After Manchester City and Tottenham played one of the most thrilling Champions League matches in recent memory on Wednesday, the two clubs were always going to struggle to match the intensity and entertainment value in their Premier League matchup on Saturday.
On the back of an impressive hat trick from 19-year-old phenom João Félix, Benfica is poised to advance to the semifinals of the Europa League for the first time since making it to the final in 2013-14. The club’s desperate for European success — a feeling that’s directly tied to the curse of Béla Guttmann.
The day has finally come. After a multi-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the special counsel’s report has finally been made public. Our diligent reporters at The18 have combed through the PDF files like Unai Emery looking for a weakness in Chelsea’s defense and have come up with our own Mueller report findings.
A substitution — unless you’re John Terry and organizing yourself a guard of honor — should be pretty straightforward. Up goes the number of the player coming off, off he goes and on comes the substitute. That’s all there is to it. No need for fuss.
Argentine club Unión de Santa Fe really wants to get past Ecuador’s Independiente del Valle in the first stage of the 2019 Copa Sudamericana. But are we really buying the club’s reasoning for using Viagra before the match?
The Unión-Independiente match will be played Wednesday evening at Estadio Olimpico Atahualpa, which is 9,350 feet above sea level. For comparison, Mile High Stadium in Denver is 5,280 feet above sea level, and I am writing this article at 5,328 feet.
Cristiano Ronaldo 4.0 is up and running at Juventus Stadium. His age is 34, which typically alludes to ever-present bodily soreness and general feelings of lethargy, but Ronaldo 4.0 includes updates on foxiness in the box, elastico nutmegs and improvements on crushing the dreams of everyone else in European competition.
Here’s "He That Is More Machine Than Man" coming alive during the Champions League anthem, as he’s done time after time en route to scoring 126 UCL goals, including 65 in the knockout stages.
October 14, 2017: Watford are fresh off defeating Arsenal 2-1 thanks in part to a Troy Deeney penalty, dropping the Gunners to eighth in the table. Deeney was scathing in his assessment of Arsenal after the match.
The English commentator summed up the Ashley Barnes yellow card perfectly:
“The game has gone completely when you’re booked for kissing,” he said.
Barnes, a Burnley forward with double-digit Premier League goals this season, went into referee Mike Dean’s book just before halftime in a 2-0 win over relegation-threatened Cardiff City on Saturday.
The incident followed Cardiff’s Joe Bennett tugging Barnes down from behind, a clear yellow card.
But in addition to booking Bennett, Dean showed Ashley Barnes yellow after the two momentarily clashed head to head.
Promoting a club in the United Soccer League can be tricky. It’s always an uphill battle for any lower-tier sports team, especially in soccer. But Austin Bold FC has what may be the greatest (or maybe worst, we’re not sure yet) promotion we’ve ever seen to get fans into the stadium.
Trevor Noah is a soccer fan, this much we know. He made some great jokes about World Cup commentators last summer and followed it up with some powerful words on the Africanness of the French national team that won the tournament.