1. “Heysel was a horribly tense experience. It remains something of a nightmare. I was spared the worst excesses because of my presence in a commentary position high up in the main stand. The angle of vision meant I was unable to see the wall collapsing on the extreme left hand side of the ground. At the very time the match between Liverpool and Juventus was due to start, parts of the old stadium resembled a battle ground.”
“I saw missiles being fired from the Liverpool end over the heads of the police cordon and landing in the Juventus side. Truly, I was taken aback by this because Liverpool fans always had a great reputation among visiting supporters up to that point. They were deemed to be good fun, top-class followers, however, on this occasion they had been infiltrated by a hooligan minority that ultimately tarnished the club’s reputation.”
Ger Canning gave a chilling description of the Heysel stadium disaster which claimed the lives of 39 football fans in 1985 for RTÉ Sport online.
2. “Rodgers has always presented himself as a seductively modern creature, a “process manager” with a fully tooled-up range of coaching neologisms, from state-of-the-art fluent passing football, to his urge to mint new positions, subvert the dominant paradigm, play a false No9 and 3/4 and all the rest of it.”
“And then, of course, there’s the Liverpool team. Like Rodgers himself, the side have been a little obscured in recent times, hard to get a decent look at. The bald facts are that three years on, and with £210m spent, Liverpool have won no trophies and enjoyed one disappointing Champions League season.”
Barney Ronay in the Guardian questions whether or not it was an achievement that Liverpool finished second in the 2013/14 season or should we be asking why Rodgers failed to finish first with the league’s best player.
3. “ZURICH—After the Justice Department indicted numerous executives from world soccer’s governing body on charges of corruption and bribery, frantic and visibly nervous officials from FIFA held an impromptu press conference Wednesday to announce that the United States has been selected to host this summer’s 2015 World Cup. “We are thrilled to reveal that, for the first time in 21 years, the World Cup will finally return to America, with matches set to kick off today at 5 p.m. local time in Los Angeles,” said FIFA president Sepp Blatter”
The Onion gives a satirical description of the events unfolding in Zurich and how Sepp Blatter plans to work his way out of this one.
4. “Given the glory and heartache on display, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was an important trophy and not the “rubbish”, “rotten”, “devalued” ,”drain on resources” or “waste of time” it is christened every year. English football pundits and managers seem to believe you have to play 29 games to win it and that it involves climbing a mountain and fighting crocodiles. They still weirdly see it as getting in the way of that important business of hanging on to your 8th-placed finish in the Premier League. It gets in the way, despite it being football and they being football clubs.”
John Nicholson gives an excellent view on why the English sides should take the Europa League more seriously, and how the Premier League is not as great as some people think it is (F365).
5. “To be clear, Hartley’s latest offence was by no means the most heinous ever committed. In some ways, though, the unnecessary aspect of the Northampton player’s unprovoked head-drop into the face of his Saracens rival Jamie George was more of a concern to the management than the actual physical contact.”
“It is that recurring inability to maintain control, regardless of circumstances, that will worry Lancaster most. Hartley has many admirable qualities – leadership ability, determination, off-field perspective and a dry sense of humour – but there are only so many times he can let his coaches down. If England’s starting hooker throughout the World Cup is not Leicester’s Tom Youngs, it will now be a surprise.”
Before Stuart Lancaster dropped Dylan Hartley from the England World Cup squad, Robert Kitson in the Guardian outlined why it was the only course of action.
6. “John Barlow, 40, from Penyfford, in Flintshire, North Wales, had been serving a five-year sentence for wounding with intent. Since fleeing the authorities while on temporary home leave in May 2004, he rose to become a respected figure in the equine world. Using the alias John Johnson, he worked as a horse psychologist and was also a talented showjumper with aspirations to join the British Olympic team.”
The Telegraph reported this bizarre story about a man on the run from prison who set his sights on becoming an Olympian after developing a career in show-jumping.