The preening Portuguese beat the more humble Lionel Messi to yet another Fifa award last week but does he ever notice that football is a team game?Last Monday the Best Fifa Football Awards were held in London – leading one to ask when can one expect the Worst Fifa Football Awards, featuring YouTube videos of missed sitters and theatrical simulation. All the legends were there: Diego Maradona, Ronaldo (the Brazilian one), Phillip Schofield. It was the “biggest night on planet football”, as the Sky presenter said, full of “excitement, glamour and gossip”, making it sound as though it were an overblown gathering of prima donnas on the red, sorry green, carpet. Which, on reflection, is an unerringly precise summary of the...
Spurs manager ran through his options in the commendable draw at Real Madrid and the Argentinian is increasing his sphere of influence at the clubIt numbers among the many construction projects at Tottenham Hotspur but, perhaps, it is the one to have drifted under the radar. The London club have committed £30m to the building of a 45-bedroom player hotel on a site adjacent to their Enfield training ground and the rationale is illuminating.Mauricio Pochettino and his staff are obsessed with marginal gains, with new angles and the creation of the optimum environment, and the private player accommodation lodge, as it is officially known, is another example of the growth that they are seeking. Related: Harry Kane can be one-club...
Tottenham’s top scorer could not find the decisive finishing touch at the Bernabéu but still made an impact that demonstrates how far he has comeA backheel at the Bernabéu. That is quite a baptism or it would have been if, as most of this stadium first thought, it had actually happened. The replay told a different story but it was Harry Kane the Tottenham Hotspur players ran towards as the ball settled in Keylor Navas’s net, giving them the lead just before the half-hour. The problem was that at the end of the game it was also Kane they sought out, Hugo Lloris putting an arm round his shoulder and walking him to the touchline. This was an excellent result...
Thirty-five different teams over 73 games stretching back almost 18 months had tried and failed to stop Real Madrid scoring. Real Betis went one betterManchester United couldn’t do it, Manchester City couldn’t do it and Bayern Munich couldn’t do it. Juventus couldn’t do it either. Nor could Borussia Dortmund, Napoli or Sporting Lisbon. The other Sporting, from Gijón, couldn’t do it. They came from Mexico, Japan, Poland and Cyprus and failed too. Barcelona tried four times but they couldn’t do it. Sevilla and Atlético had five goes each. Nope, no good. Along came Valencia, Deportivo and Celta, Osasuna, Espanyol and Villarreal, but they couldn’t do it and nor could Las Palmas, Eibar, Athletic, Cultural, Granada, Málaga, Alavés or Leganés. Real...
Harmony has broken out on and off the pitch, so much so that their coach referred to Sunday’s 2-2 draw at the Bernabéu as a ‘lovely spectacle’“Every time you looked left and the men in white attacked, you thought: ‘We could lose this,’” said the Valencia coach, Marcelino García Toral. “But every time you looked right, my good side, and we attacked, there were real chances to score.” So Marcelino looked left, right and back again while behind him everyone in the Santiago Bernabéu stand did the same, accelerating to the end. Left, where Neto pushed Karim Benzema’s header against the post on 92.38; right, where Simone Zaza wriggled into the area on 93.22, the winner there before him until,...