Search: ' Luiz Felipe Scolari'

Africa's talent looks to foreign shores for success, writes Tom Neate

While Africa’s finest footballers compete in Ghana, 23 13-year-old boys have won the chance to leave the continent behind. They are the winners of a mammoth and controversial talent search undertaken by the Aspire Academy. At the forefront of Qatar’s push for sporting success, the academy provides sporting and educational facilities with the aim of developing future world sporting champions. The centrepiece is the Dome, currently the world’s largest purpose-built indoor sports arena. Incorporated under the roof along with a vast array of sporting facilities is a full-size football pitch; there are an additional seven pitches outside, five of which are natural grass.

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A week of hopes and fears for Scotland and England led to double failure but contrasting reactions online, as Ian Plenderleith found out with the help of a folk singer and various dead writers

England’s and Scotland’s failure to qualify for Euro 2008 not only proved there is no longer a British team in the continent’s top ranks. The contrast in home reactions to that failure also showed us that, although the end result may be the same, an underdog country’s sporting patriots generally maintain a healthy perspective, while a Bulldog Nation’s repeat anticipation of glory only perpetuates its misery and ill-humour.

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Steve McClaren’s job is up for grabs

This month the sports pages have been embroiled in a cagey kind of guessing game: something speculative and possibly a little unfair, but which has, as ever, proved irresistible. So much so that discussion of who the next England coach will be has advanced so quickly that you’d be forgiven for forgetting the only real obstacle to getting someone in tomorrow is the fact that the position is already filled.

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The FA's reaction to the Burns Report

Several mysterious half-seen creatures are said to exist in the UK. There’s the Beast of Bodmin, a giant cat that’s held responsible for the death of livestock in south-west England. The Loch Ness monster lurks in various hazy photographs, lovingly reproduced on early-hours TV documentaries. And, perhaps the most spectral of all, there’s Geoff Thompson. He’s a bearded man in late middle age, occasionally sighted getting in and out of taxis, and is said by some to be the chairman of the FA. Many doubted his existence, but suddenly at the end of October 2006 he both appeared in full public view and made a useful contribution to an important matter. Thompson voted to abolish his own post, one in a series of measures for reforming the FA proposed by the Burns Report.

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Having beaten England, Portugal found themselves within a game of the World Cup final. Phil Town captures the mood in Portugal

Speaking some time back at a conference on motivation, Luiz Felipe Scolari told the story of his first days with the Selecção in 2002. He got the players together and asked them to imagine the team as a truck and to consider what part of the truck each of them thought they represented. He found that what he had inherited from António Oliveira was a truck with four drivers and a wheel missing. Six months later, the same experiment came up with just two drivers and all the wheels in place.

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