Philip Cocu for PSV Eindhoven (v Vitesse Arnhem), 29 April 2007

After all that, an amazing day on the last day of the Dutch season saw PSV retain the Eredivisie title after all.

Leaders AZ, reduced to 10 men after just 19 minutes of their game, went down 3-2 to a last minute goal at Excelsior. Even a draw wouldn't have been enough, as second place Ajax won 2-0 at Willem II.

However, third place PSV not only overhauled the points total of Ajax and AZ but also the goal difference as they smashed Vitesse 5-1 at the Philips Stadion to win the title on goal difference by one goal. Their captain and inspiration Philip Cocu scored the vital and decisive goal in the 77th minute.

It's cruel on AZ as only the top two in the league qualify for the Champions League and so they will end up in the UEFA Cup again next season. Harsh too on Ajax who, with fifteen minutes of their game to go were all set to be Champions based on "goals scored".

(and it means we have Ronald Koeman's coma-inducing brand of "no strikers" football in the Champions League again next season...)

Wayne Rooney for Manchester Utd (v AC Milan), 24 April 2007

Predictions time again. I should (fingers crossed) have the table updated by the end of today....

*blames workload*

Blackburn 2-0 Charlton
Chelsea 2-0 Bolton
Everton 1-1 Man Utd
Man City 0-0 Aston Villa
Middlesbrough 1-1 Tottenham
Portsmouth 1-1 Liverpool
Sheff Utd 2-0 Watford
Wigan 0-0 West Ham
Arsenal 3-0 Fulham
Reading 2-1 Newcastle

and from the closer than close last week of the Dutch season:

Excelsior 1-2 AZ
PSV 2-0 Vitesse
Willem II 1-3 Ajax

*update*

Predictions tables updated, and it looks like a three horse race going into the last couple of weeks of the season (mainly due to an astonishing points scoring run by Adem over recent weeks). Also mention to Jonny who scored the highest ever weekly total last week (26 points) - bear in mind its 3 for a correct score and 1 for a correct result. Thats good going (although the 5 bonus points for getting Kevin Pietersen clearly helped....)

Didier Drogba for Chelsea (v Valencia), 4 April 2007

Proof if it were needed that where we lead, the others follow....

So I wrote about the Gary's and Terry's of the football world back here in March. Frank Keating in the Guardian writes almost the same piece today (notwithstanding Didier Drogba's hair).

You don't think they might be using our ideas, do you?

*gasps*

Shote Arveladze for AZ Alkmaar (v Heerenveen), 22 April 2007

After the Premiership, the Dutch Eredivisie is my favourite football league. I have been lucky enough to watch some Dutch football over the years, and whilst the quality isn't always terrific, the teams have great exotic sounding names and some lunatic shirt colours. There's some handy players around too.

PSV have dominated Dutch football for a few years now but this year a remarkable dip in form since the winter break has seen them overhauled in the race for the title. From being ten points clear at the turn of the year, next weekend the Dutch league is heading for the most exciting climax in decades.

Louis van Gaal's AZ side, a resurgent Ajax and Koeman's PSV are currently all tied on the same 72 points with one match of the season to go. PSV have the easier tie on paper (at home to Vitesse) whilst Ajax travel to lowly Willem II and AZ must go to struggling Excelsior.

In the event of a tie, goal difference will decide the title and AZ are in pole position with +53 from Ajax's +47 and PSV's +46. Barring a miracle, an AZ victory should see the little Northern club celebrate only their second ever League title.

An AZ triumph would end the "big three"'s stranglehold on Dutch football in that only one team bar Ajax, PSV or Feyenoord has won the League since 1964 (AZ in 1981). (And you thought the Premiership was boring..!)

So, from 13.30pm next Sunday my eyes will be on the Dutch title race. One of these years, my team (NEC) might be involved. I doubt it, though....

Douglas Rinaldi for Watford (vs Blackburn Rovers), 18 April 2007

Here we go then: this week's predictions.

We're on the home straight now.

Bolton 1-0 Reading
Charlton 1-1 Sheff Utd
Fulham 0-1 Blackburn
Liverpool 2-0 Wigan
Man Utd 3-0 Middlesbro'
Tottenham 0-1 Arsenal
Watford 0-0 Man City
West Ham 1-0 Everton
Aston Villa 0-1 Portsmouth
Newcastle 0-2 Chelsea

Wildcards -- this week, top and bottom(-ish)

Colchester 0-2 Sunderland
Tranmere 0-1 Scunthorpe
Walsall 2-0 Bury
Plymouth 2-1 Southend
Doncaster 0-1 Brentford
Wrexham 0-1 Torquay

Bonus (5 points): Top run scorer in Saturday's dead rubber match at the Cricket World Cup between England and the West Indies. Ramnaresh Sarwan

Bryan McFadden for Westlife XI (v Malaysian Rockers United), 23 November 2002

101 Great Goals #62 - Bryan McFadden

OK, so it might not be exactly the sort of player you may expect to see in a compliation of genius goals from the history of football, but there is no denying that whilst a little bit Hollywood (and bearing in mind the opposition was made up of Asian rock bands) it's a great finish.

When he throws himself into the air, it's like he's flying without wings.... (sorry. couldn't resist.)

Patrice Evra for Manchester United (v AS Roma), 10 April 2007

After the Easter break and the rather excellent English success in the Champions League this week, we're back to the domestic predictions again...

from the Premiership

Arsenal 2-0 Bolton
Man City 0-2 Liverpool
Middlesbrough 2-1 Aston Villa
Portsmouth 1-1 Newcastle
Reading 2-1 Fulham
Sheff Utd 1-2 West Ham

from the FA Cup

Manchester Utd 3-0 Watford
Chelsea 2-0 Blackburn Rovers

squeaky bum time in the Championship

Birmingham 2-1 Southampton
Coventry 2-1 Preston
Ipswich 1-1 Derby

and three bonus wildcard points for naming a horse that'll finish in the top 3 in the Grand National:

Idle Talk

Michael Carrick for Manchester United (v Roma), 10 April 2007

I have been lucky enough to see some great United performances in my twenty odd years of going to Old Trafford. And whilst we've put six or seven goals past the likes of Barnsley and West Ham (and even Arsenal on occasion), I'm not sure I have ever seen anything quite like last night.

This is a Roma side with only two defeats in their previous 22 matches and who eliminated five times French champions Lyon in the previous round. Inter's nearest challengers for the Serie A title. With respect to the great Premiership Barnsley side, Roma are in a very different class.

And yet, that is probably the most exhilerating attacking performance I can remember seeing. I don't even think that Roma were particularly poor (although their keeper didn't look that stunning) but I think they just couldn't live with the effervescent and high-tempo game that United played. United's biggest win in Europe for forty years, the biggest winning margin in the European Cup at this stage since 1958 and a result that equalled the biggest ever European win at Old Trafford.

It's one of those incomprehensible results. A good Italian side defending a lead, United with a makeshift eleven (Darren Fletcher, I thought, was particularly impressive), a forward returning after 18 months out injured, the fact United have not overturned a first leg deficit in the Champions League in five attempts, their frankly poor form in Europe, the lack of goals from Ronaldo and Rooney - the list goes on. And yet here we are today applauding a magnificent 7-1 triumph.

I particularly loved the moment in the first half when we were 3-0 up with about 20 minutes to go until half time. Giggs had misplaced a couple of passses to gift Roma possession and the guy next to me turned to his mate and sighed. "We've gone all shit again", he complained. At 3-0 up. After 25 minutes. Of the European Cup Quarter Final.

Heh heh heh.

Football. Bloody hell.

Alan Smith for Manchester Utd (vs Roma), 10 April 2007

It seems slightly hard to believe now (and always looked a bit dodgy with a relatively slender 2-1 lead), but an Italian newspaper wrote after the first leg of the Champions League Quarter Final last week that Roma had taught Manchester Utd "a footballing lesson".

I wonder what they've got to say this morning.

Actually, I usually manage Roma in "Football Manager", and throughout the whole game last night, I was pondering what I would do to turn things around. Initially I thought about throwing on Gaetano D'Agostini to free up Totti and Vincenzo Montella to reinforce the front line. Then (and after some consultation with Lord Bargain), I decided I would roll the dice and throw on -- Roma legend -- Ian Stonebridge.

By the time the seventh goal went in though, I thought the only realistic solution was to reboot the PC and start the match again.

Sadly, this was not an option that Roma had last night, otherwise I think they certainly would have taken it.....

Chris O'Grady for Rotherham United (v Nottingham Forest), 9 April 2007

Do you know what the managers of the following clubs have in common?

Birmingham City, Bury, Wrexham, Sunderland, Rotherham United, Blackburn Rovers, Macclesfield Town and Peterborough United?

Yep, their managers all played under Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United. Widen that search away from simply United and you include Alex McLeish, Gordon Strachan and Willie Miller. And then of course you can include those without a current managerial post including Bryan Robson, Neale Cooper and Mark McGhee.

Does it help playing under a great manager? Or do people like Fergie and Clough just stick around long enough that it stands to reason that a proportion of their players will go into management?

Hernan Crespo (for Inter Milan) v Parma, 1 April 2007

For those of you who have't seen it lately, this is the top of the Serie A league table.

Team P W D L F A Pts
1 Inter Milan 29 25 4 0 63 23 79
2 Roma 29 17 8 4 56 23 59

Inter are nine games away from emulating Arsenal's achievement in the 2003/4 season of going through an entire domestic season unbeaten. Some have argued that the points deductions following the match-fixing scandals have downvalued Inter's achievements this season but you have to remember that despite their points losses, Lazio, Fiorentina and AC Milan remain in Serie A along with other strong clubs including Roma, Palermo and Sampdoria.

Three years ago, Arsenal won the Premiership without losing a game. Two years ago, Chelsea lost one match en route to the title.

What does this mean? Are the major leagues getting more uncompetitive, or have there simply been a few "great" and dominant teams in recent seasons?

Alex Ferguson once considered that six defeats was the maximum a team could afford on their way to the league title. If you look across the major European leagues this season so far, the leading sides have suffered only a handful of losses. Lyon, Barcelona, Porto, PSV Eindhoven and Fenerbahce have all only lost four league games. Genk, in Belgium, and Manchester United have only lost three.

The only "competitive" league this season appears to be the Bundesliga where leaders Schalke have lost six games already.

Does this mean we should be lauding Inter's achievements or bemoaning the lack of competitiveness within the game?

Steven Gerrard for England (v Andorra), 28 March 2007

I am not sure why I invited Swiss to contribute here, to be honest. First he confessed to not actually being a football fan, then he preferred to post about cricket and then admitted to not liking watching the international side.

Heh heh heh. At least you get both sides of the debate, I suppose....

Predictions time again:

Bolton 2-1 Sheff Utd
Charlton 2-0 Wigan
Fulham 1-1 Portsmouth
Liverpool 1-0 Arsenal
Man Utd 2-1 Blackburn
Newcastle 3-1 Man City
Watford 1-1 Chelsea
West Ham 1-0 Middlesbrough
Tottenham 2-0 Reading
Aston Villa 2-0 Everton

and some wildcards from the Hamptons:

Wolverhampton 2-1 Southampton
Northampton 2-0 Brighton

David Nugent for England (vs Andorra), 28th March 2007

Is it bad that I’ve stopped caring about my national football team? There used to be a time when I would avidly park myself in front of the TV to watch any game they played in – friendlies just the same as qualifiers or finals games. It was an event, something to look forward to, something that would bring friends together over a few cans of beer and some salty snacks. We could all sit around before and after the game picking imaginary squads and trying to work out how to solve the perennial “problem” on the left flank, to wonder how successive England managers could pick players like Philip Neville but ignore players like Matthew Le Tissier and to generally chew the cud about football in general.

As I’ve got older though, I’ve become increasingly jaundiced about the whole circus. I don’t know when the rot set in, but it’s now got to the point where I can genuinely take or leave an England international. There are several reasons for this:

1) The games are – almost without exception – astonishingly turgid. How many really good England games can you remember? Poland in 1986? West Germany in 1990? Holland in 1996? The 5-1 against Germany? That’s about it (and let’s not forget that we lost the most important one of those games). Long and bitter experience has taught me that this is 90 minutes of my life that would be better spend doing something else.

2) The relentless hype. Somehow the success of the Premiership and the high profile of our players leads us into the delusion that we are a great side; that we have a ‘golden generation’. On recent evidence, neither of those statements is remotely true. Yes, we have a squad packed full of very high profile and very highly paid players, but they are always less than the sum of their parts when other teams (like Northern Ireland at the moment) seem to be able to punch well above their weight. It’s largely the media that pumps this up and whips up a storm out of the smallest little thing relating to the national side. I’m bored of the fact that the TV and the papers are full of tiresome speculation and uninsightful comment pieces about the players and about the manager. Yes, England have been poor recently, but how much of the crowd reaction has been prompted by the press vultures hovering around Steve McClaren? How many of the journalists who question his competence would have picked a radically different team last night? How many of them really think that changing manager now would help England? How many of them have a constructive suggestion to make? The English Football press delights in pumping up our expectations in the national side by making them out to be world-beaters, and when they inevitably fail to live up to the stratospheric hype, they are pilloried. I’m bored of it.

3) The players. Footballers in general and English footballers in particular make me sick. They represent for me everything that is wrong with our society and what we aspire to. These are kids without much education who suddenly find themselves praised to the skies and earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a week. In a way, I suppose it’s not that surprising to see how they choose to spend that money: on stupid fast cars, on massive houses, on tasteless jewellery. That’s bad enough, but what really revolts me is the way that some of these people think that their money and status enables them to behave. Of course, footballers aren't alone in this, but how many times do we have to read about fights in nightclubs, or marathon drinking sessions, or roasting sessions in hotel rooms? Kieron Dyer, Frank Lampard, Joey Barton, Rio Ferdinand, John Terry, Ashley Cole, Wayne Rooney.... how many of the current England squad do I need to name? Worse: this is the lifestyle that people aspire to. I saw an advert on the back of the bus the other day which offered people the opportunity to hire a Ferrari or a Lotus for the day. The strapline? "Have a Footballer’s Lifestyle!" No thanks. These grasping idiots and their vacuous, greedy girlfriends are all over the covers of magazines and the television (WAG's Boutique anyone?). They are sated and they are self-satisfied. The world would surely be a better place if they dropped off the face of the planet. They're obscene.

I flew back into the country on Sunday. I had no idea that England had been playing, but when I read the review of the game against Israel in the Observer, I was not in the least bit surprised. In fact, I was amused. How many times have I read a report like that? Enough to know not to bother watching England again.

Yesterday I went out to a gig and missed the game entirely. At about 21:45, word of the score began to circulate amongst the crowd. One bloke heard the news and immediately pumped his fist vigorously. “Get in!”. I had to shake my head. I wish I could generate that much passion for a feeble win against Andorra, but I just can’t do it.

I know I'm ranting and I know I'm generalising. I like watching football, but this has just become too painful.

Christoph Preuss for Eintracht Frankfurt (v Bayern Munich), 17 March 2007

101 Great Goals #12 - Christoph Preuss

Here's a wondergoal from last week's Bundesliga which is a deserved matchwinner if ever there was one. Bayern Munich dominated this match but were undone by this astounding effort which Mary Shelley's Oliver Kahn could only watch into his net.

Brilliant.

Paul Robinson for Tottenham Hotspur (v Watford), 17 March 2007

The 101 Great Goals series continues apace, and if you missed it, there's a bit of Platini magic here.

International Predictions this week:

Czech Republic 1-1 Germany
Greece 1-2 Turkey
Israel 1-2 England
Liechtenstein 0-2 Northern Ireland
Lithuania 0-1 France
Netherlands 3-1 Romania
Portugal 2-0 Belgium
Republic of Ireland 2-1 Wales
Scotland 1-0 Georgia
Spain 2-1 Denmark

It's wild enough already this week, I reckon....

Michel Platini for Juventus (v Ascoli), 2 December 1984

So, here's a little snippet from Europe's new premier footballing politician but who, lest we forget, was probably the finest midfield goalscorer the game has ever seen.

Platini himself blames his team-mate for this goal. "If he hadn't given me such a bad pass, with the ball slightly behind me and too high to be taken on my thigh, I wouldn't have been obliged to flick it over my head and the goal would never have existed...."

101 Great Goals - #47 - Michel Platini

Emile Mpenza for Manchester City (v Middlesbrough), 17 March 2007

So. Martin O'Neill. Experienced manager, guided Celtic to the UEFA Cup final, won titles in Scotland, cups in England. Well respected, well known and heralded as a saviour when he took over at a previously huge club suffering a downturn in fortunes.

Stuart Pearce. Great player, novice manager. Struggling with dressing-room division, a lack of goals and his career seemingly in tatters before it has hardly begun. Has one or two games to save his job at a previously huge club suffering a downturn in fortunes.

Have you looked at the Premiership table tonight?

Two teams have played 29 games and garnered 33 points.

You guessed it. Aston Villa and Manchester City.

Aaron Mokoena for Blackburn Rovers (v Manchester City), 11 March 2007

Predictions time again, folks. And no extra bonus points for correctly guessing the score in the penalty shoot-out assuming the match ends in a draw....

Blackburn 2-0 West Ham
Chelsea 3-0 Sheff Utd
Man Utd 2-1 Bolton
Middlesbrough 1-1 Man City
Reading 1-0 Portsmouth
Tottenham 2-0 Watford
Wigan 1-0 Fulham
Aston Villa 1-2 Liverpool
Charlton 2-1 Newcastle
Everton 1-1 Arsenal

and wild in the fields:

Carlisle 1-0 Huddersfield
Mansfield 3-1 Boston
Bury 1-3 Macclesfield

Cristiano Ronaldo for Manchester Utd (v Europe XI), 13 March 2007

There are days when I despair for the future of football. No, that's not strictly true - it is the idiots that run the game that I despair of.

The latest genius brainchild of the pillocks who run the game is to abolish draws.

What in the name of 140 years of the game would be the point of that? I know! Not content with fixture congestion (whoever decided to play the FA Cup replays on a Monday night before England fly to Israel for their most important game in months needs lynching also) we could make players play all night long until the small hours when someone dies on the pitch and the opposition score from the resulting error. A 2.30am finish, but At Least Its Not A Draw.

It is complete and utter nonsense. Our American cousins have tried to get their hands on football before (make the goals bigger! make all fans drink Budweiser!) but they had better not influence the beautiful game with this latest bit of lunacy. I know they aren't capable of understanding a draw (a TIE? you mean no-one wins?) but football is played in over 200 countries, not just theirs. Not even theirs, some might say.

So, I hope this idiotic idea is given the contempt it deserves. If it is agreed upon, we might as well just let players wear shoulder pads and giant helmets and twat the ball into the bleachers with a giant stick.

Trevor Sinclair for QPR (v Barnsley), 25 January 1997

101 Great Goals #76 - Trevor Sinclair

Remember this bit of magic from the FA Cup Fourth Round in 1997? It rightly won the "Goal of the Season", despite being scored by peculiarly-haired "yet another answer to England's left sided problem" Trevor Sinclair....