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Trophy bitter

Some people are never happy – take Bayern Munich. Dominant at home but toothless abroad, the German champions have taken out their frustration on Owen Hargreaves, as Karsten Blaas reports

When Bayern Munich secure yet another Bundesliga title, mostly with two or three games to spare, the players gather in the centre circle after the final whistle to celebrate. They start jumping up and down and wave at the crowd. One of them, usually Hasan Salihamidzic or Bastian Schweinsteiger, produces a large glass of wheat beer, a Bavarian speciality, and pours it over somebody else’s head. Oliver Kahn clenches his fists and grits his teeth at the supporters and throws his gloves into the crowd. After about 15 minutes, the players gradually disappear into the dressing room. It’s a dull procedure, probably even for those who feel affiliated to the club.

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Crime and punishment

As Juventus go kicking and screaming into Serie B, Matt Barker reports on the failure of the new board to realise just how seriously the Moggi match-fixing scandal has damaged the club's reputation

When, in July, the initial sentences in the Moggiopoli scandal were announced, Juventus appeared to take their punishments with reasonably good grace. They would, club officials claimed, co‑operate fully with the legal process and abide by whatever penalties were imposed. There was talk of a club reborn and, in the shadow of sporting director Gianluca Pess­otto’s attempted suicide, of a more humble side to La Vecchia Sig­nora. Some people even started to feel a little sympathy for them.

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Courting controversy

Managers may not like it but there are legal limits to what a footballer can do to an opponent. As the police investigate Ben Thatcher's challenge on Pedro Mendes, Neil Rose looks at where the law stands

“Anything that happens on a football pitch should be governed by the FA and FIFA,” said Stuart Pearce following Ben Thatcher’s challenge on Pedro Mendes. “Once you start involving the police, the floodgates can open and you could end up with a situation where players are arrested during a game.”

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Flexible friends

Wearside has seen an unlikely football marriage, but Paul Doyle looks behind the headline spats to see how much Roy Keane and Niall Quinn have in common and assess their chances of survival

Niall Quinn often comes across as a Ronan Keating-type figure. There’s something earnest about the two Dubliners that denotes a craving to be perceived as nice guys. And there’s something essentially gormless in their demeanours that frequently suggests they’re both merely well meaning simpletons not to be taken seriously in the real, nasty world. So when Quinn first declared his intention to take over Sunderland, many in his homeland greeted the news with the same mixture of pity and amusement that they felt several years ago when Keating expressed an interest in becoming president of Ireland.

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Peterborough, Crawley, QPR

Tom Davies updates us on clubs in crisis

The inner workings of Peterborough United have been laid bare by Sky’s Big Ron Manager series, in which the discredited ex-pundit was brought in to “advise” then caretaker-manager Steve Bleasdale as the team challenged for last season’s play-offs – their form collapsed. This dirty laundry-airing exercise is the latest in a string of developments that has left supporters exasperated with Barry Fry after nine years of declining playing fortunes and attendances since he arrived, first as manager then as chairman.

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