Home » Entries posted by Peter Wahlberg
If you’re a fan of sport – any sport – cheer for Portsmouth now
The FA Cup Final is not just a game anymore. For the first time, a relegated team will feature in the final of the oldest cup competition in the world. For the first time, the FA Cup Final will feature the best team in the top division in a clash with the worst. For the [...]
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Going Fourth: The state of play in the Premier League
The past week has been big for soccer – the last quarter of the European professional season sees a three-way title race in Italy between falling leaders Inter, AC Milan and outsiders AC Roma joining existing dogfights in Germany, where Bayern can’t shake Schalke 04 or Leverkeusen; Spain, where Barcelona are narrowly holding a humiliated [...]
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Martin O’Neill is a witch, and other FA Cup foibles
You heard me right. The commentators can crow all they want about what a talking-to Martin O’Neill must have given his players at half time. Any American, especially any New Englander, knows better. It wasn’t a team talk. It was sorcery that gave Villa their win. Only one way to fix that. As such I’ve [...]
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Reading tea leaves: the FA Cup quarterfinals
Here it comes – thundering towards its inevitable conclusion – the FA Cup! 762 can enter: only 1 can win. After the Carling Cup ended with more a wheeze than a bang and with the Premier League looking like an oh-so-dramatic race between Man U and Chelsea, the FA Cup is our last, best hope [...]
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2009-10 Carling Cup Final Preview and Prediction
Every year the follower of the Carling Cup and its cousin the FA Cup have found them consistently blasted by accusations of tedium. The pressures of the top flight and the draw of international competition conspire to reduce play to little more than an expensive exhibition, it’s said. With the new draw of a Europa [...]
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FA Cup Fifth Round Recap and Replay Preview
An exciting day – plenty of dubious predictions (and one or two sound ones) to walk backas well as four replays to come the week after next. (For comparison the fourth round, itself very good, had three replays of sixteen games.) I’ll be a little surprised if at least one doesn’t go all the way [...]
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2009-10 FA Cup Fifth Round Previews and Predictions
The world’s oldest football competition, the FA Cup, is entering its home stretch this weekend after a series of dramatic matches saw top four sides Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United shown the door. Leeds, Manchester’s victor, nearly repeated the feat in a desperate effort against Tottenham; Liverpool’s and Arsenal’s betters, Reading and Stoke City, remain [...]
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Four things I learned from the Africa Cup of Nations
1) There is no one at the CAF fit to manage football The choice of Angola to host the tournament in the first place was bizarre, given that it’s a quasi-Communist autocracy in the midst of a long and bloody civil war (which stipulated that, as a nation-building exercise, many of the games in this [...]
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Fussballgeist and FIFA – Thoughts and Predictions on FIFA 2010 World Cup Group Stage Draw
Before getting to the World Cup draws themselves, I want to make clear that I will not christen a group of death. FIFA has made groups of death obsolete. Nothing like 1986 can happen again; stage management from continental leagues on up is such that no win will be terribly surprising, no loss so unexpected. [...]
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France v Republic of Ireland: In the clash of the Republics, injustice for all
Heartbreaking. That’s all I can say about this match. Gut-wrenching, soul-wrenching, the very best kind of completely awful. The pivot point of the match – and for the rest of time nothing else will be discussed – was Henry’s unjustly-allowed goal. (Technically it was Gallas’, but Henry had more than a hand in it. Two, [...]