Man Underperforms But Keeps Job (Part 2)

Vaya con Dios, Diego Maradona: despite getting further than England but scoring fewer goals against Germany than England did, El Diego is now looking for another job. Presumably Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, George Bush and FIFA mafiosi were to blame, not shoddy defending or inability/unwillingness by his strikers to track back.

The current coaches of Cuba and Venezuela are Raul Gonzalez Triana and Cesar Farias respectively. Just sayin’

Not nearly as harsh as what happened to the North Korean team though…and Fab goes marching on.

Breaking News: Bus Carrying Togo Team Fired On

According to the BBC, two players from the Togolese football squad in Angola for the African Nations Cup have been injured following an attack on their team bus this afternoon. We’ll keep an eye on the situation.

UPDATE: ESPN Soccernet is reporting three players and the bus driver were injured and quotes Nantes striker Thomas Dossevi as saying that the team no longer wants to take part in the tournament.

UPDATE: Yahoo! Sports is reporting that the driver – who was Angolan – was killed and that two players and two medics were injured. Both Emmanuel Adebayor of Manchester City and Mustafa Salifou of Aston Villa are reported to be uninjured.

Togo were scheduled to begin their Group B games on Monday with a game against Ghana in Cabinda, Angola.

UPDATE: Various news services are reporting that Togo FA Vice President Gabriel Ameyi has announced that defender Serge Akakpo (of Romania’s FC Vaslui) was injured, but there seems to be some confusion over the identity of another wounded player, named as ‘Obilali Kossi’ – this might be either Obilali Kodjovi of GSI Pontivy in France or Kossi Agassa, who aslo plays in France for Istres in Ligue 2. Both players are goalkeepers.

Ameyi also commented that the team apparently did not tell the CAF that they were travelling by bus and that they ‘should have flown’ to Angola. Presumably the Togolese FA should have had some kind of say in that too?

Cabinda is an Angolan enclave surrounded by both the Democratic Republic of Congo (which older readers may remember as Zaire, the Belgian Congo or Congo Kinshasa) and the Republic of Congo (formerly known as Congo Brazzaville and the French Congo) and despite being an oil rich area has a history of political violence even though the Angolan Civil War ended in 2002.

Premiership Preview

OK, so the definition of ‘tomorrow’ was a bit flexible to say the least, but Saturday is here so let’s have a quick look at the games that feature England internationals. Not surprisingly, the first game of the day is the one with the most England squad members on show: Aston Villa v Chelsea (Sky Sports 1 now) could feature seven players including Emile Heskey, who seems to want to leave Villa in order to improve his chances of making the squad next year; an odd time to start making these comments seeing as though the transfer window doesn’t re-open for a while yet. Still, at least he’s been honest enough to admit it and you have to admire that.

The rest of the weekend games don’t actually feature any fixtures where England players face each other: Steven Gerrard has withdrawn from the Liverpool team that is playing at Sunderland this afternoon and Wayne Rooney won’t be playing for Manchester United against Bolton. No doubt that both of them will be fine for their Champions League games next week.

A game to keep an eye on: Stoke v West Ham. It’s early enough in the season for the Hammers to turn it around but it’s a surprise seeing them in the bottom three: they snapped a three game losing streak with a draw in their last game v Fulham a couple of weeks ago, but Stoke aren’t exactly pushovers at the Britannia.

Couple of items to finish with. The draw for the UEFA playoffs will be made on Monday lunchtime, so we’ll have a reaction to that; and if we can find a transcript of what Sr. Maradona had to say on live TV that’s caused Sepp Blatter to investigate an outbreak of Potty Mouth after the game in Montevideo then that’ll be posted too.

Enjoy your weekend and thanks for reading.

Another win

2-1 this time, goals from Lampard (pen) and Defoe, the Slovenes got one back late in the game. Croatia are drawing 0-0 with Belarus, but there’s only about 20 minutes gone.

Quick Slovenia preview

Slovenia are no mugs internationally speaking: since independence from the old Yugoslavia in 1991, they reached both Euro 2000 and the 2002 World Cup and they are currently ranked 57th in the world and 31st in Europe (which puts them ahead of Wales!) and they lie third in World Cup qualifying group three, two points behind Northern Ireland with three games left to play.

With a population of just over 2 million – about the size of Greater Manchester – it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that nearly all of the squad play outside Slovenia. Their best known player is Robert Koren of West Brom, who also holds the record for the most international appearances. The potential goal scoring threat is Milivoje Novakovic of FC Koln who is a big unit and will test our defenders; on that subject, Gary Cahill of Bolton has been called up to provide cover for Wes Brown and John Terry – it’ll be interesting to see if he gets any playing time today.

Coverage on ITV starts at 4:45pm GMT and we’ll have the result when it comes in; over the next couple of days we’ll have a round up of the rest of today’s qualifiers.

Netherlands 2, England 2

A come from behind…well…draw tonight, I’d say it was the right result despite going in at half time 2-0 down thanks to some decidedly summer holiday kickabout defending by Messers Barry and Ferdinand.  Jermain Defoe scored both our goals and James Milner and Carlton Cole were also impressive.

England playing tonight even though the Prem hasn’t started yet…

The debate whether we have to play a friendly so early in the season is a bit of a non-starter as FIFA decide on these dates, but at least it’s not a qualifier and the Dutch are almost in the same boat as us (the Eredivisie is two games old) – but the big difference is that they have already qualified for the World Cup and we haven’t. We’ll try to get a report up tomorrow, but as it’s a friendly there’s no live stuff planned for this evening; we’ll post the result as soon as we have it.

As something a bit different in the build up to South Africa, we’re going to follow the two dozen or so players who we think might make the final squad for next summer. An interesting fact is that the only player we’re following who doesn’t currently playing in the Premiership is David Beckham (who has been making some headlines of his own recently) - in fact, according to the font of all knowledge that is Wikipedia, there are more members of the current North Korean squad who play in Europe than there are in the England squad.

Basically what we’re going to do is this. Even though the Premiership has yet to start, there are a lot of games this weekend that should feature players from the squad that face the Dutch tonight – barring any injuries of course.

Top of the list are Man U v Birmingham (Sunday 1:30 Sky Sports) and Blackburn v Man City with four England squad members on show, followed by Chelsea v Hull (Saturday 12:45 Sky), Spurs v Liverpool (Sunday 4pm Sky), Aston Villa v Wigan and Wolves v West Ham (all with three England players). Everton v Arsenal (Saturday 5:15 ESPN)features Theo Walcott and Joleon Lescott and last of all (if he plays) David Beckham will be playing for LA Galaxy v Seattle Sounders sometime on Sunday morning when we’re all tucked up in bed.

At the beginning of the following week, we’ll post one liners about the performances from the previous weekends that will outline goals, assists, injuries etc. and hopefully we’ll gradually get a clearer idea of who will make the final squad if/when we qualify.

Kazakhstan Preview

Despite an injury list that would be extremely worrying if the situation was repeated in South Africa next year, we’re going into the next two qualifiers in an extremely favourable position to ensure automatic qualification. We should beat Kazakhstan on Saturday (4:00pm on Setanta, highlights 10:00pm on ITV) and Andorra on Wednesday (7:45pm on ITV), but arguably the most important game in the group is the one between Croatia and the Ukraine, which kicks off at 7:15pm on Saturday: it’s pretty safe to say that if Ukraine lose, they’re unlikely to get to South Africa next summer, leaving the Croats as the only obstacle to overcome.

 

So what do we know about the Kazahk team? Their home record in the World Cup is pretty poor – apart from a 3-0 win over Andorra last August they’ve lost every single one of their other home qualifiers, most recently a 5-1 defeat by Belarus in April. They’re currently ranked 137^th in the world and 47^th(out of 53) in Europe – just worse than Luxembourg – so they’re the second weakest team in our group after Andorra, despite being the ninth largest country in the world. The game is being held in Almaty (which isn’t the capital city but is the largest city in the country), which apparently means ‘full of apples’. The players to watch out for in a squad without a great deal of international experience are striker Sergei Ostapenko (4 goals in 19 appearances) and midfielder Ruslan Baltiev, who is the most capped player in the squad (70). Unusually these days, none of the Kazakh squad play their club football outside the country, although some of them have played abroad (normally in Russia) in the past.

 

The starting England eleven for tomorrow’s game hasn’t been announced at the time of writing, but the main issues are who will be in goal and the composition of the back four. I’d be tempted to give the gloves to Robert Green, who deserves another chance to show what he can do as the other options are Scott Carson (who will be playing in the Championship with West Brom next season) and Paul Robinson. After Rio Ferdinand dropped out, Fabio Capello brought Gary Cahill of Bolton Wanderers in as a replacement central defender, but if Green does start in goal then I think it makes sense for Matt Upson of West Ham to partner John Terry in central defence instead of Joleon Lescott.

 

Currently England are 1/6 favourites to win, with a 2-0 win around 5/1 and Wayne Rooney to score first at about 10/3. I think the two goal margin is a fair one, but having scored in their last twelve consecutive home games I’d be surprised if Kazakhstan don’t score.

Happy St George’s Day

Today is St George’s Day and most of us will still be going to work. As you may know, countries all over the world celebrate their patron saint, for example and the closest to us and probably the most well known, is Saint Patrick’s Day for Ireland!

Here is an interesting quote from Wikipedia on the subject:

“Due to supreme shortshightedness and a virtually complete lack of pride in one’s own country, St George’s Day is not celebrated as much in England as other National Days are around the world; the English populace plods off to work as usual and pays scant attention to the day.”

Well, we know there is pride – loads of it – but it isn’t backed up by any determination to do anything by the forces that be, up there in their ivory towers, to make St George a public holiday..dammit! (woo.. steady we’re breaking our non policitical policy – Ed)

St George’s Day is celebrated by the several nations, kingdoms, countries, and cities of which Saint George is the patron saint, including England, the old kingdoms and counties of the Crown of Aragon in Spain — Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia; Portugal, Cyprus, Georgia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Macedonia, and the cities of Moscow in Russia, Genova in Italy, Ljubljana in Slovenia, Beirut in Lebanon, Qormi and Victoria in Malta and many others.

Visit this website on details of how you can take action http://www.stgeorgesday.com

Anyhoo – Have a GREAT day!