To go from a career-threatening injury to the England squad in two years is pretty impressive. Well done, Jimmy. Your hard work has paid off.
August 31, 2008
The future of sportswriting
The excellent USS Mariner has a post on the future of sportswriting.
Blogs have been important in the States for some time, particularly baseball blogs which have the advantage of daily games and quantifiable happenings. But they’re gathering momentum here too. Have a read.
Tough times, but Roy will see us through
Looking at Match of the Day last night it occurred to me that while Fulham almost certainly have improved, the same might be said for almost every other club.
Look at the league table and you see the Hull/West Brom/Stoke trio of doom scattered up and down, and surely these three will be in the mix for relegation come May. But who else? Everton are in a mess, but will sort things out, Sunderland have made some very good purchases, Man City should be fine, Wigan look genuinely able (why aren’t more teams raiding that stunning Egyptian side?), Newcastle will be fine, and Middlesbrough look effervescent and exciting. West Ham aren’t a good side but again, ought to find enough wins here and there.
Which really leaves us with Bolton and Blackburn. The latter have started quite well and aren’t really in the bookies’ minds, while Bolton could do anything. It’s a pickle isn’t it? I still think the 16th place discussed earlier in the year is realistic, but when you look at the league afresh it does look stronger than ever.
I say stronger, but do I mean that? Amy Lawrence’s Guardian column today has a fascinating quote from Andriy Shevchenko:
Italian football is about finishing and logic, like chess, and the English game is based on speed and instinct.
Tellingly, Lawrence adds “very few people play chess well at speed”.
Later in the newspaper Shevchenko is quoted again:
When I was at Chelsea what missed most was the organisation, the preparation, the atmospher of this club [Milan], lots of little things that are nevertheless important.
These differences between the Italian way and the English way are presumably quite stark (and I’d again recommend Gianluca Vialli’s book on the subject). One would assume that with equal spending power the Italian way would trump the English way – why wouldn’t a more thoughtful approach and good preparation beat a haphazard approach with mixed preparation? – but this might not be correct, and might undersell the work done behind the scenes by English coaches.
Nevertheless, it looks like Roy’s trying to build a team that combines the two approaches. Which ought to be a good thing.
