Umbro today revealed pictures of the new England away soccer shirt for the 2010 World Cup. The red design is reminiscent of the England away shirt from the 1966 World Cup and features white cuffs and a round collar and the England Three Lions crest above the heart with a red star to identify England’s one World Cup Final victory.
A full set of images of England’s World Cup away shirt can be found on Umbro’s Flickr stream.
In conjunction with the unveiling of the new shirt, Umbro also released a video of English rock band Kasabian playing live in concert in front of an audience in Paris. Watch the video to hear the reaction of the French audience to a band wearing England away shirts (see below).
by Ethan Armstrong on February 9, 2010 · 2 comments
It’s hard to know how to call this match. On one hand Liverpool are coming off back-to-back victories including a ten-man derby win. On the other Arsenal definitely have something to prove after Manchester United and Chelsea have patently exposed the holes in their armor. They’ll see us as a big team they can beat (because they’ve already done it this season). We’ll see them as a chance to prove we’re back on track after our struggles with form and results. For us it’s a chance to close the gap on a top four rival. For them these are three points they can’t afford to drop as they strive to keep in sight of United and Chelsea.
Really, with the way things have gone this season and with our eternal lack of depth brought on by constant medical problems (and now Aquilani’s not even in the squad because of illness), I shouldn’t get my hopes up for this one. But I honestly think we can beat Arsenal tomorrow. And I don’t think I’m just telling myself this to calm the nerves going into the match.
Liverpool’s biggest problem apart from the injuries has been our mentality. When the side is fired up we can still produce the wins without Torres and Benayoun. When we’re in a slump, it shows. Painfully. When we faced Arsenal at Anfield in December we were still accepting our dismissal from the Champions League. We’d recently drawn with Lyon, Birmingham, Manchester City and Blackburn. In the previous match we lost to Fiorentina. That match didn’t matter since we were already out of that race, but still. The first half against Arsenal showed promise, but we let a blatantly missed penalty call and a second-half own goal get in our heads and we collapsed to the Gunners on our home turf.
This time can be different. Aside from the draw with Wolves, we’ve been putting some good wins away. We beat Tottenham without three of our best finishers (Torres, Gerrard, Benayoun). And in our last two fixtures, we beat Bolton and Everton with the inimitable Dirk Kuyt leading both charges. Read the rest of this story>>
By definition, an own goal occurs in association football when a player scores a goal that is registered to his or her own team. That definition was in fact one of many I found while scouring the Internet, but most of the others are similar in that they mention players knocking or kicking the ball into their own net. Sound vague to you? It did to me, it seems the definition failed to really define what constitutes a player knocking or kicking the ball into their own net. Is it knowingly, accidentally, on purpose? More specifically, when I watched Portsmouth self destruct this past Saturday against Manchester United, I found myself twice saying out loud for the referee to award the goal to the United player as opposed to the shameful OG.
Maybe I feel sorry for players too easily as I’m witness to them out there on the pitch giving their all as the opposition continuously bombard them. Again, more specific to Saturday, surely Portsmouth players have had enough terrible luck as their club stands on the precipice of existence than to be adjudged to have played so badly as to have scored against themselves. Three times!
By my opinion or my simple wish, only one out of the three OG’s awarded to Portsmouth on Saturday were actually legit. Before you lambaste me, the other two goals did in fact touch Portsmouth players last, but were ultimately the fruits of United’s attacking labor. Pompey defender Marc Wilson turned Patrice Evra’s 69th minute cross into his own net, make no mistake about it. But the other two goals originated from positive forward attack from United players who had in fact placed direct shots (or in Nani’s case, a half shot, half cross) onto the Pompey goal. Why should players loose goal credit for striking a ball on goal and scoring, regardless of the path the ball takes in finding it’s destination?
Many of you will probably not like what I’m going to say, but I think we as soccer fans, myself included, are very hard to please. We want HD. We don’t want a sports ticker across the bottom. We want a clean presentation on screen with very few bugs, just the beautiful game. We want the best football commentators. We want TV coverage of every game. We want to hear the sound balance to be perfect where we can hear the sound of the crowd. We want to see the players coming down the tunnel before the game. And the list goes on and on.
The question I have for you is, where does advertising fit into all of this?
TV companies are in the business to make money, not to provide us the perfect soccer viewing experience. Yes, by doing the latter TV networks will attract more viewers and it’ll help generate greater TV revenue but I’m sure that many of us would agree that we’d love to have a high quality half-time presentation show with tactical analysis, great pundits, slow-mo action replays and more. Again, to the detriment of advertising.
by John Nicholson on February 9, 2010 · 30 comments
Not many think Capello has made the wrong decision to strip Terry of the England captaincy. But I think its an awful decison. I’m not concerned with Terry in the slightest, nor Bridge. But as soon as you start making decisions because there’s a media howl so to do, you are in trouble. You start to follow the media’s agenda and not your own. As we know the football media this week has been in a frothing frenzy of moralistic self-righteousness over the whole Terry/ Bridge/Capello situation. Like Terry, it just wouldn’t quit.
So lets get this straight it seems this decison was made because of something as nebulous and fleeting as ‘respect.’ Poor old Wayne can’t respect his –ex best mate any more. Aw diddums. Well you should choose your friends more carefully then, son.
I found all of it a mixture of hypocrisy and hype. The bleating sympathy for Wayne Bridge though was especially sickening and typical of the infantile culture of football. At times it was as though someone had died. His girlfriend leaves him – presumably because she’s fed up of him – and we’re supposed to feel sorry for him because his feral best mate has gone and humped her afterwards? This is pretty ordinary stuff.
by Richard Farley on February 9, 2010 · 0 comments
Simon Hattenstone is a features writer for the Guardian who used to write a weekly sports column. He joined the EPL Talk podcast to talk about his background as a Manchester City supporter, the John Terry affair, and his background in sports writing.
Don’t forget that the EPL Talk Podcast is the only Premier League interview and analysis podcast available for free. In the past few weeks, we’ve interviewed legends of the game such as Steve McManaman, Efan Ekoku, Martin Chivers and Robbie Earle as well as experts such as Declan Hill, Simon Kuper, Misha Sher, Matt Dickinson, Andy Brassell and many others. Why pay $40 a year to rival podcasts when you can subscribe to the EPL Talk Podcast for FREE featuring interviews with the biggest names in football?
by Ethan Armstrong on February 8, 2010 · 10 comments
Yes, I should be all wound up about the upcoming Arsenal match. Yes, that should be all I think about. But I’m still buzzing from Saturday’s derby. I went from being a shifty mess during the ninety minutes to climbing the walls and swinging from the chandeliers with pure elation once that final whistle blew.
Going into the match I didn’t imagine we’d go down to ten men in the first half. This fixture is famous for its bookings and sendings off, but it seemed like the Merseyside derby had been losing some of the usual brutality lately. Last season’s only ejection came against us when Lucas saw red in the FA Cup replay, but I attributed that more to Lucas’s inexperience rather than the traditional derby venom. This season’s previous Merseyside derby had only one booking: a yellow against Everton’s Heitinga.
But when things got underway at Anfield Saturday, I could see this would be the classic kind of battle that lets the blood and loosens the teeth. Tackles were full force and badly timed. You could see early on, all 22 men were never staying on the pitch for the full 90. Dirk Kuyt took a boot in the face after a hard tackle felled him. Mascherano and Fellaini might have both been sent off by less patient officials. But there came a point when enough was enough and the Ref had to respond. So Soto Kyrgiacos took the long walk after taking Fellaini down (just deserts?) with both feet and studs up. Read the rest of this story>>
