Potential upsets, Premier League clubs needing to take it seriously and old foes meeting after taking diverging pathsSwindon and Manchester City were regular combatants in the 1990s, meeting in the second tier and during Swindon’s one season in the Premier League, 1993-94. Friday’s visit to the County Ground will be a first meeting in 20 years. On 5 January 2002, former Swindon man Kevin Horlock scored the second in a 2-0 home win at Maine Road. The years since have seen the clubs move in radically different trajectories, and they now operate on different planets. Swindon arrested a slump with a 5-2 defeat of Northampton on New Year’s Day, and lie in the League Two play-off positions. The club have...
Rodgers reaches his first English final, Spurs wait on Harry Kane’s ankle and Norwich make a welcome returnBrendan Rodgers’ previous FA Cup semi-final visit, in April 2015, ended in disaster, a deserved 2-1 loss with Liverpool to an Aston Villa team inspired by a teenage Jack Grealish. That was an afternoon when Liverpool froze but six years on, Rodgers is a manager with considerably more chops. His Leicester team approached their Sunday night visit to Wembley with poise, confidence and patience. On the sidelines, and even above the 4,000 fans in the stadium as part of a post-Covid experiment, Rodgers’s baritone was audible, talking his players through each passage of play. His suit is always reassuringly expensive but Rodgers remains...
Yet another defeat to pacy counterattackers raises tantalising questions over Manchester City’s European tie with PSGAnd so the quadruple remains out of reach for another season. Perhaps Pep Guardiola is right to banish talk of it: when goals are set so high, even an extraordinary season could feel like failure. And so it lingers, forever on the edge of perception, as the Double did for Liverpool for much of the 70s and 80s, something that feels often in their grasp and yet keeps on eluding them.For a long time, the Double was rare enough to be an almost mystical quest. Growing up in the 80s, the sides who had achieved it felt vaguely otherworldly, to be spoken of in hushed...
Thomas Tuchel asked his forward to pare his game back to a very specific movement at Wembley – and in workedIt is a sporting truism that some athletes “get better” by not playing. Absence is flattering to the reputation. Time dims the bad bits and illuminates the good. The problem for Timo Werner in this dynamic, the one flaw in the plan, is that there haven’t actually been any good bits yet.Or at least, not enough. And not until now. Instead Werner has been a frantic presence in west London, a £50m player whose basic footballing range has been seriously questioned. Most recently he was compared by one pundit to a non-scoring Jamie Vardy - which is, let’s face it,...
The midfielder propelled Leicester to a FA Cup quarter-final victory that Manchester United never looked like winningWith hindsight Ole Gunner Solskjær might concede there have been better weeks to talk, a little disdainfully, about the “ego” of trophy-winning managers.In a show of commendable humility, Solskjær’s Manchester United duly exited the FA Cup at the quarter-final stage, another moment of not-quite-there to follow three semi-final dead ends. Look on my selflessness and tremble. For I am the most humble. Related: Iheanacho's double sinks Manchester United and puts Leicester in last four Related: Bellingham clear to join England squad but Marcus Rashford an injury doubt Continue reading...