Category: Latest

Football League Review: We Gotta Get Outta This Place

Football League Review: We Gotta Get Outta This Place

Posted by | Aug 29, 2016 | , | 0

After a slow start to the season, Newcastle United are starting to move ominously towards the top of the Football League Championship table. Late on Saturday afternoon, their two-nil win against Brighton & Hove Albion in front of just over 49,000 people at St James Park, a timeously persuasive performance in front of live television cameras against one of the division’s other stronger sides. Jamaal Lascelles gave them the lead after twenty-five minutes, but it still required a little luck in the openng stages of the second half to sew up Rafael Benitez’s third win of the new season....

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The Champion’s League Draw: Ian Rush’s Unscrewable Balls

The Champion’s League Draw: Ian Rush’s Unscrewable Balls

Posted by | Aug 27, 2016 | , | 0

So. Why was Ian Rush given so much to do when he couldn’t get his balls open?” It was surely the question on everyone’s lips after the Uefa Champions League (UCL) group stages draw in Monaco. The draw was less interminable than some past events and would have been less interminable still but for Rush’s problems screwing open the balls containing the group letters…and if the 2017 UCL Final ambassador wasn’t in action for the entire draw while stars such as Thierry Henry and Clarence Seedorf were in for one pot and off the stage again (the final is...

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Podcast 69: Liverpool’s Class of ’88

Podcast 69: Liverpool’s Class of ’88

Posted by | Aug 27, 2016 | , | 0

This week’s 200% podcast is going back to the 1987/88 season, and perhaps the greatest English club team of all time. Liverpool won the First Division at a canter that year, but they couldn’t win the double and this high point came shortly before the beginning of a period of tragedy and decline for the club. But still, what a team, although Ian has his doubts that they would have been able to compete with the extraordinary Milan team of the era had English clubs been allowed to enter European competitions. That, however, is more a reflection on how...

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Celtic Flying The (Palestinian) Flag

Celtic Flying The (Palestinian) Flag

Posted by | Aug 26, 2016 | , | 0

Those insisting sport and politics shouldn’t mix are hopelessly naïve. Sport is too popular worldwide for it not to be used by those with well-tuned political senses. The fight against Apartheid was as much about South Africa’s sporting isolation as students declaring “until Barclays Bank disassociates itself from the Apartheid regime I shall take my overdraft elsewhere.” Of course, a few hundred protestors at a sporting event only impact significantly as part of a multi-faceted, on-going movement which picks their sporting event wisely. Protests at one rugby tour in 1969 didn’t bring down Apartheid. But it was part of...

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Burnley: Andre Gray – And Football’s – Intractable Problem

Burnley: Andre Gray – And Football’s – Intractable Problem

Posted by | Aug 25, 2016 | , | 0

It’s now been more than four years since Andre Gray, then just another non-league footballer plying his trade with the now-deceased Hinckley United, made the first of a set of comments which have been dredged up from the bottom of the vast ocean that makes up Twitter’s archives. And they were horrible. In their nature, they went far beyond the sort of casually homophobic bullshit that can sometimes seem pre-programmed into young men. They constituted hate speech, and that should not be allowed to be forgotten. But Twitterstorms were not a fundamental part of our universe at that time...

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