Footballbits and pieces

FIFA’s decision to award the 2022 World Cup hosting rights to a tiny, Sheffield-sized, almost completely disinterested, sun-scorched, oil-rich desert atoll in the middle of the Persian Gulf was a sham – you know it, I know it, Sepp Blatter knows it. Since the Sunday Times brought to light that, shock horror, the Qatar bid team [...]

Gary Neville has confirmed that, after making 602 appearances for Manchester United over the course of an illustrious 20-year one-club career, he is to retire from football with immediate effect. With Giggs and Scholes plodding on at Old Trafford, Becks still harbouring dreams of World Cup glory, Nicky Butt banging them in for fun out [...]

Everyone seems to have have their own idea of where England National Teams go wrong. The are always new accusations and FA directives to try and address an issue where the country with arguably the best league, and on balance, as good a player as the best of them, where is it all going wrong? [...]

The time will soon be upon us when it will be discovered whether the England 2018 World Cup bid team (as well as their Russian, Spanish/Portuguese and Dutch/Belgian counterparts) will discover whether the last year or so of flesh-pressing, lobbying, rule-flaunting, power-brokering, politicking, back-slapping, bribery, petty sniping, short-sighted optimism and the abject hemorrhaging of several [...]

In a development that reveals just how low they now deem themselves to have sunk in FIFA’s estimations (and how far back they have fallen back in terms of the impending vote), England 2018 have written to every voting member on the organisation’s executive committee (EC), pleading with them to not to punish the bid [...]