Back to English Premier League watching, and English Championship score-following tomorrow. But give me a bit of Australia-Honduras any day over the North London derby.
It's Arsenal-Spurs on TV with my first coffee tomorrow and QPR-Aston Villa on somewhere while I try to enjoy my second coffee. Villa have lost a number of players to injury, including John Terry (broken metatarsal) and top two strikers Scott Hogan and Jonathan Kodjia.
Kodjia's situation is contentious. He had recovered from a broken ankle and had just returned to playing for Villa for a couple of weeks. Last week he was called up by Ivory Coast for their must-win (but they lost) World Cup qualifier against Morocco. He was rumoured to not be fully fit and he suffered an injury to the same ankle in training. Villa are now expecting to be without him for a significant amount of time. The club are hoping for compensation from Fifa but how is the value of the goals he could have scored and the points won in the league with those goals measured?
In the most ridiculous news I heard today, the US Soccer Federation is rumoured to be looking into actually organizing the tournament that was suggested on social media: what I will call the "tournament of losers". Even I thought, as a joke, that the teams that didn't qualify for the World Cup, the likes of Italy, Holland, Chile, USA, Ghana, could play a non-Word Cup tournament. But I didn't think anybody would seriously consider it. Apart from the "look at us" feel of it, who thinks the players would be actually interested in playing, while the real thing is going on without them?
Ironically, I had written a lot a couple of years ago about the possibility of there being a UEFA-run rival World Cup, when all the Fifa and Russia corruption stories were happening. A lot of European associations were making noises about not being part of Fifa anymore. It's amazing how that's all gone quiet now.
No comments:
Post a Comment