A Football Report

By Azeem Banatwalla

The footballing world in its entirety knows what happened before and after the clash between Manchester United and Liverpool yesterday. YouTube is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? So there’s not much point repeating what happened, but in the aftermath of yesterday’s events, debates have sprung up, as they usually do, on Facebook status updates, newspaper websites, and pretty much every space of internet brave enough to host a comments section. United and Liverpool fans are at each other’s throats. United fans say Suarez should have shaken Evra’s hand. Liverpool fans say it’s just a handshake being blown out of proportion. But the essential point of the debate was lost a long time ago. Having had a weekend to sleep on it, let’s see if we can find our heads again.

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By Josh Clarke

On initial inspection, similarities between Andre Villas-Boas’ Chelsea and Edgar Allan Poe seem most abundantly clear in a shared propensity for an excruciating and painfully drawn-out narrative (think Fernando Torres and The Pit and Pendulum). Push your luck a bit further and I could be persuaded to believe that a real, defensively-capable John Terry could be found in an Oval Portrait somewhere deep within Cobham.

Yet and perhaps least harrowing for Chelsea fans, could be the suggestion that Villas-Boas’ time at the helm at Stamford Bridge could be viewed a great deal more positively through the lens of Poe’s Philosophy of Composition.

Written as an exposition on how a poet achieves a powerful end effect, the essay lists the practices involved in the configuration of the poem The Raven. Leaving aside the distracting suggestion that the most poetic topic conceivable is the death of a beautiful woman – though an examination of this and Ashley Cole could well be saved for a rainy day – the basic premise is that a great piece of literature will be achieved through methodologically working back from a predetermined end point.

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By Richard Nash

2012 will see the inaugural Premier League Soccer competition take place in India. It follows in the footsteps of the hugely successful Indian Premier League cricket competition which began in 2008 and has now run for four seasons. In that time it has become the world’s leading club cricket competition and attracted the best players from around the world. The league has proved lucrative for both players and team owners by taking advantage of cricket’s biggest market.

The PLS will largely copy the IPL’s format. Six teams will be auctioned off as franchises to various companies and corporations keen to profit from its expected commercial success. The competition will be a standard league, including home and away ties, concluding in the top four teams going into a semi-final and final to determine the champion. All 33 games will be played over seven weeks. Each team will have an international coach and a limited number of foreign players. It is hoped that, aside from being profitable, the competition will help the development of Indian football.

However it is clear that Premier League Soccer will not have the same impact as the Indian Premier League for a number of reasons…

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By Amy Eustace

There came a point at the beginning of last year when you simply knew it was coming.  Perhaps it was the infamous Roy Hodgson face rub – a sure sign that man had reached his last bastion of pure desperation – the previous December, or the penalty that Steven Gerrard sent soaring uncharacteristically over the bar against Blackburn the same month. We all sensed Roy Hodgson was a dead man walking, and the Kop didn’t need to chant “Hodgson out!” to stress the point.

More cruelly, they sang the name of another; a player whose sublime touch and silky footwork had led the Kop in song throughout the 1980s and a manager whose reign at the club had been the very antithesis of Liverpool’s past decade or two. Bountiful where the nineties and noughties had been barren, magical where the club had since been miserable - fans who had long forgotten how dominance felt craved a return to his tenure. Kenny Dalglish’s was a name synonymous with success in Liverpool. Roy Hodgson’s had become a buzz word for failure.

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By Darshan Joshi

One week, two alleged stamps. Both assailants bad-boys of their clubs’ cities, further apart in distance than footballing heritage and seemingly now closer yet in terms of notoriety. One incident exponentially more temerarious than the other, and thus rightly so – relatively speaking –, one man went unpunished, and the other supplied with a four-match decapitation. Only, if just one of the two crime scenes were to be punished retrospectively, it was the wrong one left exonerated.

Mario Balotelli may cast more than an envious gaze at the Spanish footballing authorities, much as the English do those shores with an understandable predilection for sunnier days on a golden beach. The decision to deplete Pepe of a suspension for an ostentatious trampling on the hand of Lionel Messi was absurd. Perhaps the powers-that-be took into account, unfairly, Messi’s status as The Second Coming of Diego Maradona – karmic law suggests an equal and opposite reaction to every action – and Pepe was thus the purveyor of retrospective punishment too, of a sort. Only, Messi isn’t Maradona, and so his Hand isn’t exactly His Hand.

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By Saf Hossain, writing hours after returning from Craven Cottage

Attending a live match is, obviously, an entirely different experience to watching on TV. When you are free of the director’s control, you might choose to follow an individual on the field for long periods of the game. This happened as I was sitting in the Putney End of Craven Cottage as Fulham took on Juventus in the Europa League. Seventy-one minutes had elapsed, and the sign went up to signal that Clint Dempsey was coming on. I tracked everything Dempsey did after entering the game for ten minutes. Ten minutes later he floated the winning goal over the ‘keeper’s head, slaying a giant of the European game. Since then, I’ve been singing Deuce’s praises to any football fan who will listen.

Only now are the British football audience truly waking up to Dempsey’s quality. It isn’t a surprise that they are finally doing so, since the Texan today completed a brace of hat-tricks in January. Moreover, Dempsey has become the all-time American top-scorer in the Premier League and Fulham’s record scorer in the top flight of English football. Impressive titles, and the notion that a larger, richer, possibly Champions League-playing suitor will come in for the attacker seems an eventuality. How do (all due respect) smaller clubs’ fans rationalise one of their superstars moving on? Even as the most casual of Fulham followers (I support Liverpool, go figure) I’ve romanticised that Dempsey would stay loyal to the little club on the banks of the Thames. However, from what I know of soccer in the US, it certainly sounds like Dempsey has earned his place in the limelight.

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By David Walker

The January transfer window is often a frenzied time with chairmen, managers and agents battling against the clock to secure new players. As a result, many players who move during this period often do so at over-inflated transfer fees and are hit-or-miss in terms of success. So while football clubs yet again gamble with their finances this month in the same way a mug punter blindly signs up for every offer at a free bet site, let us look at some of the more successful moves that have taken place during the history of the January transfer window. 

After delving through 10 seasons of such transfers, here is what I believe to be the strongest starting XI (in a 4-4-2 formation) from all the moves that took place. These are the players who made a huge impact at their new clubs and some who continue to do so.

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