Outrageous

Wayne Rooney has recently criticized the fact that MLS must still fly commercial flights to the majority of its destinations. Meanwhile NBA, NHL, NFL and MLB players get to enjoy the sweet luxury of not being crammed into a flight with strangers while their legs are suffocated from Foxborough to San Jose. No, they get private jets and charter flights to and from all destinations, but MLS stars are forced to fly commercially, complete with layovers and all.

Scoring a goal is a beautiful thing, as is clearing one off the goal-line from a defensive perspective. But scoring a goal 13 seconds into a match without even touching it? Well it doesn’t get much better than that. It sounds like some serious witchcraft was at play in the early moments of this game. The league should look into that.

Back on June 1 in Madrid, Liverpool was the beneficiary of eagle-eyed referee Damir Skomina’s decision to punish Tottenham’s Moussa Sissoko for a controversial handball in the first minute of the 2019 Champions League Final. It was Mohamed Salah who stepped up to the spot to give Liverpool a lead it would never relinquish, so you could probably be led to assume that Salah is in favor of meticulous, hairsplitting decisions — the kind that VAR is all about.

You’d be wrong.

As a goalkeeper, being chipped is one of the most embarrassing things that can happen to you. It's one thing to have it dinked over you during a one-on-one, it's a whole different thing to be chipped from distance — which means goalkeepers will hate you if you try to chip them from long-range.

In this Sunday league match, a player tries to chip the opposing keeper from 50 yards out and fails. The keeper's reaction is priceless.

In the penultimate match of the Newcastle Jets’ 2018-19 A-League season, 22-year-old right winger Joe Champness highlighted his potential with two goals and an assist in a 6-1 demolition of the Brisbane Roar. Standing at nearly 6-3 and with two goals in three appearances for Australia’s U-23 side, Champness clearly has all the tools of an exciting young professional.

For those who watched the Premier League this weekend, I think there were many conclusions to be made after Week 1, but these were by far the clearest:

This past weekend, a photo emerged on Twitter of a bloodied young Liverpool supporter standing next to star attacker Mohamed Salah. That child is 11-year-old Reds supporter Louis Fowler, who’d spotted Salah leaving Liverpool’s Melwood training ground in his car and attempted to keep pace with the vehicle while waving at the Egyptian.

Unfortunately for Louis, in his heightened state of distraction he ran directly into a lamp post, knocking himself out and breaking his nose in the process. 

Although the Premier League kicked off this weekend and demands our undivided attention, I think you’ll be pleased to see a couple things outside of Pep Guardiola spending $1 billion on assorted full backs. I give you two videos unashamedly taken from r/soccer.

If you don’t know, r/soccer is a sort of void that begins in the pit of your stomach before lodging at the back of your throat — it’s the ultimate representation of what it means to see fear in a handful of dust. It’s like Twitter in that respect.

With all due respect to Whitney Houston, who had one of the greatest voices ever, we think Alphonso Davies has just performed the greatest rendition of “I Will Always Love You.”

Oh no.

How did we get here? Why are there horoscopes on the hallowed pages of The18.com? Why aren’t there more extremely interesting transfer mongerings like the ones over at ESPN FC? (Sources: Man Utd pray Dybala arrives in transfer exchange for Phil Jones . . . Sources: Coutinho rejects Tottenham and mind-body dualism . . . Sources: We don't have any sources.) 

These astrological signs better at least be rooted in scientific fact, The18, or I’m going batshit crazy in the comments section. You're not ready to feel the wrath of my keyboard.