Harry Maguire can build on England display, N’Golo Kanté plays against the league’s best ball-winner and Everton face a character testWith Trent Alexander-Arnold injured, Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mané still physically and emotionally recuperating from Tuesday’s World Cup qualifying playoff in Dakar – complete with extra time, penalties and laser beams – various South Americans making late returns from distant internationals and the first leg of a Champions League quarter-final to come on Tuesday, there could hardly be a better time for a plucky underdog to turn up at Anfield. But even allowing for the massive advantages the division’s leading clubs hold over the upstarts, Watford’s record at their grounds is abysmal: in all competitions since 1990 the Hornets have...
Riverside’s sparse away end a symbol of visitors’ ongoing crisis, but also of the deep dysfunction at the heart of the gameThe Riverside has been no stranger to the sight of empty seats in recent years, but on Saturday those that surrounded the 700 or so Chelsea fans who had managed to buy tickets before Roman Abramovich was sanctioned by the UK government told not of Middlesbrough’s troubles but a more poignant story of the state of English football.Football’s capacity to normalise the most ludicrous scenarios is remarkable. It is only three weeks since Abramovich declared his intention to hand over “stewardship and care” of the club to its trustees and yet that already feels at least two major news...
Midfielder’s energy, creativity and goals mark him out but what if he becomes no more than a squad player at Chelsea?Conor Gallagher’s man-of-the-match display against Manchester City on Monday was further sign of the fantastic season he is enjoying at Crystal Palace. He covered 12.5km in 90 minutes and said “I can’t feel my legs” but he is only going to get better.The midfielder, on loan from Chelsea, has all the qualities one would want: he scores and creates goals, hassles opponents and has the energy to do it for the entire game, making him a fine teammate and very annoying opponent. In 15 of his 25 appearances this season he has covered more ground than anyone else in a...
Chelsea fans air support for Roman Abramovich as they faced club backed by a nation that executed 81 people on SaturdayThere cannot have been a better way to sum up the rotten state of English football than the moral vacuum that lay at the heart of this strange and upsetting occasion at Stamford Bridge, where a capacity crowd turned up to watch one club with a disqualified owner take on another backed by the public investment fund of a nation which executed 81 people on Saturday.This was a dark day for anyone who cares about the game’s soul. No amount of sportswashing could make the putrid air hanging over this fixture disappear. Not when some Chelsea fans were still determined...
The Premier League is often a beautiful spectacle, but its thirst for success and wealth at all costs has tainted its spiritImagine we were starting again. Imagine this was a world when professional sport was in its infancy and even the concept of a league was controversial in case it made people overprioritise winning. Imagine you had a vague sense the clubs in this new competition might represent their local areas, that they might come to fulfil some sort of community function. Who would you want running them?Would it be a fabulously rich Russian who made his fortune exploiting the economic chaos that followed a period of political turmoil to buy up his country’s oil and gas reserves and who...