Football Club News, Analysis, History, Schedule, Rumours
When you don’t seem to have much of a future, it’s easier to live in the past, and that is probably truer of Arsenal than any other football club, precisely because its past is so glorious and its future so uncertain. The announcement this week of the imminent release of the “Arsène Wenger: Invincible” documentary […] READ MORE
Consistency is the sporting equivalent of the Holy Grail – the ultra-elusive but utterly priceless commodity or quality that everyone endlessly seeks. At the moment, perhaps nobody seeks it more than Mikel Arteta and his Arsenal team, who have rebounded from losing their first three Premier League games to win the next three, including the […] READ MORE
For Arsenal fans, it must feel like déjà vu all over again. And again. And again. And so on, ad infinitum. Indeed, it is arguably now more than 15 years since the club last had a manager worthy of the title, when Arsène Wenger was just the brilliant manager who focused exclusively on what happened […] READ MORE
After Arsenal’s ignominious end to last season, when the Gunners first failed to reach the Europa League final and then failed to qualify for European football of any kind for the first time in a quarter of a century, most Arsenal fans have been happy to forget about domestic football and instead enjoy the glories […] READ MORE
Italy are too good a team and Gareth Southgate too shrewd a manager for there to be much complacency among the England team and coaching staff ahead of the Euro 2020 final. But just in case there is any complacency at all, this brief history of the worst defeats in a major final by a […] READ MORE
To adapt Oscar Wilde’s most famous quotation, to win one major international tournament – a World Cup or a continental title, like the European Championship – is a great achievement, but to win two in succession is extraordinary. Only a handful of international teams in the history of football (both men’s and women’s football) have […] READ MORE
And so, having considered the finest tournaments and the finest finals in the history of the European Championships, we come to the most important category – the finest European Championship-winning teams. Three of them also won the World Cup to go alongside their European crown, and the finest of them all actually won two European […] READ MORE
The very biggest finals in football – that is, World Cup finals or Champions League finals – are rarely feasts of football, for the simple reason that there is so much at stake that even the bravest players are often inhibited by an awareness of how much they have to lose. That was evident again […] READ MORE
UEFA made the decision to stage Euro 2020 all over Europe, rather than in one or two host countries, in order to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the first staging of the European Championship. It always appeared an unwise decision, one that risked diluting the energy generated by staging the tournament in just one or […] READ MORE
Just when it seemed that Arsenal’s wretched season was completely fizzling out after the non-performance against Villareal in the Europa League semi-final, Mikel Arteta and his side have a new prize to aim for. Going into the final game of the Premier League season, Arteta knows that if Arsenal can beat Brighton & Hove Albion […] READ MORE