Footblog

Empire building: Mike Ashley style

Mike Ashley says he needs some financial help at Newcastle. Hardly surprising, given the following report from The Times this morning:

Ashley, who bought the club 14 months ago for £137 million, also denied rumours that he is a Tottenham Hotspur supporter. “It's not true,” he said. “I absolutely hate Spurs and always have done.”

He was speaking out after Sports Direct, the sports retailer that he founded, reported that profits for the year to April had halved after a drop in sales attributed in part to poor weather last summer and England's failure to qualify for the European Championship finals.

Not to mention pissing off thousands of potential customers...

Gareth Barry gets a touch of the Ashley Coles

"Have Villa offered me anything to try to persuade me my future is at Villa Park, not Anfield?" asks Scouser-in-waiting Gareth Barry. "Not a thing."

How about the lucrative four-year contract you signed back in 2006, which presumably indicated that they wanted to you to stay until 2010?

Euro fixtures mess

I'm not sure what the French for "if it ain't broken don't fix it" is, but someone please get out the Collins Dictionary and send a translation to Michel Platini?

Having spent most of the 1990s and half of this decade pissing around with Golden Goals, Silver Goals and any other bananas method of deciding a football game (I believe a Corner count was tested), they eventually went back to extra time and penalties because - shockingly - there was nothing wrong with it in the first place.

So with no new rules to tinker with, UEFA has apparently started titting around with the fixtures. For time immemorial, it's been taken as read that two teams who play each other in the group stages won't meet again unless they both reach the final. The sound logic being that - in a competition where you'd only play a maximum of six games to claim the honour of being the best team in Europe - you should face as wide a selection of opponents as possible.

But tonight Spain will play Russia for the second time in five games. The Times's Martin Samuel claims this ludicrous fixture schedule is a direct result of choosing two hosts (a decision I've already expressed my doubts about), and is a repeat of what happened at the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea:

To have teams flying to and fro across Asia was deemed impractical. Skipping between the sites was considered too great an ordeal for teams and supporters. Therefore, the majority of countries that were drawn in the South Korean groups had no fixtures in Japan until the final.

In essence, there were two parallel tournaments, the South Korean World Cup and the Japanese World Cup, meeting up for one game in Yokohama at the end. That is why Brazil and Turkey were on course to play twice. This set a bad precedent that Euro 2008 has maintained.

Consequently, Spain will tonight have to once more defeat a team they've already spanked 4-1 in the tournament to progress to the final. It also means that if Russia go out, 40% of the games it played in the tournament would have been against a single opponent. How that can be right? As Samuel brilliantly points out:

The European Championship is like one of those variety packs of cereal one sees in supermarkets: ten boxes but only six different cereals. Where is the variety in that?

The height of footy fashion

You may have noticed the recent appearance of Google Ads on Footblog, in what amounts to a "if I'm going to spend 10 minutes a week on this blog, I might as well get paid 13p for it" attitude.

I'm sure that somewhere in the arm's length Ts&Cs it says I shouldn't be clicking on the links myself. Google's not made of money, you know. However, when one of them promises "the latest soccer fashion for women" how could I resist?

And, my word, the yarns on offer at Vedette Fashion London are, in the immortal word of Big Ron, Hollywood.

Take this stunning little number, for example. The Arsenal Devoted Dress contains Illustration of three top players" on the front, although Christ alone knows who they are, because (a) the image on the website is tiny; and (b) they look like they've been drawn by a 10-year-old with Parkinson's.

The one at the top left could be the newly-departed Mathieu Flamini, which will make this £130 catwalk classic even greater value.

Now here's one for the more discerning bird. An elegant black swimsuit with two massive yellow bands containing the words "Man" and "Utd" plastered across your breasts and box.

Raises the potentially humiliating prospect that your girlfriend could be waist-high in water in a swimming pool with a swimsuit that simply states "man".

And the price of such humiliation? That'll be £155 please, sir.

And finally, how about the Chelsea OOF! Tank Dress? No, we haven't got a chuffing clue what's going on here either, so we'll leave it to the site to explain. "Hand embroidered sequin team name on back and cartoon-inspired football motif on front."

That's cleared that up then. The price? £85. Which, admittedly, is still cheaper than a seat at Chelsea.

McClaren's Twente Twente vision

Steve McClaren is stowing his umbrella in the cabin and flying off to become the manager of Dutch side FC Twente - which is roughly how many days I give it before Mac's back and ready to take over at Nuneaton Borough.

At least the Dutch have rolled out the Orange carpet for him:

"Ninety per cent of fans think why him?," said his brilliantly-named new chairman Joop Munsterman. Just 90 per cent? Well, they say time's a healer.  "But he is used to working with top players," the Munsterman adds, which will be handy for keeping a tight rein on the Twente galacticos such as, erm, Luke Wilkshire (hang on a second, wasn't he at McClaren's Middlesbrough? What's the funny rat smell?), Cees Pauwe and Douglas.

It's good to see McClaren's at least been working on his vocabulary in the spare time he's had since getting the England bullet. "He [Herman] told me that FC Twente is a fantastic club and that I would feel at home," he said, bringing the total of Google pages with the words "Steve McClaren" and "fantastic" in them to a nice round 45,000. 

Two hosts: a waste of a space

Austria and Switzerland: six games, four points, both out. Goodbye and goodnight.

Once every four years the 16 finest teams in Europe get the chance to prove who's best, and this year an eighth of them are there purely because a panel decided to award this tournament to two countries instead of one with enough stadiums to cope.

I'm not against smaller nations getting a chance to host the show, but never again should two weak sides be given a bye into the finals. Let them play a knockout match before the qualifiers, with the other having to run the qualification gauntlet with everyone else.

And if we really have to give them an advantage, stick the losers in England's group.

Holland: totally brilliant

There can't be a neutral fan left in Europe who now doesn't want Holland to go on and lift the Euro 2008 trophy. Having dismantled the world champions on Monday, the Dutch ripped apart the World Cup finalists with football of such breathtaking beauty that even Thierry Henry had to smile. A 7-1 aggregate win over The World Cup finalists - that just doesn't happen.  The Dutch probably deserve to lift the trophy for such a feat alone.

What really impressed me about the Dutch was their outright commitment to attack. How many other coaches with a 1-0 lead at half-time would have replaced a defensive midfielder (Orlando Engelaar) with an outright winger (Arjen Robben)? And even though his side were subsequently under the cosh, replace one striker (Dirk Kuyt) with another (Robin Van Persie) just minutes later? 

Van Basten would probably have been lambasted for his naivety had the French got back into the game on the back of his brave substitutions, forcing him to adopt a more conservative approach for the rest of the tournament. The fact that his gamble paid off is fantastic news for all of us.

A few early observations from Euro 2008

• Croatia without Eduardo look about as dangerous as a bouncy castle. Making England's omission even more galling.
• Sticking Ray Stubbs pitchside with the overflow from the BBC studio (Dixon, Peacock et al) is the most pointless broadcasting initiative since Andy Townsend's Tactics Truck.
• Germany have a played called Fritz. Marvellous.
• Two crap hosts should never get a free bye into the tournament again.
• Unless it's England and Scotland.

Liverpool's classic grey kit is back

They've tried spunking millions on new strikers; they've tried replacing the board with foreigners with dodgy motives; they've even tried to sign Gareth Barry. But Liverpool's latest attempt to bring the glory days back to Anfield is to send the boys out in the classic grey kit worn by the league-winning likes of Barnes, Rush and Beardsley.

Just one question: will they also have to wear the bollock-bustingly tight shorts of the David Burrows era?

Baker back to rescue 606

The Big Irish lummox from The Guardian is right - the BBC's 606 phone in has gone further downhill than a marble dropped out of Ranulph Fiennes' pocket:

"If being subjected to the tedious bluster of presenters Alan Green, Tim Lovejoy and the byword for haplessness that is Spoony doesn't convince you that getting in among your radio with a claw-hammer is a good idea, then the echoed insanity of Gavin on the A38 who forgot to turn down his car stereo almost certainly will."

So it's with the heartiest of cheers that Footblog welcomes Danny Baker back to 606. OK, it might only be a temporary gig for the European Championships, but if he pulls off just one more brilliant call like the Dundee Utd fan with the wooden bow-tie, it will be absolutely worth it.