World Football Postulant

Kevin Keegan, today, made it official.  He has resigned as manager of Newcastle United FC.  This comes after a week of speculation as to whether he was still with the club.  Word had leaked on Monday that he had been fired, a rumor the club later refused.  With news outlets monitoring the team’s facility, noting Keegan’s parking spot had been empty all week, there w ere only so many secrets that could be kept.  After releasing a statement through the League Manager’s Association today, Keegan made it official.  Newcastle has lost their manager.
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Aston Villa’s Martin O’Neill is one of the most respected managers in the Premiership, and though his Sunday counterpart is highly scrutinized, Liverpool’s Rafa Benitez is also very highly regarded.  But after Sunday’s match at Villa Park, you would not have been able to convince anybody new to the Premiership that either manager deserved their reputations.  Each had his team play negative football, with the inevitable 0-0 outcome predictable from the match’s opening moments.

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Owen Hargreaves had been expected to return to Manchester United’s lineup today against Zenit St. Petersburg in the UEFA Super Cup.  Although Alex Ferguson was going to use the exhibition as an opportunity to get the England international some playing time, the midfielder has been ruled out of today’s match after his knee was deemed not ready for the match.  Having already ruled himself out of England’s internationals next week, Hargreaves will have two more weeks to get fit for Manchester United’s trip to Anfield on August 13.

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Michael Ballack hurt his foot against Portsmouth on August 14 and had to leave the match.  He played last week, though it seems he probably should not have, as Chelsea has sufficient depth to prevent aggrevating injuries,  Now Ballack will be out for two weeks, missing Sunday’s match against Tottenham as well as Germany’s two World Cup qualifiers.

It is an injury which, like Steven Gerrard’s, seems convenient.  Continue Reading »

Newcastle United midfielder James Milner has joined Aston Villa. The former England U21 international has submitted a transfer request last week in what has become a highly publicized wantaway saga. Over the last two days, the transfer request become known after the club had asked the player and his representation to keep his August 20 request private. The Professional Footballer’s Association was brought in to help in what became a dispute after the news of his transfer request leaked.

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One of the more exciting days of the European club football season is the day the Champions League group stage is drawn.

The 32 teams that have qualified for the group stage are drawn into eight, four-team groups.  Before that happens, all teams are broken into four pots, labeled A through D, where they are grouped according to a team’s strength (as determined by a formula called a coefficient).  Each of the eight groups can have no more than one team from each pot, no more than one team from a country.  The eight groups end up pretty even.

The draw is fun because you end up with a series of matches which, in addition to being high profile based on the quality of the teams involved, are rare.  In the days before the draw, you start considering the possibilities and potential story lines:  Chelsea and Fiorentina in a group, forcing Adrian Mutu to play the club he owes £14 million; Marseille being slotted with Arsenal months after having sold them Samir Nasri, and potentially getting Bayern Munich in the group, so they would have to face Franck Ribery; Barcelona being slotted with a Zenit St. Petersburg team whose star, Andrei Arshavin, so badly wanted to play at Camp Nou; FC Porto being grouped with Inter Milan and facing Jose Mourinho.

Here’s how the eight groups ended up being drawn, with the clubs listed in order of the group they were drawn from:  A to D.  Continue Reading »

After Liverpool’s defeat of Standard Liège, it was announced that Steven Gerrard would undergo surgery Thursday morning to correct a groin problem that has bothered him for the last month. The Reds’ captain decided to play through the pain this weekend against Middlesbrough as well as tonight, though against the Belgian champions he was a none factor and Rafa Benitez probably would have been better served with somebody else in the lineup. That Liverpool does not have somebody to fill that spot may have contributed to the decision to play Gerrard, and thanks to the upcoming break in the club schedule for World Cup qualifiers, Liverpool should only have to go one match without Stevie G.

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Liverpool may be one of the eight teams in the top pool for tomorrow’s Champions League group stage draw, but they were the closest of the thirty-two teams to being out of the tournament after the final round of qualifying finished today.

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It will be suggested that Middlesbrough was done wrong on Saturday, and if you look at how and when Liverpool scored their two goals, the suggestion is persuasive.  But Liverpool’s 2-1 victory is no more unjust than Middlesbrough’s 1-0 win would have been.  That both of the Reds’ goals came after the 85th minute - one deflection from a Jamie Carragher shot; another, a laser beam from Steven Gerrard - is an irony of timing.  It does nothing to change the rest of the match, a rather evenly played affair that had Liverpool continue their struggles in the opponent’s third.  For Middlesbrough, the match showed Gareth Southgate’s team may be ready to take another step forward in spite of their loss. Continue Reading »

If you read my EPL preview over at American Soccer Reader, you know I think highly of Middlesbrough’s chances this season. I picked them to finish ninth, and the simulation I wrote saw them as having a outside but meaningful chance at finishing in the top seven. But given a chance to pick Boro when they hosted a team of similar standing (by the prediction) to open the season, I picked the visitor.

That’s because that visitor was Tottenham. Continue Reading »