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From The Sunday Times
May 18, 2008
Wallies, brollies and follies
From Ronaldo’s goals to Steve McClaren, this season has had its share of the good, the bad and the ugly
THE GOOD
Anthropological discovery of the year: the Football League’s backbone in standing up to Leeds’s quest to overturn their points deduction
Cristiano Ronaldo: imagine how many goals he’d score if he was an out-an-out striker. It doesn’t mean we have to actually like him . . .
An all-English Champions League final: the Premier League is the strongest domestic competition in the world, you know Arsenal’s free-flowing, exhilarating passing game: football for purists and idealists . . . the goals of Emmanuel Adebayor, the defensive genius of Kolo Toure, the flowering of Theo Walcott
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Avram Grant: a superior record to Jose Mourinho’s, a Champions League final and almost the Premier League. What can the problem possibly be?
MK Dons: League Two champions and getting better attendances in the lowest league than Wimbledon were in the highest Least likely scenario in November: that by December, QPR would be the wealthiest club in West London
Fabio Capello: a man of honour, a man of integrity, a man of discipline. Just what England’s slugabeds need
Injury: Rochdale’s Lee Thorpe, who broke his arm in three places arm-wrestling on the team coach while travelling to their playoff at Darlington. “Arm-wrestling is something we have been doing most days,” said manager Keith Hill. “It’s easy for outsider to say, ‘They shouldn’t have been messing around like that’.” They shouldn’t have been messing around like that
Sir Bobby Robson: tears were shed when the old soldier collected the BBC’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Even Sir Alex Ferguson dropped his BBC boycott to present it
Goal of the season: Cristiano Ronaldo’s free kick against Portsmouth at Old Trafford. It was as if it came from another planet, one more adept at football
Kevin Keegan: for starters, making Michael Owen look interested; for the main course, shipping David Rozenhal off to Rome and, for a dessert nobody thought they had room for, plugging Newcastle’s traditional colander of a defence
Fernando Torres: the only man capable of making £26.5m look a bargain
Unsung manager of the year: Rochdale’s Keith Hill. Without a penny to spend and with only four wins in 20 games until December, his canny use of the loan system saw English football’s least successful club reach the playoffs. Arm-wrestling aside Bradford City fans: 10th in League Two; average attendance, 13,756
Overachievers: Hereford United, Carlisle United, Stoke City Birmingham City’s Stephen Kelly: the only outfield player to appear in every minute of every Premier League game
Peterborough United’s Aaron McLean: the most prolific striker in the Football League, five years after being cast into the nonleague tundra by Leyton Orient
Clubman of the year: Scarborough Athletic’s Gary Hepples, jailed for four months after breaching his supervision order to play against Staveley Miners Welfare
Most romantic footballer: Sheffield Wednesday’s Rob Burch, who, on Valentine’s Day, asked his girlfriend if she would be his lawfully wedded Wag. On daytime television
Craig Bellamy: the combative striker invested more than £500,000 of his own money to set up a football academy in war-ravaged Sierra Leone
Fulham: how on earth did that happen?
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