Dignified Southgate finally takes over as FA belatedly bow to the inevitable

Steven Gerrard and the conundrum of football management -

This week's story: Steven Gerrard and the conundrum of football management. That the former Liverpool FC legend states it is his ambition to manage a football club and yet has never taken his coaching badges says much about the English game and its attitude to coaching. There’s an old football maxim that holds that great players don’t make successful managers. To which there has always been an obvious retort: Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer, Carlo Ancelotti, Pep Guardiola, at least half a dozen others. Brian Clough, the greatest English manager of them all, was a hell of a player for Middlesbrough FC and Sunderland AFC before a cruciate injury effectively nobbled him at the age of 27. But like all easily disprovable cliches, there’s at least a grain of truth in it. Great players sometimes do become great managers, but the odds are mostly against it for a variety of reasons. The great player, so heavily reliant on a genius that is often instinctive, spends less time on the science and craft of the game than a journeyman who has to get by on his wiles. This seems a compelling theory. The game consumes them both in equal measure. It just consumes them in different ways. One neat illustration of this dynamic came when Steve Staunton was appointed Ireland manager in 2006. A member of the last Liverpool team to be dominant in England and the only Ireland player to feature in three World Cups, Staunton’s status as a great player isn’t in doubt. But there was nothing in a distinguished playing career that suggested he was an inspirational or effective manager in waiting. As an international manager, the choice of Staunton was a desperately short-sighted one. Click the image below to read the rest of this week's story.....

Scotland need to stop finding comfort in excuses -

This weeks story: Scotland need to stop finding comfort in excuses Scotland National Team may be at a low ebb right now, but other countries with even smaller playing pools and more limited resources have picked themselves up in recent years and there’s no reason why they can’t follow. Overshadowed by an interminably dull poppy row, made insignificant by the election of a mindless bigot as the leader of the free world, the build-up to a rare Home Nations clash between England and Scotland at Wembley Football Stadium, a gathering of the clans, has felt strangely muted. Having not met in a competitive fixture for 20 years, you figure there’d have been, at the very least, a noticeable quickening of the pulse as the game drew near. You could seek to explain the apparent indifference a couple of ways. Maybe wider macroeconomic factors have kicked in, strained political tensions throughout the union, fall-out from Brexit, a growing sense of ambivalence between two formerly fierce rivals. Or perhaps it’s merely that we find two proud football nations at a low ebb in their fortunes. With typical black humour, long-suffering Scottish supporters struggle to see how they could beat anyone at all right now, not even England. And maybe they’re simply tapping into a modern football dynamic that tends to dismiss these international breaks as welcome (or possibly irritating) lulls between the essential and frenetic fare of the Premier League. And given that Scotland are currently managed by a dead man walking while England are led by a coach who seems to have difficulty in deciding whether he really wants the job at all, it is a view of things that has a certain weight behind it. For anyone who loves the game, though, and was brought up on a regular diet of spiky home internationals with a liberal sprinkling of world class footballers from every corner of these inter-linked islands, Scotland’s current plight makes for glum viewing. Having blown an advantageous position in the Euro 2016 qualifiers, their prospects of summer football in two years already look remote and an ominous dark cloud hovers over the game north of the border that absorbs all hope of an impending renaissance. Scots fans survey the range of options open to Gordon Strachan and wonder where all the great players have gone. A country where the pipes once hailed the glory of Bremner, Souness, Dalglish, Robertson, Strachan himself among countless others, now scraps around the lower reaches of the English Leagues to fill out its squad and seemingly remains unconvinced that its best young talent, Oliver Burke, can truly be called Scottish. How has it come to this? Click below to read the rest of this week's story......

Daryl Horgan’s form simply too good for Ireland manager to ignore -

This week's story: Dundalk FC Daryl Horgan’s form simply too good for Football Association of Ireland (FAI) Official Online Store manager to ignore.

Daryl Horgan’s form simply too good for Ireland manager to ignore -

A big shout out for the Dundalk FC stand out player of the season - Daryl Horgan

Soccerful.com

Why Swansea fans need to get tough to keep the dream alive - Soccerful

This week's story: Why Swansea City Football Club fans need to get tough to keep the dream alive Being the only group of fans in the Premier League with a stake in their club has been a source of pride for Swansea fans since promotion in 2011, but under new American investors, they are finding their power seriously curtailed and battle lines are being drawn. Even in a world of empty marketing slogans and dull, relentless hype, shit on a stick served up as a three-star gourmet feast, there has always seemed something purposeful and right about Swansea City’s billing as “more than just a football club.” Here was a place where it wasn’t all just background noise, clever spin that made your ears bleed. Swansea really was different. A club where the old values still counted for something. Of course, Swansea has always been easy to love. It’s four decades since John Toshack led them on a thrilling merry dance through the divisions, bottom to top in four years, and in case you missed it first time around, they repeated the trick in recent seasons, taking six years instead of four this time, but throwing in a brush with bankruptcy for added difficulty and espousing a brand of football that earned comparisons with Pep Guardiola’s FC Barcelona for enhanced aesthetic appeal. But that didn’t make them different. Nor was there anything exceptional about the fact that the supporters trust held a 21 per cent shareholding in the club. What made it unique was that such an arrangement could grab a foothold amid the scabrous and vulgar wealth of the Premier League, that in a culture of preening avarice and meek subservience to the bottom line, one group of fans could still have a meaningful say in the running of their football club. Wasn’t that something? And from the outside it all cut an admirably pretty picture. The trust was more than 6,000 strong. It had a representative on the board and seemed to have a strong working relationship with the other directors. It enjoyed real power and influence, stood for something more than a rump of well-meaning fans making entreaties to a cabal of grey-suited men only to be met by platitudes before being wilfully ignored. It had a voice and made a difference. Rival fans envied it and wished they had some of it too. Swansea mattered because when the question was asked how the concept of fan ownership could ever mix with the high-roller stakes of the Premier League, they were the most obvious retort. Swansea wasn’t Chelsea Football Club or Manchester City, of course, but they were still in the top tier, still showing a righteous and hopeful path forward. And there was talk of pushing on, accumulating more shares, the prospect of a second seat on the board. Nobody seemed happy to stand still. And then everything changed utterly. In June a 68 per cent stake in the club was sold to two American investors and, as supporters learned at a specially convened forum at the Liberty Stadium this week, the deal was pushed through with minimal consultation of the trust, a determined nod to the old ways fan groups were explicitly designed to counteract. Likely fearing that involving the trust would lead to unwanted complications, the vested parties opted for the path of least resistance. They simply froze it out. Click below to read the rest of this week's story.

Robin van Persie's 'goal of the century' remembered as he returns to Manchester United

Manchester United take on Robin van Persie's Fenerbahce at Old Trafford this week.

Those who say Cristiano Ronaldo doesn't pass, look away from these assist stats now | SportsJOE.ie

This will silence a lot of critics!!

Anthony Foley: 1973-2016

Haven't really covered any other sports before but in Ireland they've lost a truly remarkable IrishRugby sportsman, one Anthony Foley. This is a tribute by Sky Sports and it's a magnificent tribute.

Liverpool youngster's backheel against Manchester United was better than Monday's entire game | SportsJOE.ie

José Mourinho did a great job of setting up his team to neutralise the home side's threat...

Watch: José Mourinho Cracks The Shites Laughing In Charity Joke-Off With John Bishop | Balls.ie

It seems like it's been about two years since we last saw José Mourinho so much as crack a smile, but he properly cracked up in a charity joke-off with comedian!!