Today’s news update is brought to you by the totally-natural Lucy Pinder, and the beautiful Heidi Montag on your right (RSS readers please click through to the site, you’ll want to see this).
Right, back to football:
Manchester United are WORLD CHAMPIONS! OK, maybe it’s not the World Cup per se but it IS the official world crown for club football and regardless of what Liverpool fans would say (I’d mention Arsenal and Chelsea fans but they’ve never won the Champions League, have they?), a final win is a final win, whether it’s against Liga de Quito in the Club World Cup taking place in Japan or against newly promoted West Ham in the FA Cup in England.
There’s been plenty of debate on the merits of the competition, with BD Condell arguing against and Tom Clark arguing for – have a look at their arguments and tell us what you think.
ROM has the live blog as well the Vidic red card video, a very harsh decision. Vidic’s actions merited a yellow card for sure, but the Quito player milked it well and got his team the numerical advantage, good on him. Van der Sar had a blinder, and like Ronaldo said in the buildup to the final hopefully for United it can give them the motivation to go on a winning run in the league as well.
Carvalho and Essien are still not fit enough to play for Chelsea. For all of Scolari’s detractors there’s plenty of reason to sympathise with the man when a) his star players are injured throughout the season and b) his boss won’t give any funds as he was open to doing in the first 3 seasons of his reign at Chelsea.
Aston Villa go into Christmas third in the Premier League, and even if Arsenal were to win their home game against Liverpool they still stand a good chance of ending the year in third place. As Martin says, they’ve already beaten Arsenal at the Emirates and beating them at Villa Park should not be any more difficult. Villa may still end up outside the top four this season but if there was ever a chance for them to prove they can mix it with the top teams, Boxing Day is it.
Jonathan Wilson (the best media blogger in 2008 according to Richard Whittall) has an excellent article on the history of how the 4-2-3-1 has taken over from 4-4-2 as the standard formation in European football. Tactically speaking he’s spot on especially with his observation that the 4-2-3-1 allows managers the flexibility to defend as 4-5-1 or attack as 4-3-3 according to the situation on the pitch. Top article.
Lean Lynn Gabriel Fortune (or Leah the Somersault Girl) is our featured player of the week.
FIFA are happy to let a Great Britain FC play in the 2012 Olympics and have guaranteed that it would not jeopardise the international status of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Not that they’re going to win a World Cup anytime soon, mind you, but it’s a welcome response from FIFA. Now if only the various factions could get over themselves and learn to work together. Or will politics dominate football again?
And finally, The Offside has a look at new potential Premier League sponsors if Barclays don’t renew their deal with the ‘richest league in the world’.
That’s it for today, thank you for ogling Heidi all this time 🙂
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