Roy Hodgson must be wondering what has hit him. In his press conference after England’s paint-drying-like victory over Estonia this week he gave a brief and honest answer to a fairly straight forward question. Why hadn’t Raheem Sterling started against Estonia? Because he'd come to Roy beforehand and said that he was too tired. Then it all kicked off.
There are some things in football that have a sense of inevitability around them. Man United fans will disappear from all social networks when their team are struggling, Joey Barton will use those same social networks to criticise players who are better than him and Harry Redknapp will sign Niko Kranjčar. But one thing that seems to have become equally inevitable is that, every few years, talk of playing a Premier League game in strange foreign lands will resurface.
I’m going to address this right at the beginning, there may not be a conclusion at the end of this article. I don’t think I know the answer to the problem that I’m addressing. But I take heart from the fact that nobody seems to have the answer. In this article, I address why Manchester City can’t seem to play in the Champions League.
As reports suggest that Calum Chambers may be in line to 'solve' Arsenal's midfield human resource crisis, a conversation with 90 Minutes Online's Darren Douglas got me thinking about football's utility men. The Bird's Eye Potato Waffles of their trade, these are the chaps who'll 'do a job' anywhere.
When Neil Lennon left his post as Celtic manager at the end of last season, he must have been reasonably confident that his desire to manage an English club would have been fulfilled sooner rather than later. However, the Irishman remains out of work, and for all he initially stated that a sabbatical from the game would do him no harm if it came to that, by all accounts he is currently itching to get back on the training ground.