Slaven Bilic returns to West Ham, Chris Wilder goes back to where it all began and Arsenal may turn to Eddie NketiahShrewsbury are not averse to a flush of FA Cup romance. In January 2003 they were at the foot of the fourth tier when Everton visited and the wily old hands, Ian Woan and Nigel Jemson, combined to confirm one of this millennium’s more famous shocks. Wind back a couple of decades and they enjoyed two quarter-final appearances under Graham Turner. Between the two, in 1996, there was a fourth-round tie against Roy Evans’ Liverpool, who came away comfortable 4-0 winners. The local newspaper worked out that it was a meeting of teams worth £195,000 and £29.6m respectively. Back...
Pep Guardiola’s call is well placed and better still would be for a streamlined FA Cup to emerge with the final in FebruaryWhen Jürgen Klopp was asked last week for his thoughts on the Africa Cup of Nations being moved to January next year he spoke uninterrupted for almost eight minutes, detailing his dissatisfaction with the burden on players and clubs and the complete lack of meaningful response from anyone in charge of the game when managers complained of the dangers of trying to cram too much into an already crowded fixture list.A few days later when Pep Guardiola was asked for his views on fixture congestion, bearing in mind that Harry Kane and Marcus Rashford had been sidelined long...
Betting on sport has always been popular, even when illegal, but after the last disastrous Gambling Act it is time to treat the issue in a more mature waySuper Bowl XXIX in January 1995 between the San Francisco 49ers and the San Diego Chargers looked like a lopsided mismatch beforehand and the reality was even worse. From the moment the 49ers scored what was, at the time, the fastest opening touchdown in Super Bowl history, it felt like the longest WWF bout in history, only without the round where they pretend the bad guy is winning.The only thing that took anyone by surprise was the TV ratings. It was not the headline figure of 83.4m viewers which was impressive because...
League One pair have cause for excitement this week but the rewards may be slim – so why not ditch replays until the semis?The FA Cup, once the competition that brought all of English football together, has become incredibly divisive. As the third‑round replays get under way this coming week, it will be hard not to notice that Wolves did not actually want an extra game at Old Trafford. It will be their 38th of an already long season, it will still be only mid-January, and Nuno Espírito Santo would have been perfectly happy for the matter to have been settled on penalties at Molineux.Traditionalists keen to hang on to the magic of the Cup will have been more encouraged...
Football offers numerous examples of why mental health matters and the importance of the saying, ‘it’s OK not to be OK’Jimmy Carr used to tell a joke about being stopped in the street by one of those clipboard-wielding charity muggers who asked him if he could spare her a minute for cancer research. “All right,” replied the comedian. “But I don’t think we’ll get much done.” Over the weekend, in collaboration with Public Health England’s Every Mind Matters and the Heads Up campaign, the Football Association asked all those – fans, players, backroom staff – at football grounds to set aside the same amount of time in order to “Take A Minute” to think about or discuss looking after their...