Monthly Archives: January 2012

31 JAN

The Sweetest Success Of All

By Natalie Whitehouse

There is one feeling in football that surpasses the rest in terms of pure jubilation: promotion to the Premier League. Whether it’s the sense of belonging to the elite twenty, or simply the anticipation of the season ahead, one thing’s for sure: everyone wants to be part of the best league in the world.

For the majority of teams, promotion England’s top flight means a giant step into the unknown with one aim: survival. And if your team’s mission is accomplished, the reality is that the next few seasons will be building on what you have in order to avoid relegation or “second season syndrome” as it is often so aptly labeled. A team who has excelled in the department of overcoming the relegation hurdle and fully establishing themselves in the Premier League are Midland’s high-flyers Stoke City. The Potters were promoted to the top flight in 2008 and have since finished in comfortable positions in the league table, reached the 2011 FA Cup final and are currently flying the flag for the Midlands in the Europa League. Read More »

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26 JAN

Paul McCarthy’s tips for Aspiring Football Writers

Former ‘News of the World’ sports editor Paul McCarthy gives his advice to entrants to the Barclays Aspiring Football Writer competition and discusses the impact of social media and blogging on sports journalism.

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23 JAN

Clint Dempsey: Worth His Weight In Goals?

By Michael Timbury

Debatably, Clint Dempsey is the best player in the Barclays Premier League not playing for a team considered as one of the ‘big six’. Of course Liverpool’s occupation of seventh place in the table muddy the waters a little as to whom exactly makes up the big six so perhaps it’s clearer to refer to them as the ‘glamour’ clubs in the league. However, I digress.

Having scored his first Premier League hatrick in Fulham’s  5 – 2 victory over Newcastle this past weekend, the vastly underrated value of Dempsey was plain for all to see. His first was a typical demonstration of the impeccable timing coupled with a sheer desire to score goals that Dempsey has displayed over his five years in England. Read More »

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23 JAN

From Russia with love?

By Charles Scott

Location aside, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham have little in common, something that suits their own fans down to the ground. They do however share one similarity. Each has invested large sums of money on highly rated Russian internationals in recent years without seeing any kind of positive return. Despite promising much and impressing at first, Arsenal’s Andrey Arshavin, Tottenham’s Roman Pavlyuchenko and Yuri Zhirkov, formerly of Chelsea, have all failed to shine in London. Read More »

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22 JAN

Match report: Fulham 5-2 Newcastle United

By Tom Sizeland

Clint Dempsey scored a hat-trick, as Fulham overcame a dreary first half performance to send Newcastle crashing to defeat.

Danny Guthrie opened the scoring on the 43rd minute, with a fantastic strike on the edge of the penalty box. A controversial penalty allowed Danny Murphy to level the game, but a Dempsey brace and a Bobby Zamora penalty quickly took Fulham to an unassailable 4-1 lead. Hatem Ben Arfa brought one back with a decent individual effort in the 85th minute, before Dempsey secured his hat-trick in the last minute of normal time.  Read More »

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21 JAN

Loyalty in Football

By David Johnson

Loyalty is an incredibly intriguing concept within the realm of football. There seems to be no middle ground on the issue with fans completely polarized on the morals or lack thereof of modern footballers. Some feel that it is an inevitable by-product of the wealth that has been injected into the game. As it is often put, if you were offered twice your current salary to do the same job while working for a more prestigious firm, could you turn it down? Read More »

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20 JAN

Revenge shouldn’t be Arsenal’s motivation on Sunday

By David Hastings

This weekend will see reigning Premier League champions Manchester United visit Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium. The match offers the home side a chance to partly extinguish memories of the worst day in Arsène Wenger’s time in charge of The Gunners, when they were humiliated 8-2 at Old Trafford last August.

The ruthlessness with which United tore the visitors apart in that game will live long in the memory of players, fans and anyone else connected with the club. Arsenal will be desperate for victory on Sunday to restore some pride, but if they become obsessed with the idea of revenge, they will open themselves up for more pain and embarrassment. Read More »

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19 JAN

Swansea FC: A brief history of the ultimate yo-yo team

By Jamie Rose

Swansea Football Club, since its inception in 1912, has experienced the sort of rise and slump extremities that lead one to assume they must, over the years, have been run on the basis of some strange rotation system exclusive to near-messianic legends and the clinically insane. Read More »

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13 JAN

Craig Bellamy: Bargain of the season?

By Seb Pearce

Transfer deadline day: a frantic day of big-money moves, rumours and reporters camped outside every football ground in the country anticipating the arrival of a potential transfer. Away from all the multi-million pound moves, it seems that the best piece of transfer deadline day business, made by Kenny Dalglish’s Liverpool, crept under the radar.

Liverpool were notably busy during the summer of 2011, shelling out well over £50 million for the services of Jordan Henderson, Charlie Adam, Jose Enrique, Sebastián Coates and Stewart Downing. All young players full of promise and potential. Despite Dalglish’s spending, it appears that his cheapest acquisition, Welsh striker Craig Bellamy, has been his most successful. Read More »

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13 JAN

Why the Barclays Premier League Reigns Over Spain

By Will Van de Wiel

The recent migration of Premier League luminaries like Cristiano Ronaldo, Xabi Alonso and ‘Cesc Fabregas to the Iberian peninsula, has led those with a continental bias to proclaim La Liga as the world’s best football league.

Witness the recent FIFA awards – nine of the World XI hailed from Spain. Of that nine, five were from Barcelona, a powerful indicator of the ideological hegemony the tiki-taka ethos currently enjoys on the world stage.

But the Premier League is a behemoth – beaming football matches every weekend to some 600 million people around the globe. So which is better? Read More »

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