Jose Mourinho is close to revealing a new code of rules for association football that will replace the archaic current scoring system he stresses is ‘fixated on goals’. The Portuguese boss has been moved to take action after his Manchester United side suffered three consecutive defeats despite being the superior team in each match, in every regard, except for the number of times they were able to put the ball in the opposition team’s net. In a bid to move the game forward from this primitive view of success and failure, Mourinho has been hard at work creating a more enlightened scoring system that takes into account possession, number of corners and melodramatic bombast. With the times “It’s 2016 and...
Arsene Wenger celebrates a huge milestone at Arsenal this weekend– on Thursday it'll be 20 years since the giant-specced Frenchman was announced as Gunners boss. Back then he was only the fourth foreign gaffer to take charge of a top-class English club; since then the total has risen to 50, in an era he helped kick-start. We're celebrating them all on FourFourTwo.com this week, and you can check out the first 10 here. How many of them do you remember from Premier League life? Eleven of that 50 have been Italian– and 10 have bossed in England's top flight (one F. Capello making up the numbers). Can you name them all? Scores to us @FourFourTwo, please– we'll retweet the good...
1. Ellen White (Notts County vs Arsenal, 2015) When things go wrong... or do they? Laura Bassett’s run-up appears to end in confusion between Notts County players – that is,until Alex Greenwood lays off for Ellen White to strike home on the spin against her former club. Take that! 2. Yosuke Ishibitsu (Kyoto Sanga vs Yokohama, 2014) An indirect free-kick in the area is one of the rarer, and thus strangely exciting things about football – think Alan Shearer twice almost breaking West Brom and Georgia players for Newcastle and England respectively. So when Kyoto Sanga were presented with one at Yokohama, their well-executed effort was a particularly fine sight. After the Yokohama goalkeeper watched three players run over the...
Eight years, 10 months, 20 days. That’s the timespan between the release of Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 – Konami’s footballing nadir, in many fans’ eyes – to the day PES 2017 goes on sale. It’s been a long, mostly fallow period, but finally the misery is over. Building upon foundations laid with PES 2016, this is the best football game the Japanese developer has ever made. PES 2017’s greatest achievement is the manner in which it reads what you’re trying to do, and reacts accordingly. Team-mates make genuinely intelligent runs into space, and behind full backs, and across central defenders. Incidents where the game attempts to manufacture mistakes – for instance, directing a pass off the pitch when you definitely...
There were contrasting fortunes for the Italian managers on a weekend where Chelsea and Manchester United lost ground on Manchester City and Arsenal. Many were surprised when Antonio Conte left it until the 84th minute to make substitutions in the home defeat to Liverpool, whereas Walter Mazzarri tweaked his defensive shape to stop United. Elsewhere, Pep Guardiola used transitions and counter-attacks to make it five wins out of five in the league, while Ronald Koeman continued to tighten up the Everton defence. 1. Man City prevail through transitions and counter-pressing Guardiola has long been associated with possession football and elaborate passing, but the attacks that handed Manchester City their 4-0 win over Bournemouth did not feature many moves. The hosts...