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.
What a year 2017 was! You know what happened in 2017? Soccer stuff. Lots of soccer stuff. SO MUCH SOCCER STUFF.
So, let's go over some of the highlights.
Zlatan Decided He's A Lion For Some Reason
For a corner kick to be taken, the ball must be placed withing the confines of the corner arc. Otherwise, chaos will ensue. Gravity will cease to exist. Everyone will float around everywhere, bumping into stuff chaotically because they have no control over anything. All the colors will turn negative. Vegetables will begin eating people. Bears will begin speaking human languages, but only ancient Greek for some reason. It will be OK to use your cell phone on an airplane.
The world will be an M. Night Shyamalan movie, basically.