“Despite the first goal, we could have coped with the situation, but the wind totally threw us off balance,” said coach Fatih Terim, after Turkey’s humiliating loss in UEFA Euro 2016 qualifiers against Iceland, a few weeks ago. Furthermore, he pledged to drop the “so-called” stars of the…
An emotional debate over the presence of a Palestinian flag in a stadium drew me in. Dundalk Football Club from Ireland, with a capacity of 4,500, recently made the headlines featuring European football watchdog – UEFA. On July 17th, in their Europa League qualifier loss against Hajduk Split,…
When Clermont Foot 63, a French Ligue 2 team, currently in 14th place in the standings, announced their new Head Coach yesterday, they made history. The new head coach is a 36 year-old Portuguese football genius and a sport science graduate, a former Benfica youth team trainer and…
Few months from today, Manchester City will take a leap into the unknown. Into one of the most intense fixtures in the clubs history, facing Barcelona in the Champions League round of 16, with an attempt at proving their credentials as a genuine European force and the fact…
Re-posting this due to repeated deletes: There seems to be an indisputable mix-up regarding Israeli football from an Arab/Muslim perspective. The dialogue surrounding this issue has generally been airy and indifferent. The entire Muslim community and presumably certain human rights activists had been calling for the boycott of…
According to numerology, wherein the basic notion is that “everything in the world is dependent upon the mystical properties of numbers”, the number 8 resonates with building (power) and at times with destruction (sacrifice). One could also say that the same would apply in football as well. A player wearing the…
Managers of football in general are not just about tactics. They need to know mind manipulation in equal measure. And while there might be other tacticians as good (or better) as Jose Mourinho in the business, there simply is no one who has gotten the mind games to…
I had scripted this article in my head. It was going to be called ‘hit and run’. The Mallorca application had been brilliant. Manuel Pellegrino had dealt with his immense personal pain and brought a Malaga team that has been performing more than it’s worth the past two…