William Hold

Fabio Capello's quiet demeanor and considered words give him an aura of deep intelligence and authority, so much so it can sometimes seems he's foreseen everything through 2010 and beyond. But this week the aura's faded a bit under over doubts about his decision last week to call-up perma knee-knacked Tottenham defender Ledley King, and […]

Say what you will about David Beckham, but at least the man isn't on Twitter. Too bad in a way, because Beckham epitomizes the Internet age. Thirty years ago, football's ignominious sideshow used to be known only to players and pub owners; today, David Beckham has made the 24 hour netnews tabloid periphery the main […]

Title race back on, blah blah blah, Aston Villa torn apart like a dingo on a newborn, yada yada yada, England expects ahead of international week—wait just one minute there, pal. It would be safe to say that Villa is a sort of stand-in England B side in the Premier League, at least according to […]

Those of us round long enough to remember the Ipswichs, Blackburns and QPRs of old running rampant in the early days of the Premier League may have winced listening to Setanta's commentators gag with delight as Dossena's lobbed long ball made it Liverpool 4, Manchester United 1. "This is why this is the greatest league […]

Jonathan Wilson, the inimitable scholar of tactical mechanics with his recent Inverting the Pyramid: A History of Football Tactics (a book I included in a piece on tactical reductionism for this website) has made a very convincing argument why English Premier League clubs have come to dominate the Champions League in the last four seasons. […]

North Americans don't get much in the way of involving chit chat shows covering the Premier League. Sky's CNN talking-head-over-ticker-tape style sports news is good for watching endless loops of Steven Gerrard looking forlorn as Liverpool's title chances evaporate into thin air, but it's hardly the sort of thing that makes you feel glad to […]

It's the first of March and although there is everything to be decided, you can smell it in the air. This could be the year United do what hasn't been accomplished by a British club since Celtic in 1967: winning the League, FA, and European Cups, in addition to the Premier League trophy. Yet as […]

And my particular bugbear, this week, is bullshit-artists who try to over-complicate a perfectly simple game by waffling on interminably about formations and tactics; holding midfielders, players in the hole, galloping wing-backs blah, blah, blah snooze yawn in a bid to make out they're more clever than everyone else. There is, of course, a time […]

You may have heard that football is about striving for glory, trying your best to win whatever the circumstances, and pleasing the fans by giving it your all each and every fixture. If you heard that, the person you heard it from is a liar. Instead, as Aston Villa's surrender to CSKA Moscow in the […]

The delicious mind-game between former Premier League rivals Jose Mourinho and Alex Ferguson didn’t disappoint yesterday afternoon. Whether making sure each player wore the correct shirt to the organizing their players in a way to enhance the scoring of goals, these two towering geniuses of the modern game proved beyond a doubt they are football […]

I'm not one to advise anyone how to spend their Champions League February knock-out phase Week One matchday(s), but I know from experience there are worse ways than at your local public house over a pint, or if you're in America, your local Sports Bar and Family Restaurant Chain tearing soggy corn chips from a […]

The Football Comedy is closely related to the Football Film: both are nearly impossible to pull off and both tend to leave fans deeply divided. In my experience, football comedy is usually best when it targets soccer’s absurd periphery, like When Saturday Comes’ tongue-in-cheek reporting on money in modern English football, Mitchell and Webb’s exquisite […]

Hiddink the Hero. Credit hspam via flickr. If I had my way, Guus Hiddink, unveiled today at Chelsea, would be the first of several managers to manage both their national and club sides at the same time. It makes perfect sense: the running gag in the British press always seems to be the enormous amount […]

The FA Cup tie that could have been. Twenty-five football matches scheduled for today have been canceled due to...snow? What? Some puffy white water falling majestically from the sky? This is particularly ironic considering the prognosticators of climate change doom predicted an all-year-round Premier League as one of the upsides to flooded capitals, widespread famine, […]

I have no idea how this keeps happening! Now, before you start calling me Charlie and suggest I place various things in my nether regions, I should begin by mentioning I am in fact an Aston Villa supporter, so much so that each Christmas I go through the official Aston Villa merch catalogue to order […]