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Dominic Pollard takes up the mantle of ‘Rule Master’ able to alter the rules of football with just one click of his fingers and a sinister smile….
In the first of what will hopefully become an enriching series of posts, I, the Rule Master, am going to examine how the game of football could be revolutionised with the introduction of a range of different rules. Like Barry Hearn, John Douglas – the 9th Marquess of Queensberry – and Sepp Blatter all rolled into one, I shall break from our age old traditions and throw the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons to explore new ways of improving the supposedly ‘beautiful game’.
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And so another group of u21’s are instantly dismissed and chastised for their failure in this year’s Euro tournament and once again everyone turns to the eventual winners the Spanish and asks ‘well what are they doing that we’re not?’ In an attempt to keep up with the Joneses we’ve tried everything; putting our juniors in oxygen tents for 5 years, teaching the offside rule from the womb and stunting growth and avoiding haircuts in the hope that just somebody will look a bit like Lionel Messi. Everybody says technically we’re inferior and that projects like the Burton academy will help…But will it? To take one from the greatest film to never win an Oscar – Cool Runnings – why are we trying to do what the Swiss do? (of course, in football terms nobody is doing that.) We have our own style, and we always will. Why are we not playing to our strengths?
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In a new feature for the DA, Andrew Allen takes a look at football in parts of the world less documented. If your team is in the Europa League, you may want to take notes from time to time…
Andrew Allen is the editor of whenwewereheroes.com
What a difference a decade makes. One minute the godforsaken people of war-torn Chechnya are trembling in the face of a relentless bombardment by Russian bombs, the next they’re watching their young President slide-tackle Diego Maradona while Craig David regales them with lyrics about his insatiable sexual appetite.
Andrew Allen is deputy editor at sport.co.uk
So Manchester United have 99% wrapped up the title by beating Chelsea and in so doing have signalled the wiping of squeaky bums up and down the country. Phew! It was getting awfully sweaty down there and I was getting bored of the way you teased Arsenal every week by pretending we still had a chance.
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Andrew Allen is deputy editor at sport.co.uk
International fortnight. Two words which send shudders down the back of a football writer. You spot the thing in the calendar weeks in advance but somehow never quite prepare yourself for how mind-numbingly tedious and painful it is. It’s like a two week stint in the dentist’s chair (unfortunately not the version made famous by Gazza) where day-by-day teeth are brazenly extracted from your mouth with pliers…but without anaesthetic.
While you might think we hacks would be glad for a few days respite in the middle of the season – a kind of winter break to prevent repetitive strain syndrome in the fingers – you’d be wrong. Very, very wrong.
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Andrew Allen is deputy editor at sport.co.uk
Twitter, the webpage where Stephen Fry makes you feel like you’ll forever come last in the pub quiz, has consumed me. Where once I was a cynic, now I am a disciple, or as the lingo goes – a follower.
It’s been four months since I started using the internet’s hippest social network and in that time I’ve already seen it recognised as the driving force behind sweeping revolutions in the Middle East, the relationship between Shane Warne and Liz Hurley…and the end of Ryan Babel’s Liverpool career. Beat that.
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Continue reading » Andrew Allen is deputy editor at sport.co.uk
It has been made apparent in the last two weeks that Sport.co.uk has, albeit unwittingly, been doing its best to emulate the financial model implemented by Peter Ridsdale at Leeds United. You know the one…the one where you brazenly blow a load of cash you don’t have on top quality talents, close the gap on your rivals and then realise that you can’t sustain yourself. The one where you live the dream for a bit, then realise the dream was based on a fantasy…then wait and quietly watch as the walls come tumbling down!
As documented so well in one of Jim Carey’s finest hours the Mask, ‘the loaner’ was always supposed to be the last option. You’d turned to everybody else, every other scenario had been carefully thought through, but alas it was time to send for the help of… the loaner. That’s just the way it’s meant to be. In football it used to very much be this way too. I remember in my first years of watching football somebody would only come and help my beloved Wycombe Wanderers out if we were struggling with a bit of an injury or a backlog of suspensions for the month. Like a library book, if you kept that loanee for too long you were expected to pay for it. The idea that a player could feasibly come down and play for an entire season was rather absurd.
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Andrew Allen is deputy editor at sport.co.uk
Every now and then committing to life as a penniless football journalist pays dividends – after roughly two and a half years working at Sport.co.uk I finally received my first invitation to travel abroad on a work related jolly…(cough) I mean business trip.
I say first, I was once offered the salivating prospect of three days in Spain watching beach volleyball…and yes, it did turn out to be too good to be true. I politely declined when it was revealed I was due in the front row of the men’s World Cup for 72 hours of non-stop budgie smuggling action. If I want dodgy male related beach ball antics I’ll just follow Darren Bent’s career. Talking of which, £24 million Monsieur Houllier? What could possibly be the need when you have Emile Heskey waiting in the wings?
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Why Capello needs to go before Euro 2012
This article may be too late, seeing as another international week has come and gone and been condemned to the shadows by a Saturday full of Premier League action, but having seen the apathy surrounding the Wales game, and completed probably my 700th negative piece on Fabio Capello, it felt like the right time to justify the mocking.
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