Football (Soccer) News
Erling Haaland impressed despite defeat and Jude Bellingham showed up when his team needed it most
Ederson Brilliant low second-half save from Kylian Mbappé before Erling Haaland strike. Sharp saves early on but poor clearance makes the No 1 culpable for Brahim Díaz’s equaliser. 6
Continue reading...Serhou Guirassy scored one and set up another in Borussia Dortmund’s 3-0 victory at Sporting in their Champions League playoff first leg to put last year’s finalists in the driving seat for a spot in the last 16.
The top scorer in this season’s Champions League headed in his 10th goal of the competition on the hour mark before providing Pascal Gross with a perfect assist to double the lead in the 68th minute.
Continue reading...Jude Bellingham’s injury-time winner shattered an ailing Manchester City, who led twice through Erling Haaland
2012-13 (group stage)
Madrid 3-2 City
City 1-1 Madrid
City 0-0 Madrid
Madrid 1-0 City (agg: 1-0)
Madrid 1-2 City
City 2-1 Madrid (agg: 4-2)
Madrid 1-1 City
City 4-0 Madrid (agg: 5-1)
Madrid 3-3 City
City 1-1 Madrid (agg: 4-4; pens: 3-4)
Continue reading...Brendan Rodgers wants Bayern Munich to experience “hurt” at Celtic Park after taking pride in his team’s European improvement this season.
Bayern’s visit to Glasgow marks the first time since 2013 that Celtic will play knockout Champions League football, with Rodgers contemplating his most significant scalp yet. Celtic are the heavy underdogs to see off the German giants over two legs but Rodgers has challenged his players to keep the tie competitive before they head to the Allianz Arena next week. Slovan Bratislava, RB Leipzig and Young Boys have already been defeated at Celtic Park this season, with the hosts unbeaten in their last half-dozen home European games.
Continue reading...Maya Yoshida started more games and played more minutes than anyone on the Galaxy roster last season. And for that his reward was a pay cut. He's not happy about that.
An injury crisis means Carlo Ancelotti must get creative in the Champions League playoff against Manchester City
Dani Carvajal, Antonio Rüdiger, David Alaba, Éder Militão and Marcelo were in the team photo before the Madrid derby at the Bernabéu on Saturday night. A seriously impressive defence, it was just a pity they weren’t playing. Instead, Marcelo was there so they could pay homage to the full-back, who won 25 trophies with the club, in the week he announced his retirement. The other four had come to join him and support their teammates. None were dressed in white; all are injured.
All of which would be bad enough, but it was about to get worse. The following afternoon, having been named in the squad to travel to Manchester, the captain pulled out too. In the past fortnight Lucas Vázquez had missed visits to Valladolid and Leganés as a precaution but eventually he too fell, calling from home after Sunday’s training session to say something wasn’t right in his thigh. He was the backup, a midfielder at full-back, albeit one who has played there for so long now that it has become his default role. There have been 36 injuries at Madrid this season, 26 of them muscular.
Continue reading...Goals from Daniel Muñoz and Justin Devenny earned Crystal Palace a 2-0 win at Doncaster and a last-16 tie at home to Millwall
1 min: The Palace fans have travelled up the M1 and M18 in numbers. It looks freezing cold. Doncaster engage the old high press and forced Matt Turner to lose the ball.
Oliver Glasner’s turtle-neck jumper rather unfortunately reminds of the U-Boat captain in Dad’s Army. Don’t tell him, Pike.
Continue reading...On the eve of Real Madrid’s Champions League playoff first leg at Manchester City, Carlo Ancelotti billed the clash between the sides as a “clásico”.
Madrid’s trip to the Etihad Stadium on Tuesday night and the return at the Santiago Bernabéu on Wednesday next week will be the fifth time in six years the sides have played each other in the knockout phase. While the Spanish and English champions have each previously progressed twice, Ancelotti was clear about how he rates encounters between them.
Continue reading...Lifelong Argyle fan Jed Griffiths was at Home Park for the victory over Liverpool in 1956 and Sunday’s FA Cup shock
As snapshots of a lifetime spent following Plymouth Argyle, two wins against Liverpool, almost 70 years apart, stand out for Jed Griffiths. Few among the Home Park faithful attended both but Griffiths, a proud member of the Green Army since 1953, was there for the 4-0 win on 11 February 1956 in the old Second Division, his beloved club’s previous defeat of Liverpool. As for the FA Cup fourth-round giantkilling on Sunday, when the Championship strugglers sank the Premier League leaders, it was “one of the highlights of my footballing life”.
In 1956, Griffiths was a schoolboy at Devonport High school, watching the game from the old “Pop Side” of the old Home Park. “No seats in those days,” he says. “We were opposite the grandstand, and we younger kids would get passed down the front, and we hung on the railings for a closeup view.”
Continue reading...Blackburn Rovers have “reluctantly granted” their manager, John Eustace, permission to speak to fellow Championship side Derby County.
Eustace confirmed after Sunday’s 2-0 FA Cup defeat to Wolves that Derby had made an official approach for his services. The relegation-threatened Rams are seeking a replacement for Paul Warne, who was sacked on Friday.
Continue reading...Plymouth showed the world’s oldest football competition still has life but Arne Slot won’t be too worried despite his team winning just five of their last 11 games
It was, it has to be acknowledged, a much-changed Liverpool lineup. Of the 11 players who began Sunday’s FA Cup fourth-round match at Plymouth Argyle, only Luis Díaz had made more than 10 league starts this season and only three others had made more than five. Even allowing for that, Plymouth’s victory registers as one of the great shocks of recent times, only the fourth time the leader of the Premier League has ever gone out of the competition to lower-division opposition.
As their quietly charismatic 42-year-old Bosnian coach Miron Muslić pointed out afterward, it was a day that will go down in Plymouth’s history, that will be recalled for generations, as a one-off result more impressive than anything they achieved in reaching the semi-final in 1983-84. It was Liverpool’s ninth defeat to lower-league opposition this century but, in terms of the scale of the shock, it felt perhaps most akin to their exit against non-league Worcester City in 1959 when they were a second-flight club, a defeat that precipitated the decline that led to Phil Taylor making way for the great Bill Shankly.
Continue reading...Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now!
While ecstatic Plymouth Argyle fans almost certainly cared not one whit that they couldn’t recognise some of the faces in the Liverpool side their basement-dwelling Championship side knocked out of the FA Cup on Sunday, there were no end of media buzz-kills on hand to talk down their achievement. The fact that Arne Slot had spared almost all of his big-name heavy artillery the long trip to Devon was immediately raised, although we can only guess if the presence of Alisson, Mo Salah, Cody Gakpo, Virgil van Dijk, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Ryan Gravenberch, Dominik Szoboszlai, Alexis Mac Allister and Ibrahima Konaté in their side might have led to a more impressive Liverpool performance. You can only beat what’s in front of you and while it’s true that Liverpool’s line-up certainly had an early pre-season friendly feel about it, the atmosphere at Home Park did not and could only have been more febrile if a visiting Scouser had been caught putting jam on their half-time scone before the clotted cream.
How KCTV gets the footage is a mystery … there is no studio. It’s straight into the game, which carries Korean commentary from KCTV over the crowd noise. Most homes appear to have TV these days and KCTV is the most widely received national network, so most homes are able to watch” – a report by US website 38 North reveals that a heavily censored version of the Premier League is now being beamed into North Korea though we doubt Richard Masters will be paying the country a visit to discuss any possible copyright breach.
Perhaps Big Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s inspiration can come from the owners of Football Manager and officially bin MU25 for similar ‘delays and technical hitches’ (Friday’s Football Daily, full email edition), although I doubt a refund would create a ‘huge disappointment’ among its fanbase. Aiming for a MU26 launch date of around November sounds about right as well” – Ian Potter.
Rich Goldthorpe’s twin-fandom combination of Manchester United and St Albans City tore at my heartstrings (Football Daily letters passim), but sadly I can go one better (worse). United, my team since childhood more than 50 years ago, and St Albans City – now my home – are accompanied by my original home team, Grantham Town. The Gingerbreads are currently hurtling out of the Northern Premier League Midlands division in the wrong direction for a second successive relegation. Fourteen points from 28 games with only Walsall Wood below them and that’s because Walsall have no points at all after folding earlier this year. I don’t even know what division lies below the NPLM. This has been a year to look away from the results and hope for better things next year. Still, once you’ve got your team(s) you’ve got them for good … or in this case bad” – David Fryer.
If Arne Slot wanted an option on the bench, he should have picked Djimi Traoré. He could always pull out an unforgettable goal playing against lower league opposition, that lad. What? Well, John Aldridge then, surely to be relied on to put it away in a clutch FA cup situation. Yes, I’m still so bitter” – Jon Millard
This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
Continue reading...State TV has started broadcasting matches, albeit with heavy-handed intervention of Pyongyang regime’s censors
TV viewers in North Korea have to endure more than their fair share of war films – in which there can be only one victor, news reports delivered with revolutionary gusto and breathless Kim dynasty propaganda.
But even for a country as wary of outside influences as North Korea, it appears unable to resist the lure of Premier League football – the most-watched sport on the nation’s TV screens. Just don’t expect to see any live action, let alone Gary Lineker presenting in his underpants.
Continue reading...Mateo Retegui and Moise Kean are firing Atalanta and Fiorentina up the table and themselves into Spalletti’s plans
It feels like only yesterday that Roberto Mancini was lamenting the scarce selection of centre-forwards available to him as Italy manager. He returned to the theme repeatedly through his final few months in the job, highlighting how few domestic players were even starting up front for the nation’s top clubs. “It makes things difficult for us,” he said. “Let’s hope it’s not an irreversible phenomenon.”
Luciano Spalletti has not dwelled on this subject since he succeeded Mancini in the role, but plenty of others were ready to say it for him as Italy crashed out early from Euro 2024. Starting up front in their last-16 defeat to Switzerland was Gianluca Scamacca, making his 20th appearance for Italy and yet to score his second goal. The only other recognised No 9 in the squad was Mateo Retegui, who had struck a modest seven times in his first Serie A season with Genoa.
Continue reading...A much-travelled former FA Cup hero for Cambridge against Newcastle now has Crystal Palace in his sights
Subscribers to the theory that the FA Cup has lost its magic have clearly never met Joe Ironside. It is now more than three years since the Doncaster striker experienced one of the very best days of his life when he scored the winning goal for his former team Cambridge United in a wildly celebrated third-round upset at Newcastle.
“What a day, what a really special day,” says Ironside as he looks forward to Crystal Palace’s visit to South Yorkshire for Monday night’s fourth-round tie. “The celebrations afterwards are something I’m going to remember for a lifetime but, although my memories are all happy, the game itself is a bit of a blur. The one thing I can remember was the VAR check for offside after I’d scored. It was only about three minutes but it felt so long.”
Continue reading...