By Paul Gardner My congratulations to Juan Agudelo on escaping the soccer confusion that reigns at the Red Bulls. It has been blatantly clear for about a year now thatthere was no future for Agudelo at the Bulls — a club that showed no evidence whatever of knowing what to do with a young player […]
SoccerTalk with Paul Gardner
Posted inSoccerTalk with Paul Gardner, Story
The Beautiful Game breaks through in EPL
By Paul Gardner If you watched the ManCity-QPR game yesterday, you saw one of the most extraordinary games you’re ever likely to see. Trying to describe it issheer anticlimax — bound to be, so high did the emotions rise one minute, so low did they sink the next. And these wrenching reversals of delight and […]
Posted inSoccerTalk with Paul Gardner, Story
Soccer's insane rule: forcing a team to play short-handed
By Paul Gardner When people pay money — plenty of money — to watch a soccer game, they are entitled to receive in return a genuine soccer game. And the minimumrequirement for that, it seems to me, is that they get a contest between two teams of 11 players. The players may not be the […]
Posted inSoccerTalk with Paul Gardner, Story
Banning the wrong guys: skewed thinking allows the thugs to flourish
By Paul Gardner While the relentless search for divers and, now, the newly identified crime of embellishment, proceeds apace, one is left wondering just why so muchenergy and moral fervor is consumed over this issue … and so little is devoted to a much more insidious and dangerous aspect of the sport: thuggery. We have […]
Posted inSoccerTalk with Paul Gardner, Story
Farewell Ike – a hardy soccer pioneer
By Paul Gardner Farewell, then, to Ike Kuhns, who died last week at the age of 76. Farewell to a treasured journalistic colleague who had been covering American soccerfor some four decades. That fact alone tells you that Ike was an unusual man. There weren’t, back in the 1960s when I first met Ike, many […]
Posted inSoccerTalk with Paul Gardner, Story
Curious Gaps in the MLS Disciplinary Cull
By Paul Gardner The newly energized MLS Disciplinary Committee has been working overtime lately, picking up the scraps and remnants from already-played games, andhanding out post facto punishments in cases where it believes the culprit (meaning a player, or maybe a coach) deserves some extra chastisement for his offense. Thus, we’vehad players given additional suspensions […]
Posted inSoccerTalk with Paul Gardner, Story
The cloud that hangs over Chelsea
By Paul Gardner A couple of deja vu scenes present themselves. It’s 1954 in Berne, and West Germany has just won the World Cup by beating the invincibleHungarians (well, they hadn’t lost a game in four years). How could that happen? Or it’s 1982 in Barcelona and Brazil, playing really beautiful soccer, has just managed […]
Posted inSoccerTalk with Paul Gardner, Story
If Only …
By Paul Gardner … soccer scores always meant what they say. Far too frequently they don’t. Which is the fault of the current game, so structured as to allowvirtually farcical results. Case in the point: last week’s Chelsea 1 Barcelona 0 scoreline. Which ought to mean that Chelsea was the better team — hell, they […]
Posted inSoccerTalk with Paul Gardner, Story
Fergie, Wenger, Mancini & the tangled logic of coaching
By Paul Gardner Alex Ferguson will not win any prizes for his dress sense. Or for speaking easily understood English. So what. All the 70-year-old Scot does is to wintrophies. Though this season he can only win one. ManU’s chances of doing well in either of the English cup competitions, or of winning either of […]
Posted inSoccerTalk with Paul Gardner, Story
Flame out! Red Hot Bulls fizzle to Stone Cold Bulls
By Paul Gardner Exactly what it is about the Red Bulls — to say nothing of their virtually forgotten ancestors the MetroStars — that enables them to look one daylike a promising, if not formidable team, and then turn, almost overnight, into a pathetic scrambling muddle, I can’t even begin to work out. We’ve been […]