main

CommentarySchedule

What to Watch This Weekend (Nov 20-22)

November 19, 2010 — by Suman

We’re back with our picks for the weekend–as usual, culled from the SoccerInsider’s comprehensive listing of matches being televised in the US this weekend (all times ET):

Don't look at me, I'm hideous

Saturday (Nov 20)

England, Spurs-Arsenal 7:30 a.m. ESPN2, ESPN Deportes: an early kickoff the match of the weekend te heated North London derby!  Check what our resident Spurs and Arsenal supporters had to say about this one, here and here.

Spain, Valencia-Villarreal noon ESPN Deportes: 3rd and 4th in the La Liga table–cf. Sid Lowe’s column devoted to Villareal after their match v Hercules a few weeks ago.

Netherlands, Ajax-PSV Eindhoven 2:45p.m. ESPN3.com: We usually don’t include streaming-only matches, but will make an exception for this battle of Dutch heavyweights.  If you’re only going to watch one Eredivisie matchup all season, might as well be this game.  Via FIFA’s “Classic Rivalries” feature:

While older Ajax fans may always view Feyenoord as their arch-rivals, younger supporters have just as much deep-seated rivalry with PSV, who represent not just thoroughbred sporting adversaries but advocates of another philosophy of how the game should be played. True heavyweights of the Dutch footballing landscape, PSV have fully earned the right to be considered Klassieker opponents.

[…]

Since 2000, PSV have won the league on seven occasions, putting together a run of four consecutive titles between 2005 and 2008, including a 2007 triumph that went down to the final moments in the last round of games. That run of success has not gone down particularly well at the Arena, where a series of coaches have come and gone without being able to shift the spotlight back on to Ajax. Instead, their arch-rivals have taken over as the team most successful at defending Dutch colours in Europe, having reached the UEFA Champions League semi-finals in 2005.

Indeed, it’s shaping up that way again: PSV is atop the table, while Ajax is chasing them, currently in 3rd place (with Twente in between).

Spain, Real Madrid-Bilbao 4 p.m. GolTV: Will Madrid keep rolling towards El Clasico? (Which is a week from Monday btw…yes Monday, due to some Catalonia election over that weekend) Bilbao is one of the handful of teams in the middle of the table (they’re currently 8th) that are battling to finish 3rd. Bilbao do have a dangerous striker up front in 6’5” Fernando Llorente (the Lion King, apparently: “Un ‘Rey Leon’ en el area“)–he and Capdevila of Villareal are just about the only La Liga players who are not on Barcelona or Real Madrid that are getting playing time on the nat’l team.

Germany, Bayern Munich-Bayer Leverkusen 6 p.m. ESPN Deportes: A good Bundesliga rivalry, with Munich 6th in the table, recovering from a poor start, while Leverkusen is 2nd (chasing Borussia Dortmund). Leverkusen’s fans have been confidently looking forward to taking on Munich, according to this:

The Beatles’ most oompaloompaish tune has long been staple terrace fare in the Bundesliga but it was still surprising to hear the old chestnut on Saturday at the Millerntor. Bayer Leverkusen were beating St Pauli 1‑0 when the visiting supporters started chanting that slightly rejigged, teutonified version of “Yellow Submarine”.

“Zieht den Bayern die Lederhosen aus” (take away Bayern’s lederhosen), went the ever-popular cry.

Sunday (Nov 21)

England, Fulham-Manchester City 11 a.m. FSC: Dempsey seems to be playing very well, if he is a bit dim. As for Man City, clearly Mancini should be feeling the heat for the style of play, even as they remain fourth in the table. They fired Hughes last year when he was spot on the benchmarks they set for him.  Honestly, it is hard watching them play at times with no wide players and three holding midfielders.

MLS Cup, Colorado-Dallas 8:30 p.m. ESPN, Galavision Live from Toronto. We’re sure to dip in and make a comment before kickoff.

Monday

England, Everton-Sunderland 3 p.m. ESPN Deportes: How will Sunderland follow up that crushing of Chelsea? Will we see Gyan score again–so that we can see him dance again? And if so, WWBD (what will Bolo do)?

CommentaryVideo

Do Arsenal Continue Beating Spurs?

November 19, 2010 — by Tyler — 2

Notes from our Arsenal-supporting contingent, lead by the generally unruly but always introspective Tyler Carpenter.

The derby? Impossible to predict a scoreline. Position-wise the teams are mostly even, but Arsenal should win at home. The battle will be won at midfield, and I feel that finally-approaching-form Cesc could be the decider. But the mouth-watering matchup is Gunners’ right vs. Spurs’ left. Will Sagna be able to make deep runs and still track back to defend Bale? Arsenal’s right back has the speed, but can anyone defend Bale Kong?

And who should defend Rafael Van der Goal? The ’85 Chicago Bears? (Yes children, this link brings you to the Superbowl Shuffle)

Arsenal wins Draws Spurs wins Arsenal goals Spurs goals
League 61 42 46 234 202
FA Cup 3 0 2 7 5
League Cup 7 3 3 19 16
Charity Shield 0 1 0 0 0
Total 71 46 51 260 223

I remember this fixture last year: van Persie intercepting the Spurs’ kickoff after an Arsenal goal. Robin gave a quick pass to Cesc, who took it singlehandly, 50+ yards, and put it in the still-warm net. Nice!

Commentary

Why I Hate Arsenal

November 18, 2010 — by John Lally — 2

It’s coming you know.  I’ve been trying not to think about it, but now it’s unavoidable. The North London Derby is this Saturday (7:45am ET, ESPN2).  Some Spurs fans look forward to this match in the fixture list, some of us dread it – I’m very much in the latter group.

It’s hard to decide which one I fear more: the away fixture, where, in all likelihood, we’ll lose; or the home fixture, which brings with it the pain of hope.  This week, the game is at the Emirates, a stadium we have never won at. Our record is worse than that though – Spurs haven’t won away at Arsenal since May 1993, when I was 11 years old.   That game came a month after we had lost the F.A. Cup Semi-Final to our arch-rivals and they rested players ahead of the Cup Final.  Last year, we finally beat Arsenal in the league at home, but still finished below them.  It has been years and years of being overshadowed by them.  We just can’t win – even when we do win, we end up losing overall anyway.

The rivalry started in 1913, when Woolwich Arsenal moved (invaded!) North London, and got more bitter in 1919, when a vote saw Arsenal elected to the First Division, having finished 6th in the old Second Division, with Spurs relegated, after finishing 20th in the top flight.  Nearly a century later, both sides still hate each other.  Sure, I have friends who are Arsenal fans, but there will always be that divide when the conversation turns to football.  When former Arsenal player Theirry Henry was making his debut for the New York Red Bulls, he described his first opponents, Tottenham, as “a team I will not even name, that’s how much of a rivalry it is”. I couldn’t agree more –  I  only just about cheered Spurs that night more than I jeered Henry.

Honestly, I just hate Arsenal.  I hate playing them, cos we normally lose.  And if we win, I’ll be inundated with e-mails from Arsenal fans with pictures of the “Commerative DVD” Spurs release to celebrate winning a game.

I hate the fact that as we get closer to the game, our players, managers and my fellow fans, will be saying about how we can finally “make the step up” or “overtake” Arsenal.  That players such as Bale, Modric and Van der Vaart are evidence that we can really take the game to them this time.  Suddenly we forget that our defence is so porous, we conceded four goals against a mediocre Bolton team in our last away game, so goodness knows how many Arsenal could put past us.

I hate that their fans celebrate St. Totteringham’s day every year, to recognise the point where Spurs can no longer mathematically catch Arsenal in the league. I hate that they’ve been celebrating that day every year in recent history.  I hate their stadium and the terrible atmosphere they have in 2/3rds of their home games.  I hate it when they win, I love it when they lose.  My second favourite team is whoever is playing Arsenal, even when it’s Chelsea or West Ham.  I hate Wenger, Fabregas, Van Persie, Arshavin, Campbell, Toure, Henry, Ian Wright,  George Graham and everyone else associated with the club.  I hate that they are now lauded as playing some of the best football in Europe, when for years it was “Boring, Boring Arsenal”.  I hate the begrudging respect I have for pretty much everyone I listed there as being talented.  I hate that Spurs constantly measure themselves against Arsenal, and come up short all the time.

What I really hate, though, is that I care about this fixture so much.  It will bother me all weekend, and most of next week, if/when we get thrashed – but why?  When we play against Manchester United, I know the inevitable outcome.  We haven’t beaten any of the “Big 4” of Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United or Chelsea away from home in the league since 1993, we’re not going to start this weekend.  Why do I get my hopes up?

The Pacific Ocean? That’s just a shitty pipe dream.

But hey, Andy Dufresne found his freedom through a shitty pipe…dammit, there’s that hope again.

News

Spurs Unfortunate to Draw Sunderland

November 9, 2010 — by Sean

I use an emulsifier with some holding creme, then a bit of spray on top before I head out the door.

Tottenham put on a lovely footballing display this afternoon, their best stuff in the first half when they moved the ball around the pitch with ease, linking through van der Vaart and even getting peripheral winger David Bentley in on a good amount of the action.

The game ended in a draw and should’ve really gone to Spurs. Of particular interest were Bale’s lack of accuracy serving the ball from the wing (he needs more consistently excellent play before he can rightly be called one of the best wings in the world), and the amount of time the home side spent moving up the right wing, through the oil-coiffed Bentley.

I hadn’t seen Bentley in a long while. I’d forgotten about him in fact. The last time I think was 2007, he had just fallen over after having the ball swept away from him, and he stood up to adjust his hair before trotting back to look for an outlet pass. I was flabbergasted. Shouldn’t a professional athlete be prepared for the rigors of the game, and apply a sufficient amount of styling gel to keep his hair in place throughout the match? For shame.

No such acts of vanity today (at least not on the pitch, something must’ve happened in the dressing room to achieve the evening’s look). Bentley looked sharp, playing intelligent balls that kept up the pressure on Sunderland’s rearguard, and his set pieces suggest that he hasn’t lost much in terms of accuracy. Bale on the left, Bentley on the right, all’s well that ends well — in that they didn’t lose…

NewsVideo

Champions League Matchday 4 Video Highlights: Madrid-Milan, Spurs-Inter, Arsenal-Шахтар

November 4, 2010 — by Suman

In case you missed the this week’s Champions League action, here are highlights from three of this week’s 16 matches:

Tottenham Hotspur 3, Inter Milan 1: In the performance of the week, which has made him the talk of European football, 21-year old Welshman Gareth Bale led Spurs to a big victory at home over defending champion Inter.  Though he wasn’t involved in Spurs’ first goal (Modric feeding van der Vaart for that one), he singlehandedly created the latter two by streaking down the left wing and feeding perfect, nearly identical low crosses right into the path of the goalscorer (Peter Crouch for the 2nd, Pavylyuchenko for the 3rd (that after Samuel Eto’o had pulled Inter back to 2-1 with a suberb finish).

Here is the Guardian’s “as it happened” commentary on the last goal, to read along as you watch:

GOAL! Spurs 3-1 Inter (Pavlyuchenko 89′) That is just outlandish from Bale! He received the ball around the half-way line and simply belted it 20 yards beyond Maicon and set off after it. He got there first and, best of all, played the perfect pass across the face of goal, inviting Pavlyuchenko to smash it simply past the keeper. Bale has blown Inter away tonight.

Video: CL Highlights: Tottenham/Inter

CommentaryNewsSchedule

What to Watch This Weekend (Oct 30-31)

October 29, 2010 — by Suman

We’re back once again with our recommendations on when exactly you should plant yourself on your couch or local pub stool this weekend.  Again using SoccerInsider’s full TV listing as a reference, here we go, with some notes from various members of the CultFootball collective:

Saturday Oct 30

Striker, Goal Scorer, Contortionist

Manchester United-Spurs 12:30 p.m. FSC: a matchup of the 3rd and 5th place teams in the EPL table, with goal-scoring players in form on both sides (Chicharito and Nani for Man U, Gareth Bale and Rafael van der Vaart for Spurs)

Barcelona-Sevilla 4 p.m. ESPN Deportes: One of the more challenging La Liga games for Barca, especially since Sevilla seems to finally coming into form (6th in the table) after a slow start, and their Brazilian WC2010 star Luis Fabiano back in the lineup and finding the back of the net.

Those are the two matches to make time for, but if you need a couple additional matches to fill out your day:

Hercules-Real Madrid 2 p.m. GolTV: It’ll be interesting to see if Real Madrid can keep up their recent dominating form (well, last week’s scoreless draw against 3rd division Murcia in a Copa del Rey game excepted), or conversely whether Hércules can pull off another upset.

AC Milan-Juventus 2:30 p.m. FSC: AC Milan is 2nd in the Serie A table, and has an exciting set of big names in attack: Ronaldhino, Pato, Robinho, Ibrahimovic, Seedorf, while Juve is in 5th.  See Goal.com’s rundown of key individual matchups here.

And since the MLS playoffs have started, a Saturday night special…

San Jose-New York 10 p.m. Telefutura:  Sounds like Thierry Henry will miss this match due to an injury, but the Red Bulls have a number of players to watch: Rafa Marquez, the Mexican international recently arrived from Barcelona; Estonian Joel Lindpere; Jamaican Dane Richards; and Senegalese-American goalkeeper Bouna Coundoul (see this NY Daily News article about his journey from Senegal to the Bronx to high school in Manhattan, and eventually to the MLS).

Sunday Oct 31

Palermo-Lazio 7:30 a.m. FSP: Roman side Lazio sits atop Serie A, while Palermo is in 8th.  We’ll refer you to Goal.com for each side‘s rosters, recent team news, and standard formations.

Stan Cummins (sunderland) 1980's tyne-wear derby

Newcastle-Sunderland 9:30 a.m. FSP: The Tyne-Wear derby. Overlooked step-sister Sunderland have held their own against Newcastle on the pitch over the years, if not in international fame. Always good to share your name with a tasty brew.

Bolton-Liverpool noon FSC: Liverpool played well last week, and Fernando Torres finally scored, so it’ll be interesting to see if they can build on that—and work their way up in the table.

And one more—another MLS playoff game, featuring the star-studded Galaxy:

Seattle-Los Angeles 8 p.m. ESPN2

Commentary

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Yankees

October 6, 2010 — by John Lally — 1

John Lally's triumphant return to White Hart Lane.

“Why are we watching this again?” was the perfectly valid question my wife posed to me half way through Four Days in October, ESPN’s documentary about the Red Sox improbable come back in the 2004 ALCS.  Why, indeed, would two big Yankees fans be watching this again? It was my fault. “It’s the Tottenham fan in me that has to watch it” was my only defence.  To me, it made sense.

The fact that I’m a Yankees fan, who’s not from New York, is something that always had bothered me to some degree.  I felt akin to the legions of Manchester United fans there are across the globe, glory hunters attracted to the name and the success, but once you have your team, it’s your team.  I started following baseball with the 1996 World Series, so I didn’t have a choice of 30 teams, I had 2: Atlanta Braves or the New York Yankees.   New York, the city, had always been of interest to me, so I was drawn to them. Futhermore they were the underdogs – the Braves were the reigning World Series Champions, the Yankees hadn’t won since 1978.  A team with great history that hadn’t won anything of significance in my lifetime? Sounds like my kind of team – so I sided with the Yankees.  Of course, they won – which was great. And then again 2 years later, and in 1999, and in 2000.  It started to feel a little easy: baseball – a game where they play 162 regular season games and then the Yankees win the World Series.

I paid my dues as a fan over those first years – watching games that started at 1am in the UK and finished as dawn was breaking. Trips I made to New York incorporated when possible a trip to the Stadium for a game and I considered myself to be a “proper” fan.  Once I moved to New York, I was able to watch most the games at a reasonable hour and go to them much more regularly.  Less than 2 months after I started dating my wife, we went to our first game together and have continued to share our Yankees fandom together ever since.  However, the rivalry with the Red Sox was a sore point to me, as Boston was the team most similar to Tottenham.  Both teams were constantly beaten by their hated rivals.  Year after year, no matter how good their chances seemed, something would happen to perpetuate the underachievement.  Maybe the lack of success had lasted longer for Red Sox fans, but when you’re born in 1981 it doesn’t really make too much difference if your last title was in 1961 or 1918, it was history. Even sportswriter and Red Sox fanatic Bill Simmons saw the alliance and picked Tottenham as his Premiership team back in 2006

CommentarySchedule

Champions League starts today! Matchday 1 Fixtures

September 14, 2010 — by Suman

What is arguably the World Cup of club soccer starts later today–the UEFA Champions League.  Like the World Cup, it features most of the top players in the world, and consists of 32 teams that will compete in a group stage to advance to a knockout phase.   Unlike the World Cup, however, it’s an annual affair–and stretches over 8 months, with this year’s final to be played on Saturday May 28, on the storied pitch of Wembley Stadium.

The group phase starts today, with “Matchday 1” consisting of 8 matches today (Tuesday Sept 14): 2 games in each in Groups and 8 matches tomorrow (Wednesday Sept 15).   Today’s 8 matches feature the 16 teams in Groups A, B, C, and D, with tomorrow’s from the other 4 groups (E, F, G, and H).

Looking ahead, the group stage consists of 6 Tuesday-Wednesday “Matchdays” to allow for home-and-away round robin within in each group (each team needs to play the other 3 teams in its group twice–hence 6 matches): Sept 14-15, Sept 28-29, Oct 19-20, Nov 2-3, Nov 23-24, and Dec 7-8.  The top two teams in each group will advance to the knockout phase, with the Round of 16 matches February 15-23 and March 8-16 in the new year; the quarterfinals April 5-6 and April 12-13; the semifinals April 26-27 and May 3-4; and the final on May 28.

We’ve got full details on the Matchday 1 fixtures below, but here’s what jumps out at us among today’s 8 matches (and what to watch):

(1) Defending champion Inter Milan starts its campaign for two in a row today against Dutch side Twente Enschede; this match is on Fox Soccer Channel (FSC; and like all of today’s and tomorrow’s matches, kicks off at 2:45pm ET). Ironically, Inter is led on the field by Dutch midfielder and World Cup star Wes Sneijder; but unlike last year, they won’t be led by manager Jose Mourinho (called by some “the special one”), who has moved to Real Madrid, in an attempt to try to repeat his managing success there. See here for some coverage of how Mourinho has taken to some sniping at his successor at Inter, Rafa Benitez.

(2) Tottenham Hotspur squeezed into the competition a couple weeks ago, by eliminating Young Boys of Switzerland in qualifying; see John Lally’s preview of that game for some idea of what it means for Spurs to be back in Europe.  They’ll visit Werder Bremen today; you can watch that one when it’s rebroadcast on Fox Sports Espanol at 5pm ET.

(3) Manchester United stays at home, hosting Scottish side Rangers.  The story line here is Wayne Rooney, who returns to the field after Sir Alex Ferguson kept him on the bench this past Saturday against Everton (the club that signed him at the age of 10!)–ostensibly to spare him what would have been graphic but creative verbal abuse, following Rooney’s domination of the English tabloids last week (see here if you missed that story!).  That game is being televised live on Fox Sports Net (FSN; as they say, check your local listings), but will be rebroadcast on Fox Sports Espanol (FSE) at 7pm ET.

(4) Finally, the match we’ll likely be watching at CultFootball HQ this afternoon: Barcelona vs. Panathinaikos at the Camp Nou, live on FSE. Barcelona was the favorite to win the Champions League last year, only to be foiled in the semifinals by Mourinho’s Milanese defense. They’re coming off a shocking home loss over the weekend, so it will be interesting to see how they fare today.

See below for the full list of today’s and tomorrow’s fixtures.

Newer PostsOlder Posts