The coronavirus crisis has instilled a spirit of unity among football’s leaders – but the sport’s calendar has been shreddedAs Gareth Southgate put it so eloquently, this is hardly the moment for football to take centre stage. Yet after a week in which almost all of the sport’s global calendar was suspended amid the growing coronavirus pandemic, England’s manager can be forgiven for wondering if what Pelé described as the “beautiful game” will ever recover from this crisis.Thursday’s joint announcement by the Football Association, the Premier League and the EFL that the provisional date of the first weekend in April for the resumption of men’s and women’s professional football had been pushed back almost a month until “no earlier than...
Looking for crumbs of comfort in the postponement of Euro 2020 is one way of coping as football becomes an immense irrelevance ... but get realSay what you will about our monumentally mind-warping new reality but it certainty offers the opportunity to type sentences that might have appeared to be facetious attempts at satire a mere fortnight ago. Sentences like “Manchester United are working from home.” Or “West Ham’s Karren Brady has suggested there is an antidote to the deadly coronavirus pandemic.”If the latter reference puzzles you, let’s see it in action in Karren’s critically misunderstood Sun column from last weekend (in which she decided, among other things, that the Premier League season should be declared null and void and...
As the global football and rugby union triumphs of 1966 and 2003, and now Lord’s last year show, time is not always kindOutside, it is cinereous and damp; February creeps in without an ode to anything, least of all joy. But somewhere, surely, the Cricket World Cup final is being replayed. On Tuesday England men’s cricket team play their first ODI since that magical Sunday last July when the bubbles flowed and the sun cranked up and the burnt-orange bricks of the Lord’s pavilion shouted “England” – though in a carefully non-xenophobic way.When a tied champagne super over gave England victory by dint of more boundaries, when administrators and broadcasters saw sense by showing the game on terrestrial television and...
England captain rises to sixth on his country’s all-time scorers’ list on a night to remember the present rather than the pastOver to you then, Harry. From the flames of the Sterling affair, the dark talk of vendettas and humps and all the rest of it; from all this England found a moment of cold, still calm at Wembley.Never mind that they also found opponents so astonishingly poor the Montenegrin defence seemed at times to be putting on a highly crafted, beautifully choreographed piece of physical comedy. Related: England celebrate 1,000th game with seven-goal charge into Euro 2020 finals The two worst things about England football: the urge to sell itself at every turn and a deadly obsession with the...
Aaron Ramsey return to Wales after a year out, Naby Keïta must step up for Guinea and Iceland will face a frosty reception The build-up to Wales’s remaining qualifiers has been dominated by the dismay that Gareth Bale’s call-up has caused at Real Madrid, where the forward has been on the sidelines for a month nursing a calf injury. Bale’s late winner against Azerbaijan in September proved how influential the forward can be in swinging matches Wales’ way but the returning Aaron Ramsey may be just as important for Ryan Giggs. The Juventus midfielder has been absent for Wales for a year so his return now, with two must-win games ahead, could not be better timed. Having just returned to...