Scissors Kick

“Is the Uefa Nations League a complicated irrelevance? Or, for some of the home nations, is it their best route to Euro 2020? England, Wales and Northern Ireland might baulk at that suggestion, given all three were at the finals in France in 2016, but would they all be entirely confident of finishing in the top two places in a five- or six-team group to earn qualification in the usual way? The Scottish FA is being more circumspect. With its focus sharpened by Hampden hosting four Euro 2020 tournament matches, it is selling Uefa’s new competition – one which will effectively replace most international friendlies – to sceptical fans as a way of ending what would be a 22-year absence from major finals. …” BBC (Video)

“From a sunny trip to Tow Law and many unexpected winners to a seemingly endless number of scandals, our writers’ give their highs and lows of 2016…” WSC – Part 1, Part 2

“When I tell a friend I’m going to watch Hanoi T&T FC play he offers up a derisory snort. I get my bike fixed and the local mechanic shakes his head and mutters something in a tone that suggests derision, a bartender laughs at me. I am clearly not in on the joke. Vietnam is a football mad nation but ask a Vietnamese person if they follow a team here and they blush. My Airbnb host in Ho Chi Minh City woke up in the early hours to cheer on Manchester United against Southampton, watching Zlatan Ibrahimovic score his debut Premier League goal.” In Bed With Maradono

“When Lucas Boyé struck a looping wonder goal from the edge of the box on his Torino debut last month, he did much more than announce himself on the Italian football scene. The Argentine’s dipping effort – spectacular as it was – also carried the weight of history behind it. Boyé, after all, arrived in Italy from River Plate, the Buenos Aires club whose links to Torino go back more than half a century to the most tragic day in Italian football history, 4 May 1949. That was the day the Grande Torino died, an entire squad wiped out when the plane carrying them home from a friendly game at Benfica crashed into the Superga hillside overlooking Turin amidst the thick fog that hangs so often above the Po Valley.” the set pieces (Video)

“While Ireland basked in the love-in of an almost year-long Brian O’Driscoll farewell, his counterpart on the national football team hasn’t always enjoyed 100% support. But when the history of the Irish game is written, Robbie Keane will rightly be spoken of in the same breath as our retired rugby icon. After 18 years, Keane has decided to hang up his international boots and it’s only when he’s gone will we realise what we’ve missed.” Pom Mo Goal

“Irish website Póg Mo Goal has launched another edition of its superbly put together magazine, with contributions covering a wide variety of topics. The third issue of the magazine is available free in selected stores and online for a fee to cover shipping. It features 40 pages of excellent feature writing and beautiful photography and illustrations including an interview with the team behind YouTube channel COPA90.” backpagefootball, €5.99 – On Sale

“… I have tried to make all the club crests on the map approximately the same size. From the original blank map I added lakes in Sweden and Finland, plus I also added flanking-edge areas not in the original blank map (in the Baltic States/Eastern Europe and in NE Netherlands). I did this because I had to tilt the original map to orient it in a more North-South axis. That was necessary because the original map’s focal point was the Norwegian Sea, not the Scandinavian Peninsula, and so Scandinavia-and-Finland looked distorted – until I tilted the whole map about ~20 degrees.” Bill Sport Maps

“What is Brussels? The images of Tuesday’s attacks are of a city in transit, a crowded metro and a bustling airport, banal sites of everyday movement—now turned into spaces of death. The city is much less legible and familiar than Paris. We learn of fragments of its geography—an immigrant neighborhood called Molenbeek and downtown subway station called Maelbeek—but what connects them? Brussels is many things at once: the de facto capital of the European Union, a contested site in the long-running conflict between Dutch- and French-speaking groups, and a city of immigrants, remarkably cosmopolitan and diverse—a crossroads of histories and conflicts. The city is a place, but we should also think of it as a project: imperfect, unfinished, but essential.” Slate – Laurent Dubois

“Even though I’m a Watford boy, I used to hold a season ticket at Tottenham Hotspur. I went between 1998 and 2003 with my dad, alternating with my brother Richard, who was there for Sol Campbell’s return. I was at the 3-5 defeat against Man United, and also the 1-3 loss in the Worthington Cup against Birmingham. Unpredictable, full of flair, and lots of foreign talent, Spurs were fine, but Man United won things, so I switched to them in 2003.” Football Pink

“This coming Sunday, November 8th, will see the curtain come down on yet another League of Ireland season as league Champions Dundalk battle back to back league runners up Cork City in the 2015 FAI Cup final. Despite the fact the domestic league here in Ireland has one of the longest off-seasons in Europe you will already find businesses being done by the majority of the twenty league clubs in preparation for 2016.” backpagefootball

“From the moment a shirtless Michel Platini gleefully paraded the European Cup trophy around the chaos-ravaged Heysel Stadium on May 29th 1985, English football had to face the stark reality that its existence would never be the same again. The tragedy in Brussels claimed the lives of 39 people when a decaying wall collapsed under the pressure of hundreds of fleeing Italians. The responsibility for those deaths – and the majority of the trouble witnessed in and around Heysel that day – was laid squarely at the foot of the riotous, out-of-control Liverpool fans. The events of that evening were shocking in the extreme, yet this was not an isolated incident; Heysel was a gruesome punctuation to a decade long charge sheet built up against the English. Certain rampant hooligan elements who attached themselves to English clubs (and the national team) had long since spilled over the Channel from domestic football to the continent. For some time, UEFA had been itching to censure English clubs for the behaviour of their fans abroad – the Heysel disaster finally provided them with the necessary gun from which to fire their bullets.” Football Pink

“Since May 24th, 2013, the Gibraltar national football team have achieved many firsts, and have written their names into the history books. On November 19th of that year, Allen Bula’s squad represented the British colony in their first official UEFA fixture against Slovakia, earning a commendable 0-0 draw. Against the Faroe Islands in March of the following year, Roy Chipolina scored their first official goal in a 4-1 loss and three months later a strike from Kyle Casciaro earned Gibraltar a first official win against Malta. Next month, the national team will reach another milestone when they line up against Poland for their first official qualifier for Euro 2016 in France.” backpagefootball

“With the Confederations Cup now behind us and the new European soccer season less than 40 days away, there are plenty of talking points looking ahead to season 2013-14. Here are ten questions that we have been asking this summer…” SI

1932 FA Cup Final
“This afternoon at the mildly absurd time of 5.15, Manchester City and Wigan Athletic will kick off in the one hundred and thirty-second FA Cup final and, much as the old trophy has frequently been debased in recent years, it still has a rich history upon which we can draw. What follows is listed chronologically (partly out of a mild degree of Saturday morning laziness, and partly because, well, how do you compare a middle-aged man running onto a football pitch and evading his would-be captors with a penalty save or a match that would prove pivotal in the entire history of the game?), and we should also take a moment anybody with any complaints about this list should bear in mind that this list was plucked almost at random, with a hangover, at ten o’clock on Saturday morning.” twohundredpercent

“The South American Youth Championship is always a good opportunity to spot rising stars of the world game. After all, in 2011, the likes of Neymar, Lucas Moura and Oscar all featured in Brazil’s squad alone, while in 2009, Eduardo Salvio, Sandro and Salomon Rondon were just some of those who announced their arrival as potential forces in world football. There can be little doubt, then, that some of the many stars of the 2013 tournament will also go on to achieve much greater things, and there are several players already well on their way to doing so.” ESPN

“On the last Saturday in January, with most of Israel shut down for Shabbat, Beitar Jerusalem FC — the only soccer team in the Israeli Premier League to have never signed an Arab player — announced that it had picked up two Muslim players from Chechnya: Dzhabrail Kadiyev, 19, and Zaur Sadayev, 23. The first response from fans was nonviolent but brutal: At the team’s next match, members of Beitar’s proudly racist ultras group La Familia unfurled a giant yellow banner in Teddy Stadium’s Eastern grandstand. It read, in a surreal echo of Nazi terminology: ‘Beitar Will Be Pure Forever.’ The next response was arson.” Grantland

“If there is one old adage that football has chosen to ignore above all others, then that which states that ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ must be amongst the contenders for pole position. Barely a year goes by without something being rebadged or rebranded, as if applying a tenth new coat of polish to our clubs and competitions will definitely this time lead to a hitherto elusive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Michel Platini hasn’t been entirely bad as the president of UEFA – occasionally misguided, perhaps but nowhere near approaching what we might describe as Blatteresque levels of appallingness – this mornings announcement that European club football needs to be rethought is a potential minefield of disaster for UEFA which should be negotiated with the utmost care.” twohundredpercent

“The Premier League might get on your nerves and agents might make you scream, but it has nothing on the ten most bent leagues in the world and the hookers, murderers and extortionists who populate them…” Sabotage Times, amazon: Jon Spurling

The Dark History Of The World Cup by Jon Spurling
“Zaire full-back Mwepu Ilunga’s odd behaviour at the 1974 finals, breaking off from the defensive wall to boot the ball away just as Brazil’s Rivelino is about to take a free-kick, has gone down as one of the most comical scenes in World Cup history. It is replayed time and again on the obligatory TV clips shows in the run-up to each subsequent tournament. What John Motson described as ‘a bizarre moment of African innocence’ was actually more a moment of desperation, one man trying to run down the clock and prevent a third Brazilian goal, thereby salvaging a sliver of national pride.” WSC

Death or Glory
“In 1974 Zaire’s football team were summoned into a room in their West German hotel and told that if they lost to Brazil by more than three goals the following day they would never see their families again. In this astonishing book Jon Spurling has travelled the world to scratch beneath the glossy, confetti-strewn surface of the world’s biggest sporting event to uncover its dark secrets. In this astonishing book Jon Spurling has travelled the world to scratch beneath the glossy, confetti-strewn surface of the world’s biggest sporting event to uncover its dark secrets.” amazon: Death or Glory, Jon Spurling