Ballon D’Or: The Pre-Euro 2008 Candidates

France Football’s European Footballer of the Year award is defunct with the contest thrown open to players at clubs beyond European shores. As such, it’s now best to just call it the Golden Ball or Ballon D’Or. Semantics aside, it’s still the most significant personal honour a player can win. It has history, it has [...]

Champions League Semi-Finals: Predictions

We’re down to the last four of Europe’s premier club competition. Three English clubs – not teams – remain and so the usual suspects are shouting from the rooftops of Premier League supremacy. Only Barcelona, that flawed Catalan glamourpuss, remains to stake a counter-claim.
First to Tuesday night’s all-Premier League – not all-English – affair [...]

Behind The Wall: All That Glitters…

Luca Toni is an absolute shoe-in to win this season’s German Footballer of the Year award. In 2005, Michael Ballack won prompting me to question his position in the roll of honour…
Michael Ballack is the German Footballer of the Year for the third time. In his regular Bundesliga column from Berlin, Brian O’Driscoll thinks he [...]

Bundesliga: Schalke Self-Destruct

Schalke 04 sacked coach Mirko Slomka in the wake of a 5-1 Bundesliga hammering at Werder Bremen on Saturday. The result capped a bad week for the Ruhr club who crashed out of the Champions’ League in Barcelona on Wednesday.
Slomka told Premiere on Saturday:

“I’ve had it with defending myself – either you can see [...]

Retro TV Review: David Pleat – This Charming Man

Watching The Big Match Revisited on ITV 4 this week, I was struck by how charming and engaging a figure David Pleat cut back in 1983.
Struggling to keep little Luton Town in Division One, Pleat was interviewed by the legendary Brian Moore in the wake of a dramatic last-minute 2-1 Luton win over Aston Villa.
Revealing [...]

Soccer Spin: Reigning In Spain

Liverpool and Spain striker Fernando Torres believes, correctly in my view, that the Spanish Primera Liga is still the best in the world. Torres told Radio Marca:
“In England the top four are better than the ones in Spain, above all when it comes to consistency. Apart from that, the rest of the teams in the [...]

Premier League: Flawed Arsenal Flop Again

Despite playing some typically excellent football in the first-half of Sunday’s Premier League encounter at Old Trafford, Arsenal once again ended up on the wrong end of a big match scoreline having squandered yet another lead.
Arsene Wenger’s transfer policy has come in for some criticism in the wake of the midweek Champions League defeat at [...]

Sunshine Boy Spotlight: Numbers 1 & 2 Of A Regular Series

Once again, the Champions League has exposed some of Europe’s highest-paid footballers for the fair-weather folk heroes that they are.
Tonight we have two prime cases in point. First, come on down Daniele De Rossi, Roma’s erstwhile hard-man midfielder, a player who’s never been averse to the sinister side of the game while posing as a [...]

Champions League: Arsenal’s Adolescence Continues

As anticipated on these pages, Arsenal’s flawed young side bowed out of the Champions League on Tuesday night with a performance that exposed the weaknesses of a team built for style rather than effectiveness – and on the cheap.
Cesc Fabregas, Arsenal’s main man – at 20 – has run out of steam as the season [...]

Soccer Spin: So Few Men

Asked on Ireland’s RTE TV for his prediction before Liverpool’s Champions League quarter-final first leg with Arsenal, former Liverpool captain Graeme Souness told presenter Bill O’Herlihy and fellow panelist Liam Brady:
I fear for Arsenal. It seems to me that they don’t have enough men in their side.
Brady was impassive, but you know he burned inside. [...]