Spurling looks at how footballers' holidaying habits have changed radically since the days of the maximum wage

For England’s multimillionaire footballers, there is one major consolation to having flopped so dismally on the grand stage earlier this summer. With cash to burn, they have the choice of jetting off to any destination in the short gap between the World Cup and the new season. Frank Lampard, with girlfriend Christine Bleakley in tow, holidayed in Italy with the Redknapps while the newly single Ashley Cole took a break in Los Angeles. According to the tabloids, Cole quickly got over the trauma of his split from Cheryl by partying until the early hours in “the city’s top nightspots”.

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Despite a respectable performance in South Africa some think the US could have achieved more. Ian Plenderleith explains why

When US coach Bob Bradley substituted Ricardo Clark 30 minutes into the team’s final World Cup game against Ghana, he whispered intensively into the player’s ear for several seconds before packing him off to the bench. As Clark’s sole contributions in his half hour had been to lose possession in the lead up to Ghana’s opening goal, and to receive a yellow card for an amateurish late tackle, there was much lively speculation about the words Bradley had directed towards the central midfielder.

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