ONE of the great shames of modern television coverage of football is the absence of, in our opinion, one of the best commentators English sport has ever had. While these days we have to make do with John Motson playing Ernie Wise to Mark Lawrenson’s attempted Eric Morcambe, and Clive ‘Manchester United’ Tyldesley, one of the BBC’s best men has been relegated to covering some of the lesser sports.
They say that a footballer’s versatility can sometimes work against him and perhaps the same could be said for Barry Davies. Able to turn his voice to any sport including beach volleyball, ice skating, tennis, gymnastics, hockey and athletics, Davies was also an excellent football man and spent 35 years as a Match of the Day commentator.
On this day in 1975 Davies was sent to Maine Road to commentate on Manchester City’s match with Derby County. Lining up for the Rams was Francis Lee, who had been sold by Man City the previous season for £100,000 after netting 112 times in nearly eight years for the Citizens. Lee was not happy at being sold but was to mark his return to his old stomping ground in spectacular fashion when he scored the winner with a superb goal, which prompted some famous commentary from Davies: “Lee. Interesting … VERY interesting! Oh! Look at his face! Just look at his face!”
Check out the goal here, and have a look at yet another sport Davies turned his hand to a few years ago below. Click here to read about a genuine Derby County legend who passed away on this day.
On September 18 2007 Chelsea chief executive and Zippy from Rainbow lookalike Peter Kenyon said: “After the first week I didn’t feel Ranieri was up to the job. Having been around a winner like Sir Alex, Ranieri certainly didn’t come into that class, so we embarked on looking for a new manager.
“We came up with Mourinho who was young and different. We’d seen some of the best names but he was hungry and thought differently and I saw he had some of the same qualities as Alex Ferguson.
“He’s a winner and we were lucky enough to get him, and I think we’ve had some success since then.
“There’s loads of speculation that if we don’t win Jose gets fired, but that’s not the way we think.”
Just one day later, Mourinho was gone, having left the club ‘by mutual consent’. Chelsea’s most successful manager ever was out of a job after a little over three years in the job.
His record at Stamford Bridge included two League titles (including Chelsea’s first for half a century), two League Cups and the FA Cup, but crucially, he couldn’t deliver the European Cup which he had won with Porto the season before he arrived in London.
Despite forcing the club to splash out on a bigger trophy cabinet, there were rumblings that all was not well between Jose and club owner Roman Abramovich who was keen to see some champagne football as opposed to Mourinho’s functional fare.
But Jose had his own quibbles with his boss, not least that he kept foisting players on him that he didn’t want, and employing Avram Grant as director of football over Mourinho’s head.
Eventually the irresistible force of Mourinho’s ego met the immovable force of Abramovich’s money head on, and something had to give. After a limp 1-1 draw with Rosenborg in the Champions League in front of a meagre 24,000 crowd at Stamford Bridge, Jose and Roman had words, and it was all over.
A club statement said: “The reason the decision has been taken is that we believed the breakdown [between Mourinho and owner Roman Abramovich] started to impact on the performance of the team.
“Recent results supported this view. We did not want this to continue or affect the club further.”
“Early this morning we announced that Chelsea and Jose Mourinho had agreed to part company by mutual consent.
“The key phrase here is that there was mutual agreement. Jose did not resign and he was not sacked.”
“What is clear, though, is we had all reached a point where the relationship between the club and Jose had broken down. This was despite genuine attempts over several months by all parties to resolve certain differences.”
Mourinho’s parting statement had a touch more warmth in it: “I am very proud of my work in Chelsea Football Club and I think my decision in May 2004 to come to England was an excellent one,” he said.
“It was a beautiful and rich period of my career. I want to thank all Chelsea FC supporters for what I believe is a never-ending love story.
“I wish great success to the club, a club that will be forever connected to me for some historical moments.”
The most charismatic man in English football was gone, and after Chelsea fans, the press were hurting the most as they could no longer count on the Portugeezer for snappy quotes to fill their pages.
AS former England hot-shot and dog enthusiast Jimmy Greaves once said, it’s a funny old game. Football exists in a bubble where common sense and logic are notable by their absence. How else would you explain the fact that Bryan Robson has landed the managers job at so many high profile clubs?
Today in 2006 one of them, West Brom, came to their senses and ditched Captain Marvel following the Baggies’ slow start to the season.
When Robbo’s days at Old Trafford were over in 1994 after the emergence of Beckham and co he moved up north to take on the role of player-manager following Lennie Lawrence’s departure.
A promising start to his managerial career saw him win the Division One title and gain promotion to the Premier League. With the help of Steve Gibson’s millions big-name players like Fabrizio Ravanelli, Juninho and ahem, Nick Barmby came flocking to Boro’s brand new stadium at the Roverside, but they could not prevent the club going straight back down.
Gibson kept the faith with Robson and the club were again promoted in 1998. Robson’s tenure was starting to look shaky after the turn of the millennium, and with Boro rock bottom at the end of 2000 he was given the footballing equivalent of a pair of stabilisers, when Terry Venables was appointed as head coach. Middlesbrough beat the drop, but the writing was on the way for Robson as he left at the end of the season, citing the old ‘by mutual consent’ reasoning.
Robson’s next stop was Bradford City, where he was, quite frankly, rubbish. The Bantams took 22 points from 27 games and were relegated from Division One in 23rd position. He then returned to his first ever club, West Brom in November 2004. Although he kept Adrian Chiles’ favourite side up that season despite being bottom at Christmas, they were relegated the next and a poor start to the 2006/07 campaign saw him get the boot.
Somehow, he managed to convince Sheffield United to give him another bash at management after Neil Warnock resigned. After struggling with one of the division’s most talented squads he was given the boot after eight months.
These days he can be found back at Old Trafford where he works as an ambassador for the club. Good work if you can get it. As you really don’t want to see any action from Robbo in the dugout, have a gander at him doing what he did best, putting in a monster performance on the pitch, below. Were you wondering what was happening today in the crazy world of football? If so, click here. We’ll be back tomorrow, so don’t go changing.
IT’S always bad news when your season peaks in the middle of September, and that’s exactly what happened to Derby County today in 2007. When the final whistle blew at the end of their match with Newcastle United, little did the Rams know that this would be their only three-point haul of the season.
Manager Billy Davies took the club to the promised land of the Premier League four months earlier when they beat West Brom in the play-off final, a game dubbed the most expensive in all of sport, as a £60m Premiership windfall awaited the winners.
Unfortunately, as our mother’s once told us, money doesn’t buy you happiness. After securing their place at the top table of English football Derby fans had endure a car-crash of a season, as their team’s incompetence saw them break record after record at the wrong end of the table.
Their solitary win over Newcastle came thanks to a Kenny Miller goal and accounted for more than a quarter of their final point tally as they set a record for the lowest number of points ever and equalled Loughborough’s 108-year football league record of going through an entire season with one win.
Billy Davies, no doubt wishing he was still in the calmer water of the Championship, was ditched in November to be replaced by Paul Jewell. An influx of new faces came about in January, but funnily enough the likes of Robbie Savage and Laurent ‘team player’ Robert did nothing to slow down Derby’s freefall.
On no less than nine occasions Derby conceded four or more goals and their fate was sealed at the end of March when they were relegated following a draw with fellow strugglers Fulham. Bookmakers Paddy Power had seen it coming and paid out on their relegation after only five games.
Despite a summer of change, Derby’s start to the new season has been almost as bad. Last weekend they picked up their first win as they narrowly avoided going a full 365 days without a league win.
We’ll leave you with footage of the Rams defeating Preston in the 2007 play-off final so you can see how happy the poor fools were at getting promoted. If only they knew what was around the corner. Check out with other minnows were punching above their weight here and we’ll be here same time, same place for another daily dose of footballing history tomorrow.
A BIT of a nerd-fest today folks, as we look at some of the hardest shots this side of the Picos.
Although there is no official list of the hardest shots in football, the Guardian compiled an unofficial top ten last year which had some of the expected names on it. Beckham was on there twice with efforts clocked at 80.5mph and 97.9mph. Roberto Carlos, Alan Shearer and Matt Le Tissier were also there with their own netbusting shots.
Today in 1996 though one player eclipsed them all. Arsenal were playing at home to Sheffield Wednesday, who were already one nil up, when one man with a foot like a traction engine stepped up to the plate. David Hirst hit a thunderbolt shot towards David Seaman’s goal which was clocked at a whopping 114 miles per hour. It crashed against the bar with Seaman all kinds of beaten, and rebounded back into play before being blasted high and wide by one of Hirst’s teammates, as you can see below:
Hirst held the crown for 11 years until a new gunslinger rode into town and found he was the fastest shot in the west. Sporting Lisbon’s Brazilian left-back Ronny “Homem-Bomba” (human bomb) Heberson hit a canon of a shot in November 2006 against Naval that was reportedly from 16.5 metres in 0.28 seconds, which works out at 131.82mph.
IN his short spell as manager at pre-Abramovich Chelsea, Gianluca Vialli led the club to five trophies including the FA and League Cups. Naturally, the response of then-chairman Ken Bates to Vialli being Chelsea’s most successful manager in decades was to sack him.
Bates turned to another Italian to replace him and on this day in 2000 Claudio Ranieri signed a three-year contract to become the new boss at Stamford Bridge. The former Fiorentina, Valencia and Atletico Madrid coach went all Cantona-like when he confirmed he had been contacted by Chelsea. “I was flattered by the call,” he said, adding: “If there are roses they will bloom.”
It was not a universally popular appointment; fans were understandably unhappy at Vialli’s sacking and Claudio’s very limited English earned him the nickname ‘Clownio’. Soon though, just like with real clowns, no one was laughing. Despite the inconsistency that had dogged Chelsea under previous managers Vialli and Ruud Gullit, by the end of the 2002/03 season, Ranieri had led the club to a fourth-place finish in the Premiership, and the Champions League place that came with it.
That summer, everything changed when Abramovich bought the club and unleashed his golden cheque book on the football world. Ranieri was like a kid in a sweet shop and spent £120m on Damien Duff, Wayne Bridge, Joe Cole, Scott Parker and Glen Johnson, Argentine pair Juan Sebastian ‘Seba’ Veron and Hernán Crespo, Frenchman Claude Makélélé and Romanian star Adrian Mutu.
Despite having spending power the envy of his fellow managers, Ranieri’s job looked to be under threat from early on, with Abramovich spotted meeting Sven-Goran Eriksson just days after his takeover of the club.
Ranieri himself thinks the man Abramovich hired to run his new club had more to do with his sacking after just one season under the Russian’s ownership in which they finished second in the Premiership behind Arsenal’s invincibles.
He said: “When Kenyon came, I was frozen. Kenyon was the new boss, and new bosses tend to want to bring in their own people and I was not one of his people. Am I bitter? Yes. Bitterness, rancour, hurt – call it what you like. Before Abramovich came, I was doing my job, I carried on doing it for him and I wanted to continue doing it. At the end, after the game against Leeds, I knew the players and the supporters were with me, even if the club was not. They knew I had left my legacy with them.”
Ranieri was a dead man walking for much of the season and he was finally put out of his misery in the summer of 2004 when Jose Mourinho was brought in.
After a short spell back at Valencia, Ranieri saved Parma from relegation, before taking his current job as Juventus boss. At the end of last season the Tinkerman said he would relish a European tie at his old club.
He said: “Yes, I would love to play Chelsea in the Champions League next year. To bring Juventus to the Bridge, not out of revenge or spite, but just to show the fans and players, and the club, that this is what I do now. That this is Juventus, these are the players I’m proud to work with now, and this is the team I’ve built – on a budget.”
The Tinkerman may well get his wish, but until then, see here for last year’s entry, and come back tomorrow for more from us.
THE humble penalty kick: scourge of England, masterminded by Germany, invented by an Irishman and first seen today in 1891.
Today marks the birthday of innovation that has brought more heartache to English football fans than anything else. Back at the tail end of the Victorian era, the newly formed Football League was splayed with a somewhat wild-west spirit as the rulebook was struggling to catch up the cynical tactics of the era.
In order to stop the excessive hacking that was spoiling many-a-game, a mill owner and goalkeeper from Milford in Co Armagh in Northern Ireland called William McCrum came up with an idea that he believed would stop cheating.
The Irish Football Association presented Crum’s idea to the International Football Association Board who were initially sceptical of the innovation. The two parties debated long and hard and it wasn’t until a Notts County player blatantly handballed on the goal-line in their FA Cup quarter-final against Stoke that they succumbed.
The penalty kick was approved on 2nd June 1891, in time for the 1891/92 season. The first ever player to step up to the 12-yard spot was John Heath of Wolverhampton Wanderers who slotted it home en route to his sides’ 5-0 thrashing of Accrington Stanley at Molineux.
Since then, the penalty has proved to be somewhat of a hit. In 1970 Uefa introduced penalty shootouts as a way of deciding games after a number of domestic cup competitions, such as the Yugoslav Cup in 1952 and Coppa Italia in 1958 had trialled it. In 1976 Fifa followed suite, meaning that England could be knocked out of both the World Cup and European Championships in the cruellest possible way.
See footage of one of our favourite ever penalty shootouts below and then have a check on what Crum’s most famous fellow countryman was up to today here.
WHEN a young Ian Wright was spending a week in the slammer after not paying his motoring fines you’d have got a decent price on him becoming the all-time leading goalscorer top for one of the world’s biggest clubs.
If there’s one thing sport delivers better than any other facet of life though, it’s a rags-to-riches story and that’s just what young Wrighty gave us today in 1997 when he broke Cliff Bastin’s 50-year-old Arsenal goalscoring record.
We’ve already brought you the story of when the plastering industries greatest ever footballer was summoned to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen, but for today’s story we’ll keep to on-the-pitch matters (although a couple of snide digs at his TV career may well sneak in at some point).
The day that Wrighty cemented his place in Arsenal folklore came when Arsenal were facing Bolton at Highbury. For the previous four weeks Wright had been standard on 177 goals after his brace against Coventry at the start of the 1997/98 season.
When Alan Thompson gave Bolton an early lead it looked like another day frustration for the Woolwich-born frontman, but when Wright latched onto a pass from strike-partner Ian Wright he fired in the equaliser and ripped off his shirt to reveal a t-shirt saying ‘179 – Just Done It!’, which would’ve been fine, except for the fact it was only his 178th goal.
Still, it didn’t take long for him to put it right, as he slotted home again five minutes later. Wanting to make a proper day out of it, Wright bagged his third in the second half to ensure the match ball was his.
Wright would finish his Arsenal career with 185 goals, but his record would not prove to last as long as Bastin’s as Thierry Henry va-va-voomed his way to 226 goals for the Gooners over the next ten years.
In 1998 Wright left Highbury to fit in a spot of journeyman-ism at the end of his career, leading the line for West Ham, Forest, Celtic and then Burnley before taking his place on the BBC pundit sofa to act as chief cheerleader for a certain young Manchester City right-winger.
Earlier this year he parted ways with the Beeb claiming they treated him a ‘jester’ before pitching up on the new series of Gladiators to prove he could show even Alanis Morissette a thing or two about irony.
We’d rather remember him doing his thing on the pitch, so have a gander at the man himself recalling his favourite ever goals in a top 5 list that Gooner fan Nick Hornby would be proud of. See which player was blowing out the candles today here and we’ll be back tomorrow for more of the same so don’t go changing.
ONCE upon a time football was a working class pursuit, watched by men in flat caps with flasks of bovril and stubby little fags huddled together on the terraces in black and white. These days it is glamorous, expensive, sparkly and in full technicolour. Where once it was seen as a grubby little sport for the great unwashed, now it is cool and watched by everyone from bin men to chief executives.
One man had a big impact on the changed perception of football from a loutish waste of time to a cerebral sport, and it wasn’t Rupert Murdoch. Arsenal fan Nick Hornby published his seminal football book Fever Pitch on this day in 1992 and football literature was changed forever.
The book begins: “I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.”
The book was a series of essays about Hornby’s life as a Gunners fan and was his first book. It sold more than a million copies in the UK and won the prestigious William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award in 1992.
Everyone who read it thought they could have written the book, which was simply a testament to how good it was and how well it encapsulated the realities of being a football fan.
In a 2005 article in the Observer Hornby recounts the perception of the game among his peers: “You have to remember that the public perception of football for most of the Eighties was summed up by a Sunday Times article which claimed that it was ‘a slum sport for slum people’. I had friends – lawyers, teachers – who would look incredulous when I said I was a football fan. It was like saying you followed wrestling.”
Since Fever Pitch was published to critical and mass acclaim there has been an explosion in football literature with hundreds of books on the subject published each year, as football became well and truly main stream – not that Hornby wants to be held responsible for that.
He said: “I wasn’t consciously trying to popularise football, though I did think it deserved better. So I was surprised by the way popular and cultural attitudes to it have changed since – I’m not claiming responsibility for that, by the way. There are still a lot of diehard fans who feel uncomfortable about that. There’s a real sniffiness, an aggression towards anyone who might be termed a Johnny-comelately. That probably makes football unique. After all, no one tells you to fuck off if you start going to the cinema or the theatre. There are still a lot of fans who would prefer their team to be bottom of the league and playing in front of 4,000 than top and playing in front of 40,000. There was a time when I might have been one of them.”
The book spawned a film adapted by Hornby himself which concentrated on the 1989 title deciding match which Arsenal won at Anfield.
Have a look at the climax of the film below, and click here for more on-this-day fun. We’ll have more tomorrow but until then, don’t have nightmares.
ANYONE who has seen Wembley’s stunning giant arch spanning across north London cannot fail to be impressed by the sight. The finished stadium may be impressive, but the journey to get there was like trying to drive across Siberia in an old Lada that keeps breaking down, with bandits shooting at you, while chucking bundles of £50 notes out of the window the whole way. In short, the whole thing was a bloody nightmare with more delays than the Millennium Dome, and just as many set backs.
It all started on this day in 2000 when Australian firm Multiplex signed the deal to build the new stadium for a maximum cost of £326.5m, with the, in hindsight laughably ambitious target of the 2003 FA Cup final as the opening match.
It may not have been obvious from the shambles that ensued, but the company had experience of building stadia, having put up Sydney’s Olympic Stadium a full year ahead of schedule. Things did not quite go so well for England’s new footballing home and financial delays, disputes with contractors and even blackmail and death threats dogged the project from start to finish.
The original finish date of May 2003 was looking dodgy very early on, and as it turned out, the old Twin Towers were not even demolished until February 2003, and the finish date was pushed ever further back until it was eventually opened in 2007, just the four years late and £450m over budget.
Multiplex, who were reportedly paying a penalty of £120,000 for every day the project was delayed beyond its finish date, eventually handed over the keys to the FA in March 2007. With a healthy dose of understatement, FA chief executive Brian Barwick said: “We have been preparing for a very long time and are delighted to finally get inside the stadium.”
Keen to get a butchers at the new ground, the first match in the stadium, an under 21 clash between England and Italy, was a sell out. Italian striker Giampaolo Pazzini netted after just 25 seconds and went to to score another two as he grabbed both the first scorer and the first hat-trick accolades at the new stadium, as the two sides drew 3-3.
The senior team also drew on their first outing under the arch, sharing the spoils in a 1-1 draw with Brazil that saw David Beckham return to the England fold.
Have a goosey gander here at our ramblings from this day last year and come back tomorrow when we look at one of the best football books ever written.
