Late last year, when I wrote my “Five Stories You Don’t Have to Care About in 2008” column for Pitch Invasion, one of the stories I said you should care about was the race among Premier League clubs to sign Croatia’s talented young midfielder Luka Modric. At the time, it looked like he’d be going [...]

Dimitar Berbatov taking the penalty kick that drew Spurs level in the Carling Cup final yesterday: coolness so pronounced that it almost seemed rude to Chelsea, a matter-of-fact confidence taken to the point at which it began to resemble arrogant detachment. It was as if Berbatov felt such scorn for the thought that Petr [...]

There must be times when Damien Comolli, sitting on the side of his bed with one sock on and one sock off, drifts into a reverie in which excerpts from the Wikipedia page of Jonathan Woodgate come spinning toward him like nightmare newspaper headlines:
A serious injury saw him end his final season somewhat early…
Woodgate never [...]

What do you look like, Dimitar Berbatov?
A pumpkin, a ploughshare, a sullen boy, a sheaf of corn, a furrow, a scarecrow, a farm.
What do you mean, “a farm”?
I am moving on the pitch while a horse, broken from labor, gingerly walks around a split rail fence whose uppermost rail is sodden. It blows steam [...]

I’m in the middle of a long post about the football audience and the internet (which may or may not ever see the light of day), so for now, here are a few scattered thoughts. You might get a wish if you throw one in a fountain.
• Scotland have appointed George Burley to be [...]

He sits calmly. His elfin face peeks sadly over the high collar of his fleece pullover.
He sits calmly.
He sits calmly.
He sits calmly.
An aura of righteousness slowly gathers around him.

There’s an entertaining mini-history to be written (by someone else; I just track down links) of the resolutely British prejudice against the football management structure called “the continental system”—which sounds, first of all, like a euphemistic torture device from an Ian Fleming novel, and second of all like what James Bond would have tried with [...]

Spurs have confirmed, to the delight of whatever PA at Blackburn takes Mark Hughes’s phone messages, that Juande Ramos is their new manager. They’ve done well to get him, although it remains to be seen whether he’s enough of an improvement over Martin Jol to justify the ten-story belly-flop of what can only with charity [...]

Juande Ramos has resigned from Sevilla in a move that seems a certain prelude to his replacing Gary Megson at Leicester. Ramos declined to give a press conference at Sevilla, but “has chosen his website www.juanderamos.com as a means of saying goodbye to the club,” according to a statement released by Sevilla. In other [...]

That’s what Nick Miller suspects at the Football365 Blog.

Ramos has yet to prove he can break the sort of hold that Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea have over the rest of the league. This quartet dominate the Premier League in the same way that the Real Madrid and Barcelona duopoly do in Spain, and [...]