Manuel Pellegrini hasn’t done a full squad overhaul but that may be due to company policy in what may well be his valedictory season at the club.
No European side has ever won three successive tournaments, but Vicente del Bosque’s team look well-equipped to be the first.
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/ 20 January 2012
Josef Skvorecky, who has died aged 87, belonged to that great generation of postwar Czech writers that includes Vaclav Havel.
Manchester United have been shown to be heavily reliant on Wayne Rooney, and if he is injured they could struggle this season.
There is only one prediction it is safe to make about Euro 2008 and that is that England will not win it.
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/ 15 February 2008
There is little doubt Cristiano Ronaldo is the Premier League’s greatest entertainer. Cesc Fabregas, Wayne Rooney and Fernando Torres are his only rivals for flair and, with 27 goals already this season, Ronaldo is way ahead in the striking stakes, never mind all the counterattacks, dribbles and step-overs he also provides.
It is all very well noting that Ryan Giggs has just won his ninth league title, breaking the record held by Liverpool’s Phil Neal and Alan Hansen, and will become the most decorated player in English football should he add a fifth FA Cup winner’s medal to his collection at Wembley on Saturday.
You have to love the Italians, don’t you? If they didn’t exist someone would have to invent them, and just think what sort of tortured imagination it would take to dream up such improbably complex concepts as the Papacy, the Borgias, the Mafia, Niccolo Machiavelli, Silvio Berlusconi, Leonardo da Vinci and the great Juventus referee-fixing scandal.
Alan Hansen was born in June 1955, which means he was around — albeit in nappies and in Scotland — when the Busby Babes won their first league title in April 1956. Hansen will be pleased to know that even though there was no televised football at the time there were plenty of people telling Matt Busby that Manchester United would never win anything with kids.
Jose Mourinho never spoke a truer word than when he claimed, after Chelsea’s exit from the Champions League in Barcelona, that at the highest level of football details can make a big difference. What he meant was that the detail of Asier del Horno being incorrectly sent off in the first leg had handicapped Chelsea unfairly.