Thirty years after they beat Leeds, Rangers go from being biggest fish in a tiny pond to chasing shadows against LiverpoolFor Rangers, Wednesday 4 November 1992 was as good as it got in movies such as this. As Mark Hateley smashed the Scottish champions in front inside five minutes at Elland Road, cross‑border needle which had extended to the press box morphed into outright celebration. Rangers and their fans felt they were not sufficiently praised for a first‑leg victory in this Champions League clash with Leeds United. Hateley’s goal, later backed up by an Ally McCoist strike before Eric Cantona claimed a Leeds consolation, secured the tie for Walter Smith’s side – a side, that is, which was dominated by...
The Norwegian’s influence sometimes looked lacking against Dortmund but his patience again proved devastatingErling Haaland poses the professional writer a problem. Most of the time, he doesn’t do very much. He jogs towards the ball. He jogs away from the ball. He prowls and waits.He had a grand total of 26 touches, which is quite a lot by his standards, but still comfortably fewer than both goalkeepers. And so discussing Haaland’s influence becomes something of an unsatisfying binary, pivoting around a single volatile question: did he score or not? If he did, his contribution is likely to have been decisive. If not, then you’ve spent 90 minutes watching a tall blonde man look at things. Continue reading...
Huge transfer fees ensure the continent’s elite competition remains a closed shop only a handful are capable of winningBarcelona, with their Johan Cruyff-influenced idea of the game, were once more than just a club. Today, despite high debts, they operate like all the rest. They invest on a scale that very few can afford. Barça officials know that the market will grow for years. So the annual balance sheet doesn’t count for them; they calculate in decades.Barça bought Robert Lewandowski, among others, for €45m from Bayern Munich this summer. He is 34 and does not represent the continuation of tiki-taka. But he has been top scorer in the Bundesliga seven times. Continue reading...
Reference to Hillsborough in pre-match intelligence points to negligence of French police in dealing with Liverpool fansThe truly shocking revelation about the disastrous approach of the French police at the Champions League final in Paris appeared in plain sight in the first, flawed official report into the near-disaster released last Friday. Perhaps unwittingly from the report’s author, Michel Cadot, an official working in France’s sports ministry, it illuminated most clearly so far why European football’s showpiece evening descended into brutality and chaos.The single sentence about police “intelligence” before the match has provided the first glimpse of an explanation as to why the officers were so tooled-up, and acted like self-appointed last-ditch defenders of civilisation rather than guardians of safety for...
Were the indignities experienced by fans a large-scale outbreak of bureaucratic incompetence or something more sinister?For once it is the still photos that capture the scene better than the videos. Were one to base one’s impression of the hellscape in Paris on Saturday night on the grainy, shaky moving footage alone, one would probably conclude it was a lawless, seething moshpit of disorder: of youths scaling spiked fences, gates being rattled and clattered, a ceaseless stream of teargas and baton charges. But the overwhelming sensation being conveyed by the thousands of fans massed outside the Stade de France was stasis: the quiet, festering frustration of nothing moving, nothing changing, nothing happening, a sea of thwarted humanity waiting patiently for hour...