Village Idiot

That sounds pretty awful, from the outside. I know the connotations of it being Raul, but howay man, it's your own country. I'm Catalan, so my passion for the Spanish NT is admittedly dependant on the amount of Catalans being fielded. Spanish Barcelona players kinda count. I'm not very political, but for some reason it happens in football.

To be honest, I cheered when Raúl missed a penalty against France in the EC of 2000, which sent us packing.

I'd be supporting Argentina, obviously. Nothing particularly against England, but the Argies are our estranged cousins.

Absolutely class For some reason this reminded me of a game of Calcio Storico but without the violence and the mud

I hope you can get one. They're cracking games always, and lately they do better against us than the difference in squads might suggest. I'll keep an eye and post here if I hear something about the ticket sales.

8m, yes. He was on his last year at Liverpool.

I always thought that football needs some kind of sin bin like hockey for "orange card" situations. Or make it like basketball and allow the sent off player to be subbed for "orange" offences (that would still count against your substitution limit)

So you see that Owen still retains a name (in Spain at least), this is making top news in our international football coverage and reported as "Owen will miss the World Cup".

Brum have lost 20m in their season in the CCC. Wonder how your own results will compare next year. http://www.sportinglife.com/football/news/story_get.cgi?STORY_NAME=soccer/10/03/05/SOCCER_Birmingham_Losses.html&TEAMHD=soccer The current chairman seems critical of the previous board decision to keep an inflated wage bill, but that's probably one of the reasons they made it back at first attempt. Is 20m losses an acceptable price for promotion? (I think so if you can stabilize the club in the PL the following years)

You could make it 4-5-6 places and give the 4th placed team a bye to the "final".

To be frank, you were in the top flight when this list was made. Will be interesting to see what kind of turnover you retain while in the CCC, though.

Oh, and they don't play at the Olympic stadium anymore. Cornellà is smaller and this will affect ticket availability (15,000 less seats).

Yo. Espanyol-Barça are pretty weird games to get tickets for, and until the date approaches one doesn't know how it's going to work. Last year only Espanyol club members were allowed to purchase tickets, for "security" reasons, so the only way to get them were through resale websites (incredibly expensive) or if you knew a club member. Otherwise, this is the site to buy tickets for any of the Barcelona teams at base prices (with a nominal surcharge for third party ticketing). Most of the time I get them through there, unless it's a high demand game, when you gotta go and queue at the ticket office the day they go out. www.servicaixa.es There's a caveat, though, and that is that I have never tried buying tickets with a non-Spanish credit card and it might be restricted to the Spanish market (in the same way you can't buy in the USA I-tunes with a non-yank card, etc...). You can probably test it buying tickets for any other game and just not confirming the sale. In the case of Espanyol, though, you can also buy tickets straight off them. http://www.rcdespanyol.com/ticketing2/index.php The problem is... that this is a derby game. If Espanyol sells tickets openly again this year, they will sell out pretty quickly and I'm not sure you'll have much chance of catching them online. They can't fill their stadium on their own though, last year with the "members only" policy they only got something like 85% attendance So you gotta wait until news come out and see if you can get them through any of these two sites.

A real Spanish keeper would be at least 45 yards off his line when his team is in possession of the ball. I was quite atypical on that regard, only left the box at half time and that only after some convincing by my teammates.

I was actually quite a bastard as a keeper. I'm quite built (for an average Spaniard at least, we are the shortest and smallest EU nation), and at schoolboy level I was pretty much always the biggest bastard in the pitch. When I dived for a ball, if I secured it I would always let myself go and use my size and momentum to bring the forward down (without fouling since the ball was already mine). My defence was shit and I had to deal with tons of one-on-ones so intimidating forwards was a bit part of my game! Of course it had drawbacks like the aforementioned hand stomping incident I was the archetypical Spanish keeper: great reflexe saves and one-on-ones, pure shit at crosses and high balls into the box.

South Korea have as good chance as anyone to make it out of their group I think, wouldn't surprise Lee attracts interest from stronger clubs after the world cup.

I was a keeper too. That tackle I refered above was me rushing out of the box to kick out a long ball from the opposition. I got an insane amount of similar injuries at schoolboy level. Once an opposition forward stomped on my hand after palming a ball away from his feet and broke 3 fingers, another broke my nose after "heading" my head after I collected a cross... jesus christ why didn't I chose to be a midfielder. Bah, who am I lying, I loved being a goalie.

They didn't have any single player with a meaningful amount of creativity until they got Lee and Coyle added Wilshere/Weiss/Holden. I actually think they have a quite decent side right now, although they need time to gel and absorb the new manager's tactics (which they don't quite have).

Didn't he play for Bolton for a while? Left winger? Aye was s***. Went to Toulouse at part of the Elmander deal. Not much improvement then. Elmander's been shit.

Well, England has won owt during any of the years any of these have been playing, or reached any final, so it's hardly damning that none of them has achieved for country what they have achieved for club.

When I was playing at schoolboy level I lived in a depressed industrial neighborhood near Barcelona, which meant that most of the teams we played against were made up by future thugs. We had quite some incidents... Remember how in a game, after we were up at 1-0 at HT after bossing them, the other team just went straight of the dressing room tunnel to the spectators and started fighting them, hilarious.

Yes, he said that he would "rather die than apologize to Materazzi" just a couple days before he published that on his blog.

I don't think Scholes has ever had a 20+ season, even when he played as forward. But his goal tally is great for a midfielder. And Lampard is a great player, I'm not sure if I would put either him or ManU Beckham in the second spot.

Scholes. Although I think he lacked a bit of grit to boss a game and carry teams on his back. But he was an exceptional player in his prime, far superior to the others in that list.

i stopped counting after 5 and guesstimated.