Football Match Quotes

Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance. It was permissible to touch each other and cry during football matches.

[Books are] vital to learning. Half the population don't go to football matches but that doesn't make football any less important.

Who said the Arabs are incapable of breaking world records? Qatar has just set a new world record by becoming the first host nation ever to lose an opening World Cup football match.

The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with out friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.

They've drunk everything in the house, including a pitcher of African violet plant food I'd just mixed up and was stupid enough to leave on the counter." Tremaine punched Eddie in the shoulder. "I told you it tasted weird." Eddie shrugged. "Tasted okay to me.

When did my house turn into a hangout for every grossly overpaid, terminally pampered professional football player in northern Illinois?" "We like it here," Jason said. "It reminds us of home." "Plus, no women around." Leandro Collins, the Bears' first-string tight end emerged from the office munching on a bag of chips. "There's times when you need a rest from the ladies." Annabelle shot out her arm and smacked him in the side of the head. "Don't forget who you're talking to." Leandro had a short fuse, and he'd been known to take out a ref here and there when he didn't like a call, but the tight end merely rubbed the side of his head and grimaced. "Just like my mama." "Mine, too," Tremaine said with happy nod. Annabelle spun on Heath. "Their mother! I'm thirty-one years old, and I remind them of their mothers." "You act like my mother," Sean pointed out, unwisely as it transpired, because he got a swat in the head next.

Qui a dit que les Arabes étaient incapables de battre des records du monde ? Le Qatar vient d'établir un nouveau record du monde en devenant le premier pays hôte à perdre un match d'ouverture de la Coupe du monde de football.

We now find our gods not on the altar, but in the bottle of alcohol, the football match on television, the new pair of shoes and the arms of the casual lover.

If you're a boy, any display of sensitivity is gay. Compassion is gay. Crying is supergay. Reading is usually gay. Certain songs and types of music are gay. 'Enola Gay' would certainly be thought gay. Love songs are gay. Love itself is incredibly gay, as are any other heartfelt emotions. Singing is gay, but chanting is not gay. Wanking contests are not gay. Neither is all-male cuddling during specially designated periods in football matches, or communal bathing thereafter. (I didn't invent the rules of gay - I'm just telling you what they are.)

He screamed Connell’s name, and began to kiss his head with wild exuberant kisses. It was only one-all, and there were still twenty minutes left on the clock. But that was their world then. Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance. It was permissible to touch each other and cry during football matches.

It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.

I was never a fan of golf. It’s too slow. Too quiet. Too bloody boring. I like my sports the way I like to fuck – wild, loud and dirty. Football is more my game. Or rugby. Full body contact. Polo is all right too. Hell, at this point, I’d settle for an energetic Quidditch match.

Grief-work. It sounds such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic. Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; sometimes active, a conscious attention to death and loss and the loved one; sometimes necessarily distractive (the bland football match, the overwhelming opera).

Humans have this remarkable ability to know and not to know at the same time. Or more correctly, they can know something when they really think about it, but most of the time they don’t think about it, so they don’t know it. If you really focus, you realise that money is fiction. But usually you don’t focus. If you are asked about it, you know that football is a human invention. But in the heat of the match, nobody asks you about it. If you devote the time and energy, you can discover that nations are elaborate yarns. But in the midst of a war you don’t have the time and energy. If you demand the ultimate truth, you realise that the story of Adam and Eve is a myth. But how often do you demand the ultimate truth?

When Arthur had been a boy at school, long before the Earth had been demolished, he had used to play football. He had not been at all good at it, and his particular speciality had been scoring own goals in important matches.

When you will have to search for long to collect other nine players to organize your usual five-a-side football match..you will realize to be old...

The Stadium Have you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than stands bereft of spectators. At Wembley, shouts from the 1966 World Cup, which England won, still resound, and if you listen very closely you can hear groans from 1953 when England fell to the Hungarians. Montevideo’s Centenario Stadium sighs with nostalgia for the glory days of Uruguayan soccer. Maracanã is still crying over Brazil’s 1950 World Cup defeat. At Bombonera in Buenos Aires, drums boom from half a century ago. From the depths of Azteca Stadium, you can hear the ceremonial chants of the ancient Mexican ball game. The concrete terraces of Camp Nou in Barcelona speak Catalan, and the stands of San Mamés in Bilbao talk in Basque. In Milan, the ghosts of Giuseppe Meazza scores goals that shake the stadium bearing his name. The final match of the 1974 World Cup, won by Germany, is played day after day and night after night at Munich’s Olympic Stadium. King Fahd Stadium in Saudi Arabia has marble and gold boxes and carpeted stands, but it has no memory or much of anything to say.

At least I’ve got football . It’s been my life since I was seven, but sometimes Henry says I need to spend less time focusing and start “living life like I’m going to hell tomorrow.” But I feel like a normal teenager. Wel , as normal as I can be. I mean, obviously I think Justin Timberlake is a mega-hunk, but I’m also over six feet tal and can launch a footbal fifty yards. Other ways I’m not normal? A girl who hangs with an entire football team must hook up all the time, right? Nope. I’ve never had a boyfriend. Hell , I’ve never even kissed a guy. The closest I’ve ever come to a kiss happened just this past summer, but it was a joke. At a party, one of those cheerleaders suggested we all play a game of seven minutes in heaven, you know, the game where you go into a closet and kiss? Somehow Henry and I got sent into the closet together, and of course we didn’t kiss, but we ended up in a mad thumb-wrestling match. Which turned into a shoving match. Which turned into everyone thinking we’d hooked up in the closet. Yeah, right. He’s like my brother.

AFC Leopards were as thrilling a side as ever took the pitch and they dominated East African football in the eighties. That Kenyan players were an excitable bunch was attested to in one memorable Leopards match, with the opposing goalkeeper being handcuffed and dragged away to jail by police.

The boy had stopped coughing by then. He was petting a little white dog who’d trotted out from the house. “Are you Lilith’s boyfriend?” Cam grinned. “I like this kid.” “Shut up,” Lilith said. “Well, is he?” Bruce asked Lilith. “Because if he’s your boyfriend, he’s going to have to win me over, too. Like with arcade games and ice cream and, like, teaching me to throw a baseball.” “Why stop there?” Cam asked. “I’ll teach you to throw a football, a punch, a poker match, and even”—he glanced at Lilith—“the coolest girl off her game.

A qualifying match for the 2002 FIFA World Cup between the national football (soccer) teams of Australia and American Samoa ended with a whopping result of 31:0.

Football Coaches do play football matches; their attitudes toward the game in times of tendencies of losing can cause a change in the scores of the games they monitor and mentor!

We are so much distracted nowadays. There is so much distractions in the world today call it internet, media, football matches etc. but don't let it consume you.

Nor did Baggio endear himself to the Juventus faithful by his loyalty to Fiorentina. In the Fiorentina-Juve match in April 1991, Juve won a penalty. Baggio refused to take it, and it was missed. He was then substituted, and on his way to the bench picked up and put on a Fiorentina scarf. Weeks of argument followed.

Nature doesn’t know what to do with a childless woman of thirty-nine, except throw her that fertility curveball—aches and pains combined with extra time, like some terrifying end to a high-stakes football match.

During the match I received a text from a mate of mine, Joe (West Ham), saying 'I hope you thrash ‘em.' I replied that their fans were abysmal, and he answered, 'They always are, mate. Even when you go to The Emirates there’s no atmosphere.' And that just about sums it up really. God, I would hate to support Arsenal

Baseball, football, basketball - these quintessentially American pastimes are recognizably sports because they involve play: they are games. One plays football, one doesn't play boxing...The boxing match is the very image, the more terrifying for being so stylized, of mankind's collective aggression; its ongoing historical madness.

In fact, this method – of deliberately seeking out stimulation, excitement, even crisis – is one of our favourite human devices for escaping that sense of ‘a cloud weighing upon us’. A depressed housewife goes and buys herself a new hat. A bored man gets drunk. A discontented teenager steals a car or takes his knuckledusters to a a football match. Generally speaking, the greater a person's potentiality for achievement, the greater his or her objection to that feeling of being ‘cut off from one's rightful resources’.

Back in fifth year when Connell had scored a goal for the school football team, Rob had leaped onto the pitch to embrace him. He screamed Connell’s name, and began to kiss his head with wild exuberant kisses. It was only one-all, and there were still twenty minutes left on the clock. But that was their world then. Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance. It was permissible to touch each other and cry during football matches. Connell still remembers the too-hard grip of his arms.

Being gay. This has surprisingly little to do with what you do with your private parts (or, more accurately, what you’d like to do with your private parts). Being gay is more a state of mind, or sometimes, less often, a state of body. You could almost include it as a sub-crime in 2) and 3), but really, it goes beyond both of these categories. And because of the number of times it crops up as a specific accusation, it definitely deserves its own special category. But the best way to explain what ‘being gay’ means is to tell you some of the things that are gay. If you’re a boy, any display of sensitivity is gay. Compassion is gay. Crying is supergay. Reading is usually gay. Certain songs and types of music are gay. ‘Enola Gay’ would certainly be thought gay. Love songs are gay. Love itself is incredibly gay, as are any other heartfelt emotions. Singing is gay, but chanting is not gay. Wanking contests are not gay. Neither is all-male cuddling during specially designated periods in football matches, or communal bathing thereafter. (I didn’t invent the rules of gay–I’m just telling you what they are.) Girls can be gay too, but it’s much harder for them. And girls don’t tend to call each other gay as much as boys do. When a girl is gay, she’s called a dyke. Reasons for being a dyke include having thick limbs, bad hair or flat shoes.

It was only one-all, and there were still twenty minutes left on the clock. But that was their world then. Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took an insane and frightening significance. It was permissible to touch each other and cry during football matches.

In any game, the game itself is the prize, no matter who wins, ultimately both lose the game.

It's one o'clock and we're having a pre-match pint. It's been a hard week at the warehouse and the lager gives me a kick-start.

One thing should be clear, but apparently it is not: if this were indeed our nature, we would be living in paradise. If pain, humiliation, and physical injury made us happy, we would be ecstatic. If being sold on street corners were a good time, women would jam street corners the way men jam football matches. If forced sex were what we craved, even we would be satisfied already. If being dominated by men made us happy, we would smile all the time. Women resist male domination because we do not like it. Political women resist male domination through overt, rude, unmistakable rebellion. They are called unnatural, because they do not have a nature that delights in being debased. Apolitical women resist male domination through a host of bitter subversions, ranging from the famous headache to the clinical depression epidemic among women to suicide to prescription-drug tranquilization to taking it out on the children; sometimes a battered wife kills her husband. Apolitical women are also called unnatural, the charge hurled at them as nasty or sullen or embittered individuals, since that is how they fight back. They too are not made happy by being hurt or dominated. In fact, a natural woman is hard to find. We are domesticated, tamed, made compliant on the surface, through male force, not through nature. We sometimes do what men say we are, either because we believe them or because we hope to placate them. We sometimes try to become what men say we should be, because men have power over our lives.

..but because of the systematic neglect of cancer research: "There are not over two dozen funds in the U.S. devoted to fundamental cancer research. They range in capital from about $500 up to about $2,000,000, but their aggregate capitalization is certainly not much more than $5,000,000...The public willingly spends a third of that sum in an afternoon to match a major football game.

I lost count of the number of referees who came to me both at Derby and Forest and said, 'I'd just like to express my thanks. I love matches involving your team. We never have any trouble with them.

Theistic claims that supernatural agency exists in the universe derive from ancient traditions of belief. The word 'atheist' is a theist's term for a person who does not share such beliefs. Theists think that atheists have a belief or set of beliefs, just as theists do but in the opposite sense, about theism-related questions. This is a mistake; atheists certainly have beliefs about many things, but they are not 'theistic-subject-matter-related beliefs' in any but a single negative sense. For atheism is the absence of 'theistic-subject-matter-related belief. Although it is true that 'absence of belief in supernatural agency' is functionally equivalent to 'belief in the absence of supernatural agency', theists concentrate on the latter formulation in order to make atheism a positive as opposed to privative thesis with regard to theistic-subject-matter-related matters. This is what makes theists think they are in a kind of belief football match, with opposing sets of beliefs vying for our allegiance. What is happening is that the theists are rushing about the park kicking the ball, but the atheists are not playing. They are not even on the field; they are in the stands, arguing that this particular game should not be taking place at all.

Everyone becomes equally conscious of his body as a separate and complete organism, [but] everyone does not become equally conscious of himself as a complete and separate personality. The feeling of apartness from others comes to most with puberty, but it is not always developed to such a degree as to make the difference between the individual and his fellows noticeable to the individual. It is such as he, as little conscious of himself as the bee in a hive, who are lucky in life, for they have the best chance of happiness: their activities are shared by all, and their pleasures are only pleasures because they are enjoyed in common; you will see them on Whit-Monday dancing on Hampstead Heath, shouting at a football match, or from club windows in Pall Mall cheering a royal procession. It is because of them that man has been called a social animal.

I have never truly been sincere and enthusiastic except when I used to play sports and, in the army, when I took part in the plays that we put on for our own enjoyment. In both cases, there was a set of rules, which was not serious, though you pretended to take it seriously. Even today, Sunday football matches in a crowded stadium, and the theatre, which I have loved with a unique passion, are the only places where I feel innocent.

I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! more culture! read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God’s sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football matches, boredom navigating the Chilean imagination like an enormous aircraft carrier. And that’s the truth. We were bored. We intellectuals. Because you can't read all day and all night. You can't write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style...

He had been a fine player, making All-Conference in his junior and senior years, and he knew perfectly well that he had his own bad temper to thank … or to blame. He had not enjoyed football. Every game was a grudge match.

There is nothing quite like the drama and suspense of a penalty shootout. The player tasked with taking the penalty can thunder the ball home or smash it against the crossbar, or even sky it completely over the bar. Nothing will bring housewives out of the kitchen or shush the pub into complete silence quite like the theatre of the penalty shootout, no matter who’s playing. No one can be apathetic about the penalty shootout It’s as if for just those few seconds a player’s soul is laid bare for the entire world to see. The camera pans in and we can clearly see the hesitancy and heroics, the expectation and exultation, the self-doubt or self-glorification, the uncertainty and relief ….. or disappointment. Nothing matches the thrill!

Left alone, I must quickly have drifted off into my own thoughts, for I did not notice the barman return. He must have done so, however, for I was soon drinking coffee, staring at the mirrored wall behind the bar - in which I could see not only my own reflection but much of the room behind me. After a while, for some reason, i found myself replaying in my head key moments from a football match I had attended many years earlier - an encounter between Germany and Holland. I adjusted my posture on the high-stool - I could see I was hunching excessively - and tried recalling the names of the players in the Dutch team that year. Rep, Krol, Haan, Neeskens. After several minutes I had succeeded in remembering all but two of the players, but these last two names remained just beyond the rim of my recall. As I tried to remember, the sound of the fountain behind me, which at first I had found quite soothing, began to annoy me. It seemed that if only it woulds stop, my memory would unlock and I would finally remember the names.

Palmolive wrote the lyrics to ‘Newtown’ too. The song was originally called ‘Drugtown’, but I changed it to ‘Newtown’, thinking about all the new towns that are springing up around the edges of London, like Milton Keynes and Crawley. The young people growing up there are so bored, they take loads of drugs and drive around really fast or beat each other up at football matches, then they get up and commute to their dull jobs on Monday morning. Palmolive made up these great words like ‘televisina’ and ‘footballina’ as drug names, I think only a foreigner could do that.

The Lawyer went down to the dressing room before a match, only to catch Platini puffing on a cigarette. ‘That worries me,’ Agnelli said to Platini. Instantly, a riposte came back. ‘You only need to worry if he starts smoking,’ said Platini, pointing at Massimo Bonini, the tireless midfield ball-winner in that Juventus team.

The feeling of apartness from others comes to most with puberty, but it is not always developed to such a degree as to make the difference between the individual and his fellows noticeable to the individual. It is such as he, as little conscious of himself as the bee in a hive, who are the lucky in life, for they have the best chance of happiness: their activities are shared by all, and their pleasures are only pleasures because they are enjoyed in common; you will see them on Whit-Monday dancing on Hampstead Heath, shouting at a football match, or from club windows in Pall Mall cheering a royal procession. It is because of them that man has been called a social animal.

It's not you it's me' she couldn't use that line. Even though it really was her and not him, everyone thought that line really meant, 'it's not me. It's definitely you.'  There was still a part of her that thought perhaps she shouldn't do it at all. In Andrew she had all the raw ingredients for a perfect life. Here was a grown-up, good-looking, solvent, generous, warm-hearted man who adored her. A man who adored her even when she looked like the loch ness monsters little sister and had a terrible temper to match. It didn't take a huge leap of imagination to see Andrew standing at the top of the aisle, looking back at lou walking towards him with a grin as wide as the English channel. She could see him painting the nursery yellow; pushing a pram that contained two lovely brown haired twins (one boy, one girl); presenting her woth an eternity ring on their tenth anniversary, taking the twins to school, teaching them how to play football on long, summer holidays in Tuscany, giving the daughter away at her own wedding, cosying up to Lou on the veranda of their perfect house as their retirement stretched ahead of them- a long straight road of well-planned for, financially comfortable and perpetually sunny days.  'oh god' Lou poured herself a vodka.

One headline read: ‘West Ham supporters set light to a yacht.’ Now, if that boat was a yacht, then it probably only needed two paddles to row it. But if the headlines were exaggerated, the events of that night weren’t. Some nasty things happened that night. It was inevitable when you had a thousand young men down for a football match with nowhere to stay and nowhere open. [...] It was well into the wee hours before we at last found somewhere to crash out. We met a bird and bloke who were local, and for some unknown reason they offered us the use of their flat on the seafront. Needless to say, we showed our appreciation of their generosity by guzzling the spirits cabinet dry and trashing the flat. The bloke was so pissed he was half joining in while the bird, who we all thought was a bit odd, was going mental. In fact, she was like a fucking animal. - Jimmy Smith

Humans have this remarkable ability to know and not to know at the same time. Or more correctly, they can know something when they really think about it, but most of the time they don't think about it, so they don't know it. If you really focus, you realise that money is fiction. But usually, you don't focus. If you are asked about it, you know that football is a human invention. But in the heat of the match, nobody asks you about it.

Make good decisions and remember who loves you." I looked at him. "I thought it was 'remember who you are.'" The Butler looked back at me. "It is the very same thing," he said. "What?" "Young Master Carter, when you walk Ned for your mother; when you attend Miss Anne's robotics competition without observing that such attendance is, if you'll pardon the expression, 'a pain in the glutes'; when you cheer at Miss Charlotte's football match even though she barely had a touch; when you accompany your sister to a Turner art exhibition; when you take your young sisters to buy Dreamsicles; when you appear as exhibit A for Miss Emily's Favorite Person of the Week event; when you attend two ballet exhibitions despite your unfortunate and undiscerning distaste for the art; you are telling them that it is the same thing." "Is that sort of what being a gentleman is supposed to be?" "We are what we love, young Master Carter.

The eccentric passion of Shankly was underlined for me by my England team-mate Roger Hunt's version of the classic tale of the Liverpool manager's pre-game talk before playing Manchester United. The story has probably been told a thousand times in and out of football, and each time you hear it there are different details, but when Roger told it the occasion was still fresh in his mind and I've always believed it to be the definitive account. It was later on the same day, as Roger and I travelled together to report for England duty, after we had played our bruising match at Anfield. Ian St John had scored the winner, then squared up to Denis Law, with Nobby finally sealing the mood of the afternoon by giving the Kop the 'V' sign. After settling down in our railway carriage, Roger said, 'You may have lost today, but you would have been pleased with yourself before the game. Shanks mentioned you in the team talk. When he says anything positive about the opposition, normally he never singles out players.' According to Roger, Shankly burst into the dressing room in his usual aggressive style and said, 'We're playing Manchester United this afternoon, and really it's an insult that we have to let them on to our field because we are superior to them in every department, but they are in the league so I suppose we have to play them. In goal Dunne is hopeless- he never knows where he is going. At right back Brennan is a straw- any wind will blow him over. Foulkes the centre half kicks the ball anywhere. On the left Tony Dunne is fast but he only has one foot. Crerand couldn't beat a tortoise. It's true David Herd has got a fantastic shot, but if Ronnie Yeats can point him in the right direction he's likely to score for us. So there you are, Manchester United, useless...' Apparently it was at this point the Liverpool winger Ian Callaghan, who was never known to whisper a single word on such occasions, asked, 'What about Best, Law and Charlton, boss?' Shankly paused, narrowed his eyes, and said, 'What are you saying to me, Callaghan? I hope you're not saying we cannot play three men.

So, imagine you are five years old and have been brave enough to confess to your mother that your daddy rapes you every night, although he's said he'll kill you for telling. Now imagine that, as a practice run, you have to go to a courtroom that seems big as a football stadium. You have to answer questions a prosecutor asks you. And then you have to answer questions fired at you by a stranger, a lawyer who makes you so confused that you cry and ask him to stop. And because every defendant has the right to face his accuser, you have to do all this while your daddy is staring you down just six feet away.

But there’s never been anyone? Really?” Sarah shrugs. “Penny and I were tutored at home when we were young . . . but in year ten, there was this one boy.” I rub my hands together. “Here we go—tell me everything. I want all the sick, lurid details. Was he a footballer? Big and strong, captain of the team, the most popular boy in school?” I could see it. Sarah’s delicate, long and lithe, but dainty, beautiful—any young man would’ve been desperate to have her on his arm. In his lap. In his bed, on the hood of his car, riding his face . . . all of the above. “He was captain of the chess team.” I cover my eyes with my hand. “His name was Davey. He wore these adorable tweed jackets and bow ties, he had blond hair, and was a bit pale because of the asthma. He had the same glasses as I and he had a different pair of argyle socks for every day of the year.” “You’re messing with me, right?” She shakes her head. “Argyle socks, Sarah? I am so disappointed in you right now.” “He was nice,” she chides. “You leave my Davey alone.” Then she laughs again—delighted and free. My cock reacts hard and fast, emphasis on hard. It’s like sodding granite. “So what happened to old Davey boy?” “I was alone in the library one day and he came up and started to ask me to the spring social. And I was so excited and nervous I could barely breathe.” I picture how she must’ve looked then. But in my mind’s eyes she’s really not any different than she is right now. Innocent, sweet, and so real she couldn’t deceive someone if her life depended on it. “And then before he could finish the question, I . . .” I don’t realize I’m leaning toward her until she stops talking and I almost fall over. “You . . . what?” Sarah hides behind her hands. “I threw up on him.” And I try not to laugh. I swear I try . . . but I’m only human. So I end up laughing so hard the car shakes and I can’t speak for several minutes. “Christ almighty.” “And I’d had fish and chips for lunch.” Sarah’s laughing too. “It was awful.” “Oh you poor thing.” I shake my head, still chuckling. “And poor Davey.” “Yes.” She wipes under her eyes with her finger. “Poor Davey. He never came near me again after that.” “Coward—he didn’t deserve you. I would’ve swam through a whole lake of puke to take a girl like you to the social.” She smiles so brightly at me, her cheeks maroon and round like two shiny apples. “I think that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” I wiggle my eyebrows. “I’m all about the compliments.

Chad’s easygoing personality matched well with Chris’s. Chad didn’t want or need anything out of the friendship; he just genuinely liked Chris, and vice versa. They started hanging out on weekends, watching football or fooling around with the kids. Leanne and I would hang out in the kitchen and we’d all have a relaxing, fun time. Chad even helped Chris clean out the garage one day-if there’s a stronger test of suburban male friendship, I can’t think of it. “You know, I think Chad would take a bullet for me,” said Chris one night when we were getting ready for bed. “Really? That’s an awfully big thing.” “Yeah, but I really do.

But he had grown very self-conscious. The new-born child does not realise that his body is more a part of himself than surrounding objects, and will play with his toes without any feeling that they belong to him more than the rattle by his side; and it is only by degrees, through pain, that he understands the fact of the body. And experiences of the same kind are necessary for the individual to become conscious of himself; but here there is the difference that, although everyone becomes equally conscious of his body as a separate and complete organism, everyone does not become equally conscious of himself as a complete and separate personality. The feeling of apartness from others comes to most with puberty, but it is not always developed to such a degree as to make the difference between the individual and his fellows noticeable to the individual. It is such as he, as little conscious of himself as the bee in a hive, who are the lucky in life, for they have the best chance of happiness: their activities are shared by all, and their pleasures are only pleasures because they are enjoyed in common; you will see them on Whit-Monday dancing on Hampstead Heath, shouting at a football match, or from club windows in Pall Mall cheering a royal procession. It is because of them that man has been called a social animal.

be apart. Despite getting rejected by my top-choice school, I was starting to really believe in myself again based on all the positive feedback we continued to get on our videos. And besides, I knew I could always reapply to Emerson the following year and transfer. • • • College started out great, with the best part being my newly found freedom. I was finally on my own and able to make my own schedule. And not only was Amanda with me, I’d already made a new friend before the first day of classes from a Facebook page that was set up for incoming freshmen. I started chatting with a pretty girl named Chloe who mentioned that she was also going to do the film and video concentration. Fitchburg isn’t located in the greatest neighborhood, but the campus has lots of green lawns and old brick buildings that look like mansions. My dorm room was a forced triple—basically a double that the school added bunk beds to in order to squeeze one extra person in. I arrived first and got to call dibs on the bunk bed that had an empty space beneath it. I moved my desk under it and created a little home office for myself. I plastered the walls with Futurama posters and made up the bed with a new bright green comforter and matching pillows. My roommates were classic male college stereotypes—the football player and the stoner. Their idea of decorating was slapping a Bob Marley poster and a giant ad for Jack Daniels on the wall.

Images of people in the Middle East dressing like Westerners, spending like Westerners, that is what the voters watching TV here at home want to see. That is a visible sign that we really are winning the war of ideas—the struggle between consumption and economic growth, and religious tradition and economic stagnation. I thought, why are those children coming onto the streets more and more often? It’s not anything we have done, is it? It’s not any speeches we have made, or countries we have invaded, or new constitutions we have written, or sweets we have handed out to children, or football matches between soldiers and the locals. It’s because they, too, watch TV. They watch TV and see how we live here in the West. They see children their own age driving sports cars. They see teenagers like them, instead of living in monastic frustration until someone arranges their marriages, going out with lots of different girls, or boys. They see them in bed with lots of different girls and boys. They watch them in noisy bars, bottles of lager upended over their mouths, getting happy, enjoying the privilege of getting drunk. They watch them roaring out support or abuse at football matches. They see them getting on and off planes, flying from here to there without restriction and without fear, going on endless holidays, shopping, lying in the sun. Especially, they see them shopping: buying clothes and PlayStations, buying iPods, video phones, laptops, watches, digital cameras, shoes, trainers, baseball caps. Spending money, of which there is always an unlimited supply, in bars and restaurants, hotels and cinemas. These children of the West are always spending. They are always restless, happy and with unlimited access to cash. I realised, with a flash of insight, that this was what was bringing these Middle Eastern children out on the streets. I realised that they just wanted to be like us. Those children don’t want to have to go to the mosque five times a day when they could be hanging out with their friends by a bus shelter, by a phone booth or in a bar. They don’t want their families to tell them who they can and can’t marry. They might very well not want to marry at all and just have a series of partners. I mean, that’s what a lot of people do. It is no secret, after that serial in the Daily Mail, that that is what I do. I don’t necessarily need the commitment. Why should they not have the same choices as me? They want the freedom to fly off for their holidays on easy Jet. I know some will say that what a lot of them want is just one square meal a day or the chance of a drink of clean water, but on the whole the poor aren’t the ones on the street and would not be my target audience. They aren’t going to change anything, otherwise why are they so poor? The ones who come out on the streets are the ones who have TVs. They’ve seen how we live, and they want to spend.

More often than not, the 'totality' to which individuals are to stay loyal and obedient no longer enters their life and confronts them in the shape of a denial of their individual autonomy, or as an obligatory sacrifice like universal conscription and the duty to give their life for the country and the national cause. Instead, it presents itself in the form of highly entertaining and invariably pleasurable and relished festivals of communal togetherness and belonging, held on the occasions of a football world cup or a cricket test match. Surrender to the 'totality' is no longer a reluctantly embraced, cumbersome and quite often onerous duty, but 'patriotainment', an avidly sought and eminently enjoyable festive revelry.

They passed each other at the door, she going out, and he returning from work. Unselfconsciously she put one hand up to his left cheek and, in passing, kissed him on the other. He was astonished, and, by the time that she reached the entrance to the yard, so wass she, because it was not until then that she suddenly realized what she had done. She stopped dead, as though having walked straight into a metaphysical but palpable stone wall. She felt her blood rising to the roots of her hair, and realised that she did not dare look back at him. Undoubtedly he too would be rooted to the spot. She could almost feel his eyes travelling from her feet to her head, finally settling upon the back of her head in the expectation that she would turn around. He called out, as she knew he would, 'Kyria Pelagia.' 'What?' she demanded curtly, as though an effort to be short with him could cancel out the hideously simple way in which she had betrayed her affection without even thinking about it. 'What's for dinner?' 'Don't tease me.' 'Would I tease you?' 'Don't make anything of it. I thought you were my father. I always kiss him like that when he comes in.' 'Very understandable. We are both old and small.' 'If you are going to tease me, I shall never speak to you again.' He came up behind her and around her, and threw himself upon his knees before her. 'O no,' he cried, 'anything but that.' He bowed his head to the ground and moaned piteously, 'Have mercy. Shoot me, flog me, but don't say you'll never speak to me.' He grasped her abou the knees and pretended to weep. 'The whole village is looking,' she protested, 'stop it at once. You are so embarrassing, get off me.' 'My heart is broken,' he wailed, and he grasped her hand and began to smatter it with kisses. 'Stupid goat, you are deranged.' 'I am tormented, I am burning, I am broken into pieces, my eyes spout forth with tears.' He leaned back and gestured poetically with his fingers to portray the extraordinary cascade of invisible tears that he intended her to envisage. 'Don't laugh at me,' he continued, having struck upon a new tack. 'O, light of my eyes, do not mock poor Antonio in his affliction.' 'Are you drunk again?' 'Drunk with sorrow, drunk with agony. Speak to me.' 'Did your battery win another football match?

They passed each other at the door, she going out, and he returning from work. Unselfconsciously she put one hand up to his left cheek and, in passing, kissed him on the other. He was astonished, and, by the time that she reached the entrance to the yard, so was she, because it was not until then that she suddenly realized what she had done. She stopped dead, as though having walked straight into a metaphysical but palpable stone wall. She felt her blood rising to the roots of her hair, and realised that she did not dare look back at him. Undoubtedly he too would be rooted to the spot. She could almost feel his eyes travelling from her feet to her head, finally settling upon the back of her head in the expectation that she would turn around. He called out, as she knew he would, 'Kyria Pelagia.' 'What?' she demanded curtly, as though an effort to be short with him could cancel out the hideously simple way in which she had betrayed her affection without even thinking about it. 'What's for dinner?' 'Don't tease me.' 'Would I tease you?' 'Don't make anything of it. I thought you were my father. I always kiss him like that when he comes in.' 'Very understandable. We are both old and small.' 'If you are going to tease me, I shall never speak to you again.' He came up behind her and around her, and threw himself upon his knees before her. 'O no,' he cried, 'anything but that.' He bowed his head to the ground and moaned piteously, 'Have mercy. Shoot me, flog me, but don't say you'll never speak to me.' He grasped her about the knees and pretended to weep. 'The whole village is looking,' she protested, 'stop it at once. You are so embarrassing, get off me.' 'My heart is broken,' he wailed, and he grasped her hand and began to smatter it with kisses. 'Stupid goat, you are deranged.' 'I am tormented, I am burning, I am broken into pieces, my eyes spout forth with tears.' He leaned back and gestured poetically with his fingers to portray the extraordinary cascade of invisible tears that he intended her to envisage. 'Don't laugh at me,' he continued, having struck upon a new tack. 'O, light of my eyes, do not mock poor Antonio in his affliction.' 'Are you drunk again?' 'Drunk with sorrow, drunk with agony. Speak to me.' 'Did your battery win another football match?

Moreover, Nancy Sinatra was afflicted, as the overwhelming majority of Americans were, with monolingualism. Lana’s richer, more textured version of “Bang Bang” layered English with French and Vietnamese. Bang bang, je ne l’oublierai pas went the last line of the French version, which was echoed by Pham Duy’s Vietnamese version, We will never forget. In the pantheon of classic pop songs from Saigon, this tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable, masterfully weaving together love and violence in the enigmatic story of two lovers who, regardless of having known each other since childhood, or because of knowing each other since childhood, shoot each other down. Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

He would have known or found out that the sewer-pipe running out of Cellblock 5 was the last one in Shawshank not hooked into the new waste-treatment plant, and he would have known it was do it by mid-1975 or do it never, because in August they were going to switch us over to the new waste-treatment plant, too. Five hundred yards. The length of five football fields. Just shy of half a mile. He crawled that distance, maybe with one of those small Penlites in his hand, maybe with nothing but a couple of books of matches. He crawled through foulness that I either can’t imagine or don’t want to imagine. Maybe the rats scattered in front of him, or maybe they went for him the way such animals sometimes will when they’ve had a chance to grow bold in the dark. He must have had just enough clearance at the shoulders to keep moving, and he probably had to shove himself through the places where the lengths of pipe were joined. If it had been me, the claustrophobia would have driven me mad a dozen times over. But he did it. At the far end of the pipe they found a set of muddy footprints leading out of the sluggish, polluted creek the pipe fed into. Two miles from there a search party found his prison uniform—that was a day later. The story broke big in the papers, as you might guess, but no one within a fifteen-mile radius of the prison stepped forward to report a stolen car, stolen clothes, or a naked man in the moonlight. There was not so much as a barking dog in a farmyard. He came out of the sewer-pipe and he disappeared like smoke. But I am betting he disappeared in the direction of Buxton.

Lionel Messi (32), who plays for FC Barcelona in the Spanish football league, has recorded his 50th hat-trick. The team also won. Messi made his first hat-trick as a left-handed striker in the 25th round of the away game against Spain in the 2018-2019 Primera División at the Ramon Sánchez Pisjuan Stadium in Seville, Spain. Messi's 50th hat-trick. He wrote 44 hits in Barcelona and 6 hits in Argentina. The start of the game was not good. In the 22nd minute Messi's passing mistake led to a counterattack in Seville. He scored a goal for Navas and Barcelona were 0-1. Four minutes later Messi scored a fantastic goal. On the left side, Ivan Rakitić's cross came up with a direct volley shooting. It was stuck in the left corner of the goal correctly. In the second half of the second half of the match, he managed to take a right-footed shot from the front of Arc Circle, Goalkeeper Thomas Bachlick reached out his hand but he was blind. 텔레【KC98K】카톡【ACD5】라인【SPR331】 ♥100%정품보장 ♥총알배송 ♥투명한 가격 ♥편한 상담 ♥끝내주는 서비스 ♥고객님 정보 보호 ♥깔끔한 거래 ◀경영항목▶ 수면제,여성-최음제,,여성흥분제,남성발기부전치유제,비아그라,시알리스,88정,드래곤,99정,바오메이,정력제,남성성기확대제,카마-그라젤,비닉스,센돔,꽃물,남성-조-루제,네노마정 등많은제품 판매중입니다 센돔 판매,센돔 구입방법,센돔 구매방법,센돔 효과,센돔 처방,센돔 파는곳,센돔 지속시간,센돔 구입,센돔 구매,센돔 복용법 In the 39th minute of the second half, Carlos Alenya's shot was deflected and deflected, and Messi broke into the box with a penalty box. Messi helped Luis Suárez score just before the end of the game and made four goals on the day. The team had a pleasant 4-2 victory and solidified the league with 57 points (17 wins, 6 draws, 2 losses). Madrid, who have been at the top of the table for the last time.

Football teams that lost their matches can have many other chances to play in successive seasons; but a soul that is lost through death may not have the chance to justify its potential again!

Alfredo di Stéfano is maybe the greatest player I have ever seen. I watched him in a match when Manchester United played against Real in the semi-final of the European Cup in Madrid the year before the accident. In those days, there was no substitutes' bench; if you weren't playing, you were in the stand. I felt like I was looking down on what looked like a Subbuteo table—I was that high up—but I couldn't take my eyes off this midfield player and I thought, Who on earth is that? He ran the whole show and had the ball almost all the time. I used to dream of that, and I used to hate it when anyone else got it. They beat us 3-1 and he dictated the whole game. I'd never seen anything like it before—someone who influenced the entire match. Everything went through him. The goalkeeper gave it to him, the full backs were giving it to him, the midfield players were linking up with him and the forwards were looking for him. And there was Gento playing alongside and Di Stefano just timed his passes perfectly for him. Gento ran so fast you couldn't get him offside. And I was just sitting there, watching, thinking it was the best thing I had ever seen. But I had been forewarned a bit by Matt Busby, the manager at the time, because he had been across and seen them play a match in Nice before the semi—in those days it wasn't easy to do that—and, when he came back, we asked him what they were like, but he didn't want to tell us. And I understood why he didn't when I saw them. I think he knew that, if he had said they were the best players he'd ever seen, it would have been all over for us before we'd started. And this was when Di Stefano was thirty. What must he have been like in his youth?

patient man. Tommy and Cindy invited me over for one of their big old barbecues. Their endless efforts at trying to match me up with women never ceased. Tonight was no different; the air headed blonde I was talking to was getting on my nerves. I looked at her attractive face. Most men would be pushing to get into her pants, I just smiled. “Men and sports,” she said trying to start a conversation. “I swear they’d rather watch football than hump.” “It’s an exciting game, have you given it a try?” I said,

If one part of a country is watching football match while the other part of the same country is under heavy attacks by the rockets, then we can say that there is no nation in that country, but there is only crowd of people!

What if it was a war? • What if it was a movement? • What if there was an exclusive club? • What if it was a rare collectible? • What if it was a party? • What if it was a dance rave? • What if it was a celebration? • What if there was a charitable cause? • What if it was a patriotic event? • What if it was an unveiling? • What if there was a space rocket launch? • What if it was a visit by state dignitaries? • What if it was a pep rally? • What if it was a car show? • What if it was a football game? • What if it was a chess match?

THE ROAR of the death blast on the Avenue of the Americas cannot be heard in faraway Johannesburg. With eight weeks to go to the opening game in Soccer City, Sepp Blatter and his South African capos have enough problems. Outraged by price gouging, fans are staying home. In the townships citizens protest every day; ‘Service riots’ send messages to politicians that public money should be spent on homes, water, sewage plants and jobs, not stadiums that will become white elephants. Why should they listen? They have the police beat back the protestors. The World Cup is good news for Danny Jordaan, leader of the bid and now chief executive for the tournament. Quietly, his brother Andrew has been given a well-paid job as Hospitality liaison with MATCH Event Services at the Port Elizabeth stadium. A stakeholder in the MATCH company is Sepp Blatter’s nephew Philippe Blatter. The majority owners are Mexican brothers Jaime and Enrique Byrom, based in Manchester, England, Zurich, Switzerland and with some of their bank accounts in Spain and the Isle of Man. The Brothers are not happy. Sepp Blatter awarded them the lucrative 2010 hospitality contract aimed at wealthy football patrons, mostly from abroad. If that wasn’t enough, Blatter also gave them the contract to manage and distribute the three million tickets. The brothers are charging top rates for hotels and internal flights and expected to make huge profits. Instead, they are on their way to losing $50 million. They plan to recoup these losses in Brazil in four years time.

A journalist watched this final in a Cologne pub that was frequented by both Germans and Englishmen. ‘It was weird,’ he later said. ‘The Germans all rooted for Manchester, the English were all urging Bayern on!’ It was natural, not weird, as Bayern were still as unloved in their own country as Manchester United were in theirs. But the instant Ole Gunnar Solskjaer scored the winner, the mood changed. It seemed too cruel to lose a match under such circumstances, even if the losers were Bayern. Also, after winning three European Cup finals they should have lost, the once lucky Bayern had now lost three they should have won. Hitzfeld took defeat in his stride, and the image of this gentlemanly coach congratulating Ferguson despite being hit so hard altered the picture some people had of Bayern as a club of cold egotists.

Maradona Diego (Armando) (b.1960), Argentinian footballer. He captained the Argentina team that won the World Cup in 1986, arousing controversy when his apparent handball scored a goal in the quarter-final match against England.

I think about a story told by a Serbian player I very much admired. He must have lived in a village that was like mine but even poorer, far from everything, lost in the Yugoslavian countryside. When he was small, his uncle had given him a fabulous, shiny-white new ball. In order not to spoil it, he and his brother decided never to let it bounce on the ground and play only with their heads. There was only one ball, and they had to make it last. During one match, a coach from Red Star Belgrade spotted him. He was recruited thanks to the skills he had developed playing with his head in this way. What sort of player would he have been if he’d had access to twenty balls? Not spoiling the ball he was given, playing all the time, developing his own qualities through perseverance and training: I liked everything about this story. The white ball was sacred to me, too, and it remains so to this day. That was the kind of football I came from.

The league match ended in a tense 1-1 draw, which kept Barcelona eight points clear at the top. Lionel scored a penalty and then with ten minutes to go, Cristiano scored a penalty. Messi 1 Ronaldo 1. ‘Anything you do, Ronaldo does too!’ Andrés said with a big smile on his face. Lionel’s teammates loved to tease him about his Ballon d’Or rival. They needed their star to be at his very best. In the Copa del Rey final, Lionel was desperate to be the matchwinner. He tried dropping deep, he tried moving out to the wing but nothing worked. Wherever he went, he was surrounded by defenders. Then in extra time, Cristiano scored to give Real the victory. Messi 1 Ronaldo 2. Lionel was furious. He always hated losing but losing against Ronaldo and Real Madrid was the worst feeling ever. ‘What are we going to do?’ he asked his teammates. ‘We have to win the Champions League semi-final now!

The first leg was away at the Bernabeu and Guardiola asked his players to put lots of pressure on the Real defenders. ‘Tackle, tackle, tackle but don’t be reckless! Remember, we’re at home in the second leg.’ The Madrid fans booed Lionel every time he touched the ball. He was used to that. He never stopped running but Real were marking him out of the match. ‘Something has to change!’ Lionel thought. He was getting more and more frustrated with himself. After sixty minutes, the match did change; Madrid’s defender Pepe was sent off for a dangerous tackle. ‘Come on, we’ve got to take advantage of the extra man!’ Carles shouted from defence. The Barcelona pressure was building. Xavi passed to Ibrahim Afellay on the right wing. Ibrahim dribbled into the area and looked up. ‘I’m here!’ Lionel called. He had made a great run in between the centre-backs and he steered the ball into the net.

Permian had established itself as perhaps the most successful football dynasty in the country—pro, college, or high school. Few brands of sport were more competitive than Class AAAAA Texas high school football, the division for the biggest schools in the state. Odessa was hardly the only town that nurtured football and cherished it and went crazy over it. But no one came close to matching the performance of Permian. Since 1964 it had won four state championships, been to the state finals a record eight times, and made the playoffs fifteen times. Its worst record in any season over that time span had been seven and two, and its winning percentage overall, .825, was by far the best of any team in the entire state in the modern era of the game dating back to 1951. All this wasn’t accomplished with kids who weighed 250 pounds and were automatic major-college prospects, but with kids who often weighed 160 or 170 or even less. They had no special athletic prowess. They weren’t especially fast or especially strong. But they were fearless and relentlessly coached and from the time they were able to walk they had only one certain goal in their lives in Odessa, Texas. Whatever it took, they would play for Permian.

a story while working for the BBC World Service when he was kicked out of the 1994 World Cup: several hundred people in Bangladesh had attempted mass suicide as a result. It is impossible to overestimate the scope and intensity of Maradona’s popularity, and the range of sometimes contradictory emotions he evokes. Nowhere more so than in Argentina, where his place in the collective national psyche is worthy of lengthy volumes of analysis. From god to political manoeuvre, from saint to machiavellian drug abuser, from villain to victim and back, every possible interpretation has been covered some-where along the line. Even in England Maradona stirs extreme reactions. Despite the bitter aftertaste left behind by his hand-ball in 1986, the general public continues to vote the second goal in the same match the best ever scored in a World Cup. When FIFA recently decided to name the best footballer ever they had to hand out two awards; one for officialdom's

a match

Some of the habits back then seem not so much of another era as from a different planet. On the Friday lunchtime before home games, for instance, the trainer Tom Curry used to inflate the match ball, lace it up and immerse it in a bucket of water, where it stayed, kept submerged by a brick, until just before kick-off. It would then be pulled out ready for action, saturated, weighing about half a ton.

Vardy’s rise was truly remarkable. He’d been released by Sheffield Wednesday as a teenager and completely quit football for seven months, before storming up the footballing pyramid in a manner rarely witnessed, starting at eighth-tier Stocksbridge Park Steels, where his wage was £30 a week. Following a conviction for assault, he played for six months with an electronic tag around his ankle and was forced to observe a home curfew from 6 pm every evening, which meant being substituted midway through the second half at away matches and driving home quickly. Then came a move to seventh-tier Halifax Town for £15,000, while he worked full-time at a factory making carbon-fibre splints. Twenty-nine goals in 41 games earned him a transfer to Fleetwood Town, in the fifth tier of English football. He spent just a season there, because 34 goals in 42 matches meant Leicester were prepared to spend £1m to secure his services – a record for a non-league player.

The afternoon was given over to sport, or to the appreciation of sport, as Ulf watched two football matches on the television, one after the other. They were scrappy and inconclusive games, marred by several ill-natured arguments with the referee. That always irritated Ulf, who felt that referees should be granted powers of arrest. If the police were waiting on the lines, and offenders could be seized and marched off to the cells, then there would be none of this bad behaviour, thought Ulf. As it was, these overpaid and over-indulged sportsmen could play to the gallery, parading their egos in displays of arrogance and petulance that held up the game unnecessarily. And as for those who deliberately sought to prolong a match for strategic reasons by feigning injury, they would soon abandon that if referees were allowed to count them out on the ground, just as the umpires of boxing matches could do. They would not have to count up to ten, thought Ulf: three would probably be enough to restore these sham casualties to rude health.

We finished seventh from the bottom after that first season, an almost stratospheric placing for a team over-staffed with deadbeats and renegades whom we dared not leave alone for a moment; I’m not thinking of capers off the field but of their incapacity to absorb instructions on it. The poorer the footballer, the more attention he needs. Basic drills at throw-ins, corners and free kicks must be hammered into their thick heads and, even then, are often forgotten in the stress of a match.

So you’re a goal-oriented person, right? Hold on for a moment and ask yourself. Does your life goal contribute for your fellas, does it help seeking people their paths too, will it impact for the progress of a society? Remember, you can be a goal-oriented person with the orchestration of team-work as if you’re running towards a post in a football match. Otherwise its a self-centred life where chances of loosing a ball is at high risk.

I look at all these changes and I think about them, and yet I always see football for what it is and what it should be: a match where anything can happen; the players; ninety minutes; fantastic moves; an element of luck, talent, courage, a touch of magic; and, for those who are watching these men play, the search for excitement, for a memory, for a lesson in life.

Having parked up at the entrance to the football ground I’d like my coffin to be taken from the hearse and carried around the mile and a half perimeter of the pitch in a fitting lap of honour. Then, after the lap of honour, I would like the undertakers to lift me out of my coffin, dress me in the home strip and sit with me in the Evans Halshaw Home Stand for a match against any team in the Essex and Suffolk Border League Division One. (From Undertaker's Question Time, 2016)

he explained that elements of his behaviour in front of the media were a necessary evil: a vital cog in the psychological machinery that he used to win football matches.

Can broadcasters please be a little bit more careful in choosing the adverts that they show at half-time in televised football matches? Watching in a crowded pub I, like many other customers, took advantage of the break to visit the men’s room and found myself wedged between two complete strangers. Our discomfort wasn’t eased when the paper-thin walls failed to muffle a loud chorus of “Go Compare”. Clive Pilley Westcliff-on-Sea, Esssex

Someone once tried to explain to me why football is so endlessly fascinating to its fans. It was all to do with unpredictability and consequences, he said. If you studied any match closely, you could trace how one bad pass, a missed tackle, a fluffed corner, a reckless clearance or an untrapped ball could, after seven, ten, fifteen further moves, be responsible for a crucial goal. It was, I suppose, a version of that

It made for a stark contrast with the booing of Sydney star Adam Goodes, which re-emerged in force in his team’s Round 17 match against West Coast in Perth. The booing and jeering had been going on for the best part of a year but intensified again against the Eagles to a remarkable extent. For a champion of our game, it was disrespectful and hard to fathom.

The thought struck me that she would always look beautiful, even when she was being ugly. Hers was a big, lovely, empty face: the face of a pom-pom girl at a football match, the face advertisers use to help them sell preposterous and irrelevant things.

Right’ was not how I would describe the AFL’s decision to play our final against Geelong at Skilled Stadium. It had always been our understanding that the venue for finals should be the best available stadium, in the home state of the higher-ranked team. But apparently this was a guideline rather than a rule and the AFL, no stranger to running an agenda that suited their objectives, decided the match would earn more revenue played in Geelong. I found this incredibly disrespectful to Fremantle. It was inappropriate, it was arrogant, it was flawed. Internally, we were seething but focused. Externally, we stuck by our ‘anywhere, anytime’ mantra, and vowed to make the best of the situation.

During induction week we were housed in apartments on South Fremantle’s South Terrace and given a tour of the club - not that there was that much of a club to tour in those days. It was a dilapidated and substandard set-up. The gymnasium, team meeting room and physio treatment room were all housed in the old Victoria Pavilion at the western end of Fremantle Oval. Our official change rooms were in the South Fremantle visitors’ change rooms, which were normally reserved for the opposition at WAFL matches, and the team was shipped to other venues around Perth as required for training sessions. We trained regularly at Subiaco Oval, Aquinas College, Troy Park, McGillivray Oval and various military facilities, in particular the Leeuwin barracks in East Fremantle, in my early days.

It was obvious that the violence was a protest. It made sense that it would be: that football matches were providing an outlet for frustrations of a powerful nature. So many young people were out of work or had never been able to find any. The violence, it followed, was a rebellion of some kind—social rebellion, class rebellion, something. I wanted to know more. I had read about the violence and, to the extent that I thought about it, had assumed that it was an isolated thing or mysterious in the way that crowd violence is meant to be mysterious: unpredictable, spontaneous, the mob. My journey from Wales suggested that it might be more intended, more willed. It offered up a vision of the English Saturday, the shopping day, that was different from the one I had known: that in the towns and cities, you might find hundreds of police, military in their comprehensiveness, out to contain young, male sports fans who, after attending an athletic contest, were determined to break or destroy the things that were in their way. It was hard to believe. I repeated the story of my journey to friends, but I was surprised by how unsurprised they were. Some acted as if they were disgusted; others were amused; no one thought it was anything extraordinary. It was one of the things you put up with: that every Saturday young males trashed your trains, broke the windows of your pubs, destroyed your cars, wreaked havoc on your town centres. I didn’t buy it, but it seemed to be so. In fact the only time I felt that I had said something surprising was when I revealed that, although I had now seen a football crowd, I had never been to an English football match. This, it seemed, was shocking.

Ruby had found it difficult to focus. It looks farther away, she said, giggling. It is farther away. That's the thing about drugs. When you use them, everything you want in life is farther away. How cool is it to do something that anyone with a match can do? Cool is becoming an astronaut, or a comedian, or a scientist who cures cancer. Lopez Island is exactly what you think it is - a tiny blip on a map. But the world is out there, Ruby, even if you haven't seen it. Don't throw your chances away. We don't get as many as we need. Right now you can go anywhere, be anyone, do anything. You can become so damned famous that they'll have a parade for you when you come home for your high school reunion, or you can keep screwing up and failing your classes and you can snip away the ends of your choices until finally you end up with a crowd who hangs out at Zeke's diner, smoking cigarettes and talking about high school football games that ended twenty years ago. She had stood up and brushed off her dress, then looked down at Ruby. It's your choice. Your life. I'm your mother, not your warden.

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What makes a bad coach? They don't study the current live game that is playing to know what to do. They always study previous games. Come with a plan and no matter what. They stick to that plan. They are not checking if the plan will work on the current game or match.

– but what exactly do we mean by happiness? Is happiness a short-term state (‘I’m happy when I’m playing tennis’) or a longer-term condition (‘I’m a happy person’)? The very thing that makes one person extremely happy (going to a football match, reading a book, being alone...) might indeed induce a state of extreme unhappiness in another. But happiness, however defined, is something generally considered a positive state worth cultivating.

We want to talk about war and peace in Ukraine in these matches. The need to end this madness and return to normal life and to rebuild the country,

After witnessing a particularly brutal Harvard–Yale match in the 1890s, boxing champ John L. Sullivan boarded a train for New York City. In the washroom, he encountered noted football official Paul Dashiell, who asked the prizefighter what he had thought of the match. Sullivan lowered his voice to a whisper before observing, “There’s murder in that game.

Nature doesn't know what to do with a childless woman of thirty-nine, except throw her that fertility curveball--aches and pains combined with extra time, like some terrifying end to a high-stakes football match.

Nous pas lire Pour le Proust, à la librairie, te donnent pas de télécommande, pas moyen de zapper pour un match de football ou un jeu où on gagne des Volvo. Nous vivons plus longtemps, mais moins scrupuleusement, et en phrases beaucoup plus courtes. Nous voyageons plus vite, plus souvent et plus loin, et rentrons sans souvenirs, mais avec cartes mémoire.. C’est moi avec mon mec. Là c’est mon ex je crois. Et là tout le monde à poil, donc à la plage, mais où. Sept volumes, pitié. Y a pas ça en plus court ? Ou alors, encore mieux, en images ? Y avait à la télé un truc, Marius, Fanny... Mais ma belle-sœur me dit que c’est un autre Marcel P. Et d’ailleurs, entre nous, c’est qui, votre Marcel. Il a passé sa vie au lit, à gribouiller. Une feuille après l’autre, à pied, clopin-clopant. Et nous , en cinquième vitesse, touchons du bois, bien portants.