The 230th edition of the Merseyside derby takes place this afternoon at Anfield in the 2017-18 FA Cup Third Round — the 24th time the rivals have met in the world’s oldest football competition and the first since Liverpool’s epic 2-1 victory over Everton in the semifinals of 2012.
We interrupt your regular 24/7 Coutinho transfer saga coverage to bring you this alarming item from the BBC:
David Jeffrey has accused the co-users of the Ballymena Showgrounds of a lack of respect after the pitch was damaged by stock car racing on New Year's Day.
Former Chelsea, Real Madrid and AC Milan midfielder Michael Essien has joined the lofty ranks of footballers with extremely messed-up statues. Essien is in good company, with the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale and Diego Maradona.
Essien's bad statue exists in his native Ghana, and folks, it is not a good statue.
Pep Guardiola has it all backwards when it comes to the festive schedule. In a postmatch interview after his side beat Watford 3-1, Manchester City’s manager discussed the busy fixture list and how the English FA doesn’t care about its players. That’s not what we’re taking issue with; we totally agree with that. What we think Guardiola, perhaps the best coach of this generation, is wrong about is why people watch football.
“We’re going to kill them,” Guardiola said of playing two matches in three days. “Here in England they don’t protect their players.”
Look, we all knew it was coming. He was getting on in years, had lost a step (or eight) of pace and really hasn’t been the same player he was 10 years ago for about 10 years. Nonetheless, Bobby Boswell’s international retirement announcement is the most heartbreaking retirement of 2018.
The man who scored the winner in a 1-0 victory for the MLS All-Stars against Chelsea in 2006 made the stunning proclamation on Twitter on Tuesday:
It’s an old trope of film that always gets the job done effectively and, more importantly, concisely: the training montage. Films like the Rocky franchise, The Karate Kid, X-Men: First Class, The Fighter, Cool Runnings, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The Hunger Games and you get the point have all utilized the uplifting sequence to quickly portray a long passage of time devoted to painstaking preparation.
If you learn anything today, please let it be this: Kids are not good at anything. This recent video of 100 children taking on three Japanese internationals will serve as my indisputable evidence.
Hiroshi Kiyotake, Hotaru Yamaguchi and Yosuke Ideguchi faced off against 30 forwards, 30 midfielders, 30 defenders and 10 goalkeepers in a friendly match recently. While the youngsters were well drilled in positional discipline (they refused to be pulled from their defensive stations), their skills left a lot to be desired.
Lionel Messi is probably the best soccer player of all time, and one of the reasons for that is he never stops trying to improve himself. Even though he's a world-class passer, dribbler and finisher, Messi told a Russian outlet his goal now is to be a better penalty-taker.
Arsenal and West Brom drew 1-1 on Sunday in a match that didn’t really get going until the final 10 minutes. But catching the eye more than the insipid performance from the Gunners was the odd choice of Arsenal kit, which was all red for the first time since 1978. Social media was not exactly impressed.