Football

Neil Lennon, the Celtic manager, is not normally an especially sympathetic figure. But so what? Here’s the big news from Scotland today: Three prominent figures associated with Celtic Football Club have been sent potentially lethal home-made letter bombs. Celtic manager Neil Lennon, his QC Paul McBride and the politician Trish Godman, a Celtic supporter, were each sent a package containing improvised explosives with the power to kill or severely wound the recipient. Can we agree that this is getting out of hand? Assassination attempts – which is what this is – open a new front in football’s most depressing rivalry. At this point it’s customary to blame both sides and

Goals don’t come much better than this. Part of Lionel Messi’s charm – and his football really is charming – comes from the impish glee that runs through his performances. There’s an almost childlike joy to Messi’s game that leaves you smiling and feeling just a little better about the world. Some of that, no doubt, comes from the fact that he still looks as though he’s a 12 year old playing amongst men, but there’s a purity about Messi too that raises his football far above his erstwhile rivals for the title of Greatest Footballer of His Time. Aesthetics are not the only fruit, but they matter. Is there

Emotional involvement is a grand thing. Except when it clouds the mind. Such, anyway, would seem to be the case with Tim Montgomerie’s call for government intervention in the vexed [sic] issue of who owns football clubs. Now, like Tim (who, unlike me, is a Manchester United fan) I’ve little against supporters-groups owning football clubs. But… At the moment the Culture, Media and Sport team seem content to let the footballing authorities find a solution to the football debt problem. These are the same authorities who, amongst other things, stupidly signed a contract extension for Fabio Capello before the World Cup. Jeremy Hunt isn’t quite standing before an empty goal

  I don’t know. I really don’t. It can’t go on. But it will. It bloody will. There are times when watching Scotland play international football produces the sensation that one’s actually trapped inside a Beckett play. It might seem a tragicomedy to you but it’s no fun in here. A game of two halves, as a friend puts it, in which bugger all that’s good happens. Twice. We can all recite the horrors. The 7-0 hammering against Uruguay in 1950 1954*. The 9-3 unpleasantness against England. Peru. Iran. Costa Rica. The two draws against the mighty Faroe Islands. But all bar the last were at the Big Show and

Good to see that Craig Levein, the new Scotland manager, has a sophisticated grasp of football tactics. As this note left in the dressing room last week demonstrates: Final score? Sweden 3 Scotland 0.

A good question! Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski suggest not. Their argument, summarised by Tim Harford, runs more or less like this: – England do about as well as you’d expect, given their size, economic power, proximity to football’s “core” in Western Europe, and footballing history. That is, you’d expect them to usually make the last 16, sometimes make the last 8, occasionally make the last 4 and make the final very rarely. And they do. – Managers don’t make much difference to a team’s expected performance. Not even Fabio Capello. – There is no correlation between the qualifying performance (which in this particular campaign was outstanding) and the performance

Yes, it might well, nay would, have changed the momentum of the game*. No, video technology is not needed (not least because it hasn’t improved any game in which it has been introduced). And anyway, to adapt Wodehouse, what you gain on the roundabouts of 1966 you lose on the swings of 2010. Consider this, then, an open thread to moan about the World Cup:   *I didn’t actually see it since I was playing cricket. Against Langholm. We won. I took, rather astonishingly, two wickets. It should have been three. Or even four. But that would be greedy and massively above and beyond expectations.

I’m not going to intrude into private grief. But, as mentioned before, there’s a considerable disconnect between the England fans (many of them anyway) and the tabloids. As this wince-inducing Sun frontpage from the day after the draw was announced makes clear… So, readers, what do you think England should do next?

One of the stranger aspects of watching World Cup coverage in the United States is ESPN’s choice of colour commentator and studio analyst. Who knew that what this tournament really needs is Robbie Mustoe’s analysis? Then there’s Steve McManaman and Ally McCoist and Efan Ekoku all of whom are working for the Americans for, frankly, mysterious reasons. Not all of it works. Then again, the quality of analysis on the BBC and ITV has been abysmal and actually, I think, worse than what ESPN offers. Tom English has a splendid, righteous, column in the Scotsman today that sets about Shearer and Hansen and Chiles and the rest of them in