A Sticker's Worth 500 Words

In November 1972 the arcade game Pong made its debut and the gaming industry was born. While not the first attempt to make some computer pixels do not very much for the amusement of the masses it was by far the most commercially successful and, by the end of the decade, the first ever football game was unleashed on the world in the form of NASL Soccer. Judging by the YouTube footage it seemed to involve lots of brightly coloured stick men over hitting through balls and running in the opposite direction to oncoming forwards which may well be what the likes of Trevor Francis , Johan Cruyff and Gerd Muller were getting up to over in the US at the time. Throughout the 1980s the games became more realistic and a host of star players and managers put their names on products of variable quality. Peter Shilton’s Handball Maradona (not that he is anyway bitter about being out jumped by a midget) gave youngsters the opportunity to fulfil their goalkeeping fantasies in a range of scenarios with r

We are finally responding to a request from the excellent Anglo Italian Pod for a post on a member of Italy’s victorious 2006 World Cup squad. Mat Jolin-Beech may have already covered Francesco Totti and missed out on the opportunity to cover Alessandro Del Piero or Marco Materazzi but there were a host of exceptional footballers he could have chosen from their inspirational captain Fabio Cannavaro to the impossibly handsome Mauro Camoranesi. This blog being what it is though Mat has decided to focus on a loveable shithouse and his time in Scotland. We hope this does the trick lads. This is the first that may end up being a series of pieces from me with the theme “I forgot they played there” and the opening salvo in this possible theme is Gennaro Gattuso. The midfield hardman is synonymous with AC Milan where, in no particular order, he claimed two Champions League titles, the Coppa Italia, two Serie A winner’s medals, two Italian Super Cups, two UEFA Super Cups, and a FIFA Club

As another January transfer window closes there has been a more sedate atmosphere than in previous seasons but there have still been some interesting highlights. The summer’s mass exodus to Saudi Arabia has not been replicated and Jordan Henderson has in fact left his former paymasters for Ajax having failed to singlehandedly convince the nation to openly accept the LGBTQ+ community. Eric Dier, something of a forgotten man at Tottenham Hotspur, has joined former teammate Harry Kane at Bayern Munich who seem to be looking to replicate Spurs by failing to win the league title. Back in North London the German striker Timo Werner has returned to a Premier League he only left eighteen months ago with, hopefully for Spurs, a better understanding of the offside rule than he had at Chelsea. I’m sure this all makes sense to someone somewhere even if these moves bear more than a passing resemblance to the glory days of Championship Manager . In the summer of 1995 the Premier League was awash wi