Category: Latest

Newcastle United’s New Press Policy Could Be Doing Fans A Favour

Posted by | Dec 11, 2013 | | 1 |

Newcastle United’s decision to charge the press for access to their players is in some respects unsurprising when we consider their recent behaviour towards their local newspaper, the Chronicle, which was banned from St James Park following a spat, the true nature of which has never been made fully clear. What today’s announcement confirms is that the club now considers itself at the vanguard of a new form of relationship between clubs and the media, one in which only tame voices are heard, dissent against the club becomes a thing of the past, and the press pays for access to players and staff that it has enjoyed free of charge for many years. The reflex reaction to this over the course of today has been mostly a combination of outrage and shock at a football club behaving in this respect, but it doesn’t have to be this way. We might contend, for example, that Newcastle United are, in just about the most backhanded way possible, to be thanked for showing up the senior management of the club for what they are in just about the most public way possible. A lot of football clubs cloak themselves in the dark arts of public relations, paying considerable amounts of money to companies whose job it is to spin their news in the most positive manner possible. Newcastle United don’t really need...

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200%’s World Cup Magic, Part One: Argentina vs Cameroon – 1990

Posted by | Dec 9, 2013 | | 2 |

In the first of a new occasional series, Ed Carter looks fondly back at his first World Cup finals match. It was Friday 8th June 1990. I was ten years old and I’d never seen a World Cup Finals match before. I came to football relatively late, or at least it felt that way at the time. No-one in my family had any particular interest in the game or strong affliations to anyone in it. And beyond my mother’s understandable worship of The Championships, Wimbledon and inexplicable passion for ice dancing at the Winter Olympics, neither of my parents ever watched, talked or thought about any sport at all. My only knowledge of soccer came from watching my schoolmates playing it at breaktime in my peripheral vision. But it was about autumn 1988 and what happened is that I suspect my dad was going through one of his occasional crises of masculinity. These normally run along the lines of worrying that having no interest in or knowledge of the national game surely marks him down as a nancy boy amongst his peer group. So along with my little brother, a football-mad member of Dad’s church choir and his friend (a particularly foul-mouthed traffic warden), we decamped to the Goldstone Ground in Hove. What we saw created a lifelong interest in football in two of us. My dad remained unmoved,...

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Bundesliga Week 15 Round Up – The Oncoming Storm

Posted by | Dec 9, 2013 | | 0 |

The Weserstadion, home of Werder Bremen, sits by the bank of the River Weser and with the threat of an oncoming storm possibly flooding the river there was a chance that their match against Bayern Munich may have to be postponed. As it happened, Werder were hit by an oncoming storm of a more metaphorical type and I am not referring to Doctor Who. Even the good Doctor is likely to need more than a sonic screwdriver and impeccable sense of timing in order to see off Pep Guardiola’s Bayern who are as relentless as a Dalek invasion force in an especially bad mood. The champions exterminated Werder with a ruthless 7-0 win. Franck Ribéry, who scored two, assisted one and set up Werder’s Assani Lukimya for his own goal which got the party started, was probably Bayern’s best player on day. However the entire team could have claimed that accolade and this was the kind of performance where Bayern demonstrated how far above their contemporaries they really are. It was players vs gentlemen. At their best, Bayern are a fusion of the pace and power team of last season’s treble winning side under Jupp Heynkes and Guardiola’s high possession pull the opposition around until they fall apart Barcelona style. They never give the opposition a break and stretched Werder to such an extent that by the end of...

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England’s World Cup Draw Should Demonstrate Their Limitations

Posted by | Dec 7, 2013 | | 0 |

At least, we might reflect, expectations had already been lowered to such an extent that there can barely be anybody left on the face of the entire planet who believes in any seriousness that England will win the World Cup in Brazil next summer. It’s not a matter of being fatalist or of showing false modesty. The evidence has been right there before our very eyes for a considerable amount of time, and England supporters now making their plans for the tournament next summer can do so with a carefree attitude, finally freed of the last vestiges of that old albatross called Expectation. As if having perhaps their most mediocre squad of players in living memory wasn’t enough to recalibrate the expectations of those who have never quite gotten to grips with the fact that those pesky foreigners are now considerably better at playing association football than the English themselves are, the prospect of a difficult drawin difficult conditions now awaits. Of course, it’s not quite that simple. The overwhelming majority of England supporters and well-wishers have long watched their national team’s matches through the gaps between their fingers, whilst accusations of “English arrogance” frequently come from those who are desperate for the English to live down to their expectations of them, with very little other supporting evidence other than the worst excesses of the tabloid press and what...

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Where Does The Buck Stop At Old Trafford At The Moment?

Posted by | Dec 7, 2013 | | 0 |

Upon reflection, it wasn’t so much the fact of Manchester United’s two home defeats in the space of four days as the manner of them. At almost any pont in the last twenty-one years or so, Manchester United would have swatted the likes of Everton and Newcastle United aside in the manner of an elephant dealing with a troublesome mosquito but the last few days have been different. It’s difficult to remember more toothless back-to-back performances by a Manchester United team in recent years, and if supporters of the club might have been able to chalk last week’s loss against Everton down as being a bad day at the office which ended with being struck firmly on the jaw by the visitors, this afternoon’s Manchester United performance was even more difficult to find mitigating circumstances for. Yohan Cabaye’s goal for Newcastle United at Old Trafford today came with a third of the match left to play, but United offered practically nothing in response to this. There was no tension as the clock ran down, none of the sense of inevitability that would hang over a match when Manchester United were encamped around a penalty area, pushing and prodding for a late goal. The spell that hung over Old Trafford for so many years has, it has felt over the last few days, been broken. Away teams no longer arrive...

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