So football didn’t come home in the end, instead it proved to be a fairly predictable defeat that not only punctured the feelgood vibes that most of the country has been enjoying, but brought us all crashing back down to earth with a bump. That the defeat ultimately came via a penalty shootout felt almost […]
So, have we all recovered from Wednesday night then? For only the second time in their entire footballing history England will play in the final of a major tournament. In achieving that Gareth Southgate and his players are helping long-suffering England fans to banish memories of all those glorious failures of the past, especially those […]
I ended last week’s post by suggesting that it was now or never for England at a major tournament, that: “If the Three Lions are ever to truly blossom into the top team we all hope they can be, then beating the Germans, even on penalties, feels like an essential step on the way. We […]
On the face of it playing a 24-team finals tournament using 12 different venues spread across a continent in June and July 2020 was always going to be logistically challenging. However, factor in a global pandemic which brought the world as we knew it let alone international travel and football to a halt from which […]
Love him, hate him, regard him as one of, if not the greatest players of all time, or simply a cheat and someone whose behaviour and lifestyle inevitably destroyed him, no one will ever forget Diego Armando Maradona and the mark he made on the history of football, or indeed on society as whole. Like […]
Anyone who has read these pages in previous seasons won’t have found it a particularly tough stretch to draw the conclusion that I am far from being a fan of the seemingly too frequent and often pointless International breaks during the domestic season. As much as I love the major International tournaments in the summer […]
Mention the words “Tartan Army” to pretty much any football supporter, not just from the British Isles but anywhere in the world, over the age of 30 and it will instantaneously conjure up certain memories and images. Of the “well-refreshed (or “blootered” to use the appropriate colloquialism!) hordes”, that used to descend on Wembley on […]
So there we go, that’s another Interlull disappearing from view, but what (if anything!) did we learn from it? First of all from an England perspective it seems the front three that is emerging: Sterling, Kane, Rashford/Sancho is enough to rival any in the international game. With a total of nine goals scored in the […]
Two wins out of two, six points out of six, ten goals for and just one against and a four point lead in the group already, so England are finding the going tough in their Euro 2020 qualification group then! As I pondered on this page last week (https://football-nerd.org/2019/03/22/football-nerd-weekly-ramblings-international-break-boredom-var-creates-an-un-level-playing-field-and-orient-one-step-away-from-wembley/), one wonders what strange logic anyone […]
Interlull Tedium So here we are in the deepest darkest depths of another Interlull (© Arseblog), after the relative excitement generated by the fledgling Nations League, this one sees a return to the overwhelming tedium of qualification for Euro 2020. Back in 2016 when the Euros expanded to 24 teams, it was suggested that the […]
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