zequist

Some injury hits for Arsenal on the defensive side coming out of yesterday's CL game. Gallas is done for the year, and the keeper Almunia will be out for a couple of weeks. Probably not critical losses, as they have capable backups, but it may sting a bit.

Easter is hardly a "cult" holiday. It's celebrated by billions of people in the western world, Christians and non-Christians alike. Even the ones who aren't religious still get into the secular fun of it with things like egg decorating and baskets of goodies and family get-togethers. Even if I weren't religious, it would still have plenty of meaning to me just for all the memories of time spent re-united with family over the years. That said, I do agree with you that it shouldn't affect the sporting calendar. Even in the United States, which is a more churchgoing country than the UK, Easter has never affected our sporting calendar for at least as far back as I can remember. This year on Easter Sunday they'll be playing a full slate of 15 pro baseball games, 7 NBA basketball games, a couple of NHL hockey games, AND the final round of The Masters. Basically, among the sports that anyone cares about, only NASCAR is taking Easter Sunday off - for every other league it's business as usual.

(quote from the link): "whilst also feeling sorry for those season-ticket holders forced with the agonising choice of celebrating Easter at church or watching the match." Yes, I'd imagine that it's pretty difficult to be a member of two religions when their requirements come into conflict with each other.

We've been discussing that already over in the "Hughes on Jo" thread. Opinions are still mixed, as they probably should be at this stage.

I love me some good stats, and this one's pretty good. This covers the 30 relegations from the Premier League between 1998 and 2007 (making '07 the cutoff so that everyone's had at least one shot at promotion). 10 of the 30 came back to the Premiership within two years of relegation (6 came back at the first opportunity, 4 at the second opportunity). 4 of the 30 eventually made it back after an intermediate amount of time, from 3 years (Bolton) up to as many as six years (Watford, Palace). The remaining 16 of the 30 (over half!) are STILL in the lower divisions to this day. This shows a pretty clear trend - teams that go down either bounce back quickly or they don't bounce back at all. There's very little middle ground. Which makes sense because the financial gulf between levels has gotten so huge, but it also means these Boro fans I'm hearing who think their team can go down for a year, shed some payroll, and come back "leaner and meaner" could be in for a rude shock if the "for a year" part doesn't work out. If you want your team leaner and meaner, it's a hell of a risky way to do it. Just ask Leeds, Leicester City, Southampton, and Charlton.

I loved this quote from one of the Manc fans: "Ah Ok! That's what the strategy was. So, since Hughes can't put together a team to beat them, we send our players out to other teams to do it for us. Great job Hughes!" Classic stuff!

Well, today was a good start. Seven more games like this one, and he might actually make it a tough decision for Moyes.

Second that - all three really stood out. You could easily make a MOTM case for any of them.

And to bring it full circle, the Mexicans have rehired Javier Aguirre, who was their coach at the '02 World Cup and was just sacked by the other Madrid (Atletico) a couple of months ago. Eriksson's business manager says his first choice would be to coach in the Premiership again, though.

More on Zaki's absence - Steve Bruce basically throwing him under the bus: http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id...and&cc=5901

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/socc...d.ap/index.html Same old problems with the Mexicans. They can't lose at home, they can't win on the road (especially against the USA, which probably rankles them more than anything else), and the head coaches are still hamstrung by all the internal politics of team selection in that country. I doubt the next coach - or any future coach - will fare any better than Sven, until there are fundamental changes in the way their national team is run.

Adebayor has 12 goals and 8 assists in all competitions in only 28 games played, and he's Arsenal's second-leading scorer this year after Van Persie. If that's a bad season, we could do with a few more of Everton's players having bad seasons.

You're not only biased, you're crazy. Look, Cahill is one of my favorite players in the world, but one of the ten best in the league? No effing way. Not even his mother would call him one of the ten best players in the league! One of the ten most valuable to his team? Unquestionably. One of the ten scrappiest players in the league? Very possibly. One of the ten best players among teams outside the Big Four? You could maybe make a case. One of the ten best in the whole league, period? No. Not even close. As for Modric, I'm not even going to go there. If I'm picking the top ten mids and strikers, I'm going with Gerrard, Ronaldo, Lampard, Essien, Fabregas, Torres, Berbatov, Adebayor, Rooney, and Drogba, in no particular order. That's based partly on current form and partly on historic form (like I can't overlook the fact that Adebayor scored 24 goals last year, while Van Persie in his best year had 13).

Looks like she's taken up boxing! http://www.dailypost.co.uk/sport-news/2009...55578-23193153/ Got some better pictures too. Here's an old Bluekipper article from a couple of years ago: http://www.bluekipper.com/club/0607/club2.htm Scroll all the way down to the very bottom. And a more recent one in fighting pose: http://forums.walesonline.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=5505 I know I'M sure looking in the right places!

Of course, he's right that the Premier League wants to make money. Money is the whole reason the Premier League clubs broke away from the Football League in the first place! But, considering his and FIFA's history over the last couple of decades, the way he seems to be acting like his agenda is purely motivated by high-minded idealism and love for the game just absolutely reeks of hypocrisy.

Maybe I just have a different perspective as an American, Bill, because I'm so used to watching young players in this country, especially 18-22 year olds, developing and improving right before my eyes on television. University sports are all over the TV here, secondary school sports are starting to get TV coverage - hell, even the little league world series (youth baseball) gets massive amounts of TV coverage, and those are 12 year olds playing! Most of the guys who make it to the pros in this country have been playing their sport year-round since they were 8 or 9, and despite that most of them are STILL developing their games for several more years even after they reach the highest level. It is very rare to see a player step into a pro league at 18 or 19 and play with the poise and smarts of a 15-year veteran. It does happen, but only on very, very, VERY rare occasions...99.999% of the players who go to the pros do not step in and play their best ball right from day one. So it is strongly ingrained in the culture of sports fans in this country to give players at least two or three years to adapt and learn how to play at the top level before we write them off as busts, especially if they demonstrated a high degree of potential at the lower levels - youth leagues, university, lesser pro leagues, and so on. If you told a sports fan in this country that a player who is 17, or even 21, should already be just as good as he will be at 25 or 30, you'd get a lot of very strange looks, because that's completely contrary to all the evidence we see on television in this country every day. NOBODY here would expect a 21 year old to be as good as he will be at 25 or 30, unless it's one of those sports like gymnastics or figure skating where 16 is the prime of their career and 25 is retirement age. But in a team sport, someone who's 25 still has at least a good ten or fifteen years in front of him if he stays healthy. Now there's one thing where I will agree with you - having the physical ability to kick butt is important, and if you don't have the right physical tools your sports career is going to be pretty short. If a guy starts off his career as a high level pro and it's obvious within just a few games that he's completely overmatched, then no, not even American fans are going to give him three years to learn, and most likely neither is the team. You might notice, for instance, that I'm not arguing with the people who have written off Segundo Castillo. But when guys do have the skills, it's often that mental side that makes the difference between the superstar, the ordinary pro, and the bust. In other words, learning how to kick butt is also an important piece of the puzzle, and that's the part that the majority of young players need to be allowed the time to figure out. If you show me a player who hasn't improved his game since he was 17, who doesn't learn from past mistakes and still makes the typical young player's error of relying too much on his talent and not enough on tactics and smart play, then I'll show you a player who's either poorly coached, dumb as a rock, or so lazy that he can't be arsed to work hard enough to make himself a better pro. But to say that young players should be capable of playing like seasoned veterans, which is what you seem to be stating or implying, well sorry, but when it comes to the vast majority of professional athletes across all team sports that's just not been my experience. A very select few might be able to pull that off, but normally it just doesn't happen.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm done with this one. I've spent too much time on it already and all three possible answers I've come up with have either been shot down or already eliminated by Jimmy's hints. And yeah, I am a little frustrated about that. <_<

This is a perfect example of the same thing I was trying to say when everyone was getting on Fellaini a few weeks ago. Players at 17, 19, 21 are still learning how to be professionals. A player can have all the physical gifts in the world and still be a failure because he never grasps the mental side of the game, or because he's so immature that he lets his emotions dictate his performance. We have a saying for athletes like that in the US - "million dollar body, ten cent head." Conversely, a player of limited ability can still carve out a long and successful career for himself if he's smart and able to make the most of what he does have. But a lot of that mental attitude, at both ends of the spectrum, is a product of maturity and experience. That is something most players that young simply do not have yet, even the best ones (for instance, look at the 30-year-old Tiger Woods vs. the 20-year-old Tiger Woods - as good as he was then, he's that much better now, after ten years of being a pro). And that's why I'm reluctant to treat any player too harshly at that age. Some will remain immature idiots their entire careers, of course, as the likes of Riquelme will attest, but most of them will grow out of it eventually. Now if they simply cannot play, that's different. But we know Fellaini can play when his head's in the game, and I assume Lukas can play as well, or else Moyes wouldn't have forked out £1m to buy him and the Polish U21 program wouldn't have him on their radar screen. As embarrassing as it is, this is a good learning experience for young Lukas, and if he takes it to heart it will make him a better player in the long run. At the least, I hope it will teach him to trust his coaches, that if they make a move they have a good reason for it, even if he can't see it.

I think I might have it. Lake Byron, in Volusia County, Florida Nelson's column, in Trafalgar Square and the Four Seasons Hotel at Canary Wharf, which is on the banks of the Thames Put them together and you get the Byron Nelson Championship, which is played annually at the Four Seasons Resort in the Dallas, Texas area.

Excerpt from "The Fifth Official"'s column this week, which pretty much sums up my thoughts on the issue as well:

Their concession to making it "tougher" to qualify was to take away the berth that the FA Cup runner-up used to get if the winner qualified for Champions League. Now if that happens it simply goes to the next-highest team in the standings, like the Carling Cup berth does. So a team like Millwall can no longer make it to Europe merely by virtue of losing the FA Cup Final to one of the Big Four - if they want to go to Europe now they would either have to win the trophy outright or else get themselves back into the Premiership and then finish high enough in the standings.

Terry Thomas ain't famous for any film roles in America that I know of (in fact, this American ain't never heard of him). Can you tell us roughly the era when this film actor would have been at or around the peak of his career? Or would that give too much away?

The uncalled-for "small club" poke aside, he is right about at least one thing, and that's the fact that managers at top clubs are frequently expected to not only win, but "win pretty." Most famously in recent years was Fabio Capello leading Real Madrid to their first league title in five years in '07, and getting fired anyway because he didn't win it with enough style. I see at least two problems with this writer's premise right away, though. The first problem is that in his rush to declare Moyes unfit for Man U, he's forgetting or ignoring the fact that "too negative" was also a criticism that was frequently directed at Mourinho when he was at Chelsea, and supposedly one of the factors in Abramovich pushing him out the door. So IF for the sake of argument we were to accept his assertion that Moyes' tactics are too conservative for Man U, then we must also disqualify The Special One for the job (as well as many other big-name managers), for the same reason. The second problem I have is the underlying presumption in his article that a conservative manager will always and forever be conservative. That may be true of some managers, but then you'll have others like Otto Rehhagel, who had a very successful 15-year run at Werder Bremen playing up-tempo, flashy, attacking football, and then turned around and led the Greeks to the Euro 2004 title by playing a very negative, defensive, and (in many people's opinions) boring style of football. So I don't necessarily buy that premise either.

And if you look at the millions of dollars that AIG executives got paid in salaries and bonuses while they were busy sending the entire global economy into the tank, £40000 a week for a national team-caliber backliner looks like a pretty good deal.

Richard Briers shares a name with the late Wendy Richard, who was a major contributor to Macmillan Cancer Support. I'm probably way off base, but it is a connection!