Tuesday 1 Steve McClaren begins his first day as England manager by saying: “It will be totally different from Sven and the past five years. I’m going to do it my way.” Liverpool’s Champions League opponents Maccabi Haifa are contesting UEFA’s plan to switch the Israel leg of their tie to a neutral venue. That man Ken Bates is to report Chelsea to the Premier League, the FA, FIFA and the World Council of Churches after claiming they recruited two Leeds youth-team players through an illegal approach. José Antonio Reyes is hoping to tie up a move to Madrid: “Real are like a candy that is difficult to turn down.” Ghana full-back John Pantsil joins West Ham.
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Stories
Jon Spurling wonders whether applause is an appropriate replacement for the minutes silence.
Just as views on the responsibility for George Best’s early death are polarised, the same is true of attitudes towards the minute’s applause that was seen at Portsmouth and West Ham to mark his passing. There is a weighty body of evidence that suggests that Best would have approved of such a gesture. On Parkinson last year, he confessed: “I hope I’m remembered for the football and the cheers I brought to grounds, rather than all the front-page nonsense.” A lesser known fact is that he preferred the B-side of Don Fardon’s Belfast Boy – Echoes Of The Cheers – to the song that reached number 32 in the charts and which due to its ubiquitousness over the Old Trafford PA system was an early-Seventies version of Simply The Best.
It may be no surprise that you can get great English coverage of football in Ireland, but Ian Plenderleith tracks down individual sites that cover Poland, Slovakia and even the whole of South America
Sometimes a Google search of your club’s name can take you to interesting places. Sligo, for example. If I hadn’t been looking for an obscure fact about Lincoln City, I would likely have discovered too late that the Imps were scheduled to play Sligo Rovers in a pre-season tournament in July. As it was, I was able to cancel my summer holiday in Tuscany and reschedule for the Emerald Isle instead (some parts of this paragraph are a lie).
Forget about dodgy bounces at Kenilworth Road, plastic is back and, if it can get past a bit of red tape, could be the answer to football’s problems. As Steve Menary explains, they’re even complaining about the quality of the grass in Amsterdam
This was supposed to be the year of the artificial turf revolution, so where is it? Not that awful plastic stuff that left players with terrible burns, but a hi-tech mixture of man-made fibre and real grass has been allowed in the Champions League, UEFA Cup and Intertoto Cup for the first time this season.X
Wednesday 1 Chelsea, Ashley Cole and Jose Mourinho are found guilty of meeting in a hotel for immoral purposes and face fines totalling £600,000, with Chelsea also receiving a suspended three-point deduction; all will appeal. “The public don’t expect players to move just at the drop of a wallet,” warns David Dein. Darren Bent joins Charlton for £3 million.