Michael Owen is in danger of becoming a symbol of Real Madrid’s decline – but is winning fans over and doing pretty well when given a chance, as Phil Ball explains

So Michael Owen is the latest victim of those nasty local cliques in which Johnny Foreigner has spec­ialised, ever since Kevin Keegan went to Hamburg? Real Madrid’s Raúl, a nasty piece of work according to certain recent reports in the English sports media, has apparently been making life un­comfortable for the latest export of Eng­land’s finest, telling the recently departed José Antonio Camacho to leave him out of the team because he wanted his mate Fernando Mor­ientes to play instead. Raúl was also the al­leged guilty party in the cold shouldering of Nicolas Anelka, but if this was true then surely he deserves a medal for bravery above and beyond the call of duty.

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Milan Mandaric has taken Pompey to a crossroads – and while the club head in one direction, Harry Redknapp chooses another after this straggly defeat. David Stubbs reports

The first time I saw Portsmouth play was in the first game I ever attended – September 1971 at Hull City’s Boothferry Park, a post-holiday birthday treat en route back home from a drizzly week at the Golden Sands Chalet Park in Withernsea. Hull City won 3-1, I vividly recall, except that they didn’t – a check on Soccerbase has confirmed that my lifelong belief to that effect is erroneous. In fact, it was Pompey who won by the same score. Still, what has stuck is the allure of what was doubtless a dismal occasion for the reg­ulars. The combined stench of drifting cigarette smoke and fried onions acts like one of Proust’s cakes on me even now. I remember the bloke two rows down shouting “You Portsmouth pigs!” – the height of terrace in­vective to me. Mostly it was the floodlights that im­- ­pressed me: tall, imposing and HG Wellsian, they were like giant cyber-sentries from another world.

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The Vikings are leading the way in Europe: a new competition for the top teams in Denmark, Norway and Sweden is attracting plenty of interest, including from Margot Dunne

There is, as anyone who has ever witnessed the voting at the Eurovision Song Contest can tell you, a bond between Scandinavian countries born of more than a shared love of herrings, saunas and flat-pack furniture. It was perhaps inevitable that Norway, Swe­den and Denmark would sooner or later link their football together in some way as there have been mutterings about it for many years. Thus the formation of the Royal League (so named because the three nations are all monarchies) comes as no surprise. They are, after all, broadly similar countries whose football clubs face roughly the same problems.

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Robbie Meredith reports on how teams from the Republic and Northern Ireland are warming up for a new cross-border competition with some amicable friendlies

Appropriately, in an island awash with mythology, the most enduring myth in Irish football is about to be exposed to reality. For a number of years an all-Ireland competition has been prescribed as the cure for the moribund state of domestic football in Ireland, north and south. Now, for the first time since the cross-border Blaxnit Cup was abandoned 25 years ago, competitive all-Ireland football is returning.

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A flop at Bradford, a controversial figure at Middlesbrough – this former England skipper is seeking managerial redemption at West Brom. Matt Rickard reports

It seems perverse that Bryan Robson should find himself managing again in the Premiership so soon after an ignominious seven months in charge of Bradford City. Wasn’t this the man who couldn’t buy a job after his time at Middlesbrough that ended shortly after a chast­ening call to Terry Venables? And this despite a desperate flurry of CV writing, only matched by the deadening thud of rejection letters.

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