Steve Bradley explains why the opening night of a new national stadium led to unnecessary embarrassment
Wednesday August 4 should have been a proud day for Irish football. With the covers lifted from Lansdowne Road to reveal the new 50,000-capacity Aviva Stadium, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) threw a housewarming party to celebrate. But the invite list and guests’ behaviour left a sour taste for some fans.
While Bosnia's national team continues to improve, their federation is under attack from fans, as James Taylor reports
Late at night on September 3, after Bosnia’s victory in Luxembourg, one of the presidents of the Football Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BFF), Bogdan Ceko, was attacked by unidentified assailants. This has nothing to do with safety in Luxembourg; it is an unsurprising symptom of the off-field troubles that plague Bosnian football.
Alex Anderson reflects on the unusual task he has set for himself, of going to watch every team that has reached a European cup final
I’ve seen 66 of them. That’s exactly two-thirds. There are probably some who’ve seen the lot though. Probably even more, like me, will have realised that “every European finalist” is as worthy of bagging ambition as “every League ground”, “every League champion” and “every club Neil Warnock’s managed”. No doubt, I’ll be far from alone in recognising it as worthy of that kind of on-the-autism-spectrum attention. But when the list hits 100 – and Fulham last season were number 99 – everyone will want a piece.
A reasonable start to the season for the home side comes to an end with a thrashing as the once illustrious visitors suggest that they may not hang around for too long at the third level. Harry Pearson reports
In the second half at Victoria Park there’s an odd moment when it seems we might be witnessing the birth of a new musical phenomenon. In the past people have successfully fused techno with jazz, hip hop with heavy metal and Indian bhangra with Celtic reels, but so far as I know nobody has until now thought of combining sub-Saharan African drumming with good old-fashioned north-east exasperated football moaning.
Mike Ticher acknowledges that there are several ways in which to appreciate football. But if we concentrate too much on the view of professionals, we risk missing the point altogether
I was a bit shocked to find out I didn’t know how to watch football, despite years of practice. At least that was the impression I got from Jonathan Wilson’s excellent book on tactics, Inverting the Pyramid. Perhaps a better way to put it is that the book exposes the gulf between two ways of watching: the fan’s way, in which you care about the result and the entertainment; and the coach’s or analyst’s, in which you study patterns and work out what each team is trying to do. The book’s genius is that it successfully explains the second way of thinking to the first group of people.