Football Daily | Won’t somebody please think of the Arsenal?

Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now! Poor old Arsenal. There they were on Saturday afternoon, with their dramatic, last-minute, momentum-maintaining, potential-league-winning, stadium-into-hyperspace-dispatching goal that registered 9.3 on the Michaelthomasometer, expecting to be the talk of the town for the whole week and maybe the entire month … only for Bruno Fernandes to stage his spectacular dirty protest 24 hours later, refusing point blank to tackle, chase back, tidy his room, all that. Oh Bruno, Luke, Lisandro et al! Did Reiss Nelson calmly slot a spectacular, 96th-minute, possible-season-defining, rising, screaming, net-ripping, opposition-gut-punching, stop-the-world, top-class half-volley for nothing? While Mike Smith can rightly compare the last-minute drama at Chippenham Town in the National League South to the similar scenes at the Emirates (yesterday’s Football Daily letters), can I offer a further step on the way down the proof-ladder that the drama doesn’t reduce just because there are fewer there to witness it? Last week Glan Conwy Under-9s visited the fortress home of the mighty Clwb Peldroed Bethel in a friendly arranged to practise for next season’s change from five-a-side up to seven. In front of maybe 20 ‘fans’ (mums, dads and grandparents) and with the sloping pitch finally in their favour, the GC stormed back from 2-0 down with just a couple of minutes left to triumph 3-2 in a real smash-and-grab raid. No cameras to record, no pundits to discuss, but a fine victory nonetheless. Plus further evidence of my pet theory that the third goal always wins” – Simon Lewis. Can you please spearhead a STOP BAD GAME APOLOGIES movement? There’s myriad reasons for genuine apologies from players, managers and clubs in modern football, but the risk-free ‘we’re sorry we played so bad’ version seems to be the only one that’s given freely” – Kristian. ChatGPT is in the news at the moment. But has anybody else noticed the similarities between ChatGPT and the outpourings of all those former Liverpool and Manchester United player bots … sorry, pundits on Sky Sports? OpenAI, ChatGPT’s creator, say that its responses ‘may be inaccurate, untruthful, and otherwise misleading at times’. OpenAI’s CEO also admitted recently that the AI chatbot is ‘incredibly limited’ and that ‘it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now’. Sounds familiar. Meanwhile, here’s a ChatGPT-generated poem about the Football Daily column: I’m glad that I’m not a newspaper Reports are always so depressing Every day it’s something new And it’s never good news I couldn’t handle all the sadness All the heartache and pain I’m glad that I’m not a newspaper I’d go insane This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions. Continue reading...

Komentar

Posting Komentar

Postingan populer dari blog ini

Wiegman’s Lionesses rekindle lost energy to fire spectacular comeback | Jonathan Liew

Gambar
Nations League victory against the Dutch arrives at the last despite a lack of clarity and brittleness creeping into the team They’ll always have Paris. Throughout this Nations League campaign this has been an England team fighting its own sense of entropy, still giving everything, still trying the same plans and processes in the hope that eventually something would click. And at 9.34pm on a briskly cold Wembley night, it finally did. Ella Toone’s injury-time goal earned England three points and kept their faintly glowing Olympic dream alive. But somehow it also did so much more. It breathed life into a team and a cycle, and a moment that for so much of the evening had felt like it was drawing to its natural conclusion provided a rousing encore to a cast preparing for its final curtain. There will be new challenges and new frontiers to conquer soon enough, a fresh set of European Championship qualifiers in the spring, but for now this iteration of the Lionesses still has tricks up
Baca selengkapnya

US owners understand profit but do they appreciate clubs’ tradition and values?

Gambar
Half of the Premier teams are part- or fully-owned by Americans or US companies. Fans’ suspicions are understandable * Sign up to Jonathan’s weekly newsletter here It’s just over a year since Gary Neville declared US owners of English soccer clubs “a clear and present danger to the pyramid and fabric of the game”. The comment provoked a furore but the former England full-back turned high-profile pundit was unrepentant, insisting that if profit is the priority, there are vital aspects of the roles of soccer clubs that risk being lost. The issue, clearly, is not restricted to US owners. It’s unlikely that anybody who is not a fan who takes over a club is going to be acting primarily in the best interests of the community it represents. But given half the 20 Premier League clubs (and seven of the 24 Championship clubs) are part- or fully-owned by Americans or US companies, and given the prevalence of private equity companies whose sole interest is short-term profit, it’s perhaps
Baca selengkapnya

‘Emotional’ Leah Williamson to make first England start in almost a year

Gambar
* Euro 2022-winning captain missed World Cup with ACL injury * Defender brings ‘flexibility in defence’, says Sarina Wiegman Sarina Wiegman has confirmed Leah Williamson will start for England against the Republic of Ireland on Tuesday night in their second Euro 2025 qualifying group game. Williamson, the Euro 2022-winning captain, said she would be emotional at the Aviva Stadium when she steps out with England for the first time in almost a year, after she was sidelined with an anterior cruciate ligament injury last April. Continue reading...
Baca selengkapnya