WITH all signs pointing to a Liverpool sans Luis Suarez next season, the tip-tapping of keyboards has been audible around the globe. I felt left out, so here’s my 7.5billion penneth on the matter. This is a headache Brendan Rodgers could have done without. When Suarez...
By Rob McDonald ARGENTINA What We Know: Well, Argentina are one of those teams that are just always expected to be dead good. They have the players, after all. All of them. Whatever happens, expect a whole lot of Messi narrative. The team is settled and, so far, there...
By Clare Newstead OKAY, FIRST THINGS FIRST: I know very little about football. The actual game. The actual players. I mean it. I pick up a bit here and there about Liverpool. It’s hard not to, living with Martin Fitzgerald and watching Kop Kids on LFCTV at tea-time (I...
WHEN I set about researching the current Aussie team, its manager, and the tactical side of things, it quickly dawned on me how little I knew. There were only four players whose names I recognised (one of them spending the latter part of the season injured at my...
By Hari Sethi INJUSTICE INJUSTICE is rife throughout the history of professional football; the best team doesn’t always win, the best players don’t always get what they deserve. Yet whilst injustice initially results in an enveloping sense of despair and anger, it can...
I’VE READ with interest the Anfield Wrap correspondents’ opening commentaries on their adopted World Cup nations; ranging from Kate Forrester’s hopes that Diego Costa will bring unsavoury mayhem to Spain’s matches, to Dan Fitzsimmons’ beautiful relationship with the...
THERE is a NASA research centre in the middle of Antarctica called Concordia. It is in the coldest, darkest and most extreme environment on the planet. The outside temperature regularly falls below -80C, or -99.9C with wind chill – the extreme limit of its scale....
THE football hipster in me had fallen out of love with the World Cup a little ever since it was expanded to a 32-team tournament for France 1998. While yes, the event was given a more symmetrical system, I felt it lost some shine. The idea of four out of the six...
CAMEROON. Bolivia. Scotland. Senegal. Costa Rica. Mexico. What joins these six countries together may not be initially obvious to the untrained eye, but to the World Cup aficionados out there, and there are many, they can be defined as “the other nation”. They are the...
By Si Steers THE SWISS are a nation famous for Cheese, Chocolate, and Banks and perhaps a little less well known for football, but it is a culturally rich and wealthy country that boasts a quirky and unique significance in world affairs. Switzerland is probably most...
