For Beautifully Red: Reinventing the Heel
This was written for Beautifully Red, the United site dedicated to cataloguing the beautiful moments that might normally pass us by… These days in the Prem, when the ball flashes across the box a little behind the striker after an over-cooked cut back, or perhaps as the result of the attacking player mistiming their run towards the near […]
Smile: It Might Never Happen Again
I was always going to get behind Antonio Valencia, as the prerequisite for most of my more intense player-crushes tends to be born out of empathy. Tony arrived as the underdog, coming into a team to play the role of punching bag for the fans, as their malcontent with a team recently stripped of two of it’s most […]
Danny Don’t Dance
Action begets reaction, which begets action, which begets reaction, and once a situation develops, the effects can be far reaching – in some cases resulting in an impasse. I’ve written about Fergie’s “public telling off” of Danny for “showing off a bit” before (with regards to it’s impact on Danny), but on further reflection, a […]
What’s eating Wayne Rooney?
The Euros, A.N. Other tournament where Wayne Rooney didn’t perform to a level expected of him, or for that matter anywhere even near it. He may not have had a spacecraft on hand to help him reach the heights of the outer stratosphere – as some might expect – but those sorts of lame excuses […]
Fare Thee Well Sir Michael of Owen
Football has a way of screwing with time. I know this because of one simple fact: I’m older than Michael Owen. Insane isn’t it? How could this have happened? I was only a teenager when he started gleefully rubbing his hands together on my telly. It’s just not right. I didn’t used to like Michael […]
Middle Men: Who should stay? Who should go? Who should replace them?
As we have come to expect around the time when the transfer window flaps open, we are once again inundated with speculation as to who will come in and fill the gaping holes in our midfield. We can surely expect at least one arrival to ease our midfield malaise. Did you here that David Gill? […]
You can stick your whistle up your arse
This article originally appeared in Issue 15 of the Football United Fanzine available to view here To the foot stomping outrage of some fans, there exists statistical evidence which points to the fact that United don’t concede less, or win more penalties at home than other clubs, so we can finally put the myth that refereeing decisions favour the big clubs […]
Would you have Tevez back?
I would! *ducks behind desk* Feel free to projectile spew your vitriol in my direction below… (And I will happily defend why *I would* in reply to any comments)
Too Much, Too Young
I can’t speak for you … well, unless you’d like me too? I mean, this would be a lot easier if we could all just agree, right? No? You’re sure? Okay. Thought not. Good. Great. So, we can all agree to disagree on some things. Great. I mean, it’s not like you have to attend every argument you’re invited to is […]
My Winter of Disconnect
From an objective point of view, this season football has nudged itself ever closer towards a warped manifestation of utopia. It has lunged violently between menacingly good and astonishingly bad, intermittently grotesque and overtly sentimental. Aesthetes of stats and figures, connoisseurs of footy ‘lols’, perpetuaters of intellectual discourse, bastions of good old fashioned tribalism have all been nourished from […]
The Fairytale of Dwight Yorke
As gunshots rang out and ricocheted across Villa Park, a figure with his pants around his ankles, waddled clumsily into the back of the waiting getaway car. The tyres screeched away as 12.6 million pounds spilled from the inside of the cab and was hurriedly gathered by the bumbling villa-gers, and thus setting in motion one of the single […]
Who would you prefer – Welbeck or Balotelli?
We’re not going to show any bias towards our choice – that just wouldn’t be fair on Balotelli. So, of the two young whippersnappers, which would you rather have in your team’s starting eleven?