Kevin Donnelly had always been jealous of footballers’ parents – until he went to watch his mate’s son play
In 40 years attending football matches, I thought I had experienced everything. That is, until the day I went to a match with the dad of one of the players taking part in a Scottish Premier League game. As a young player who is basically starting out, his son was looking to build on a promising string of results for his team in which he had started all the games.
How could the best player in the school end up doing DIY while an unknown captained England? Howard Pattison ponders the thin line between international stardom and obscurity
A friend once told me that at school he had been voted the boy most likely to become a professional footballer. We never had opinion polls like that at my school. Most of us never had opinions. But if we had been asked which of our classmates would go on to kick a ball around a field for a living, I can guess who it would have been. Captain of the school team, played with both feet, read the game brilliantly. Perhaps he was a bit on the short side, but he was stocky with it. “A low centre of gravity” they would say now, like Maradona. Had stamina too, what they would call a real box-to-box player. Bryan Robson, perhaps.
Since they last met at Vicarage Road over a quarter of a century ago Swansea and Watford's paths have diverged. However, as they meet again in the second tier it is the visitors who are building an enviable reputation while the hosts look to be suffering a case of post-play-off syndrome. Huw Richards was there
Watford and Swansea are forever linked by the shared experience of the late 1970s and early 1980s when both rose in a few seasons from the fourth level to the upper reaches of what we then called (and still is, whatever its official label may be) Division One. There, though, their paths diverged. Watford stayed on at the upper end of the league and have spent only two of the past 30 seasons outside the top two divisions. Swansea, by contrast, returned whence they had come and have only this year escaped the bottom two.
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.
It's a phrase which is regularly repeated throughout the world to describe football. Ian Plenderleith looks at its numerous appearances in modern sport writing to decide if the game really is beautiful
God curse Pelé for the beautiful game. Not for having played it, but for having said it. The cliche has become so entrenched in football writing, it’s almost as though some all-powerful totalitarian linguist had banned the word “football” from public use, and we have developed this cunning euphemism instead. Never mind that football, like any other sport, is only beautiful in rare, fleeting moments. And disregard all those other profound authors from the past two decades who’ve been telling us that football is in fact more than a game. There are numerous books, columns and websites which have co-opted the five syllables as their main moniker. We can presume they all thought they were the first.