This week, we advise you to ignore us. Not because last week’s selections were particularly bad – Hangeland secured a clean sheet and Carrick scored three (admittedly Arteta getting injured after 5 minutes and now being out for the rest of the season wasn’t ideal – but not really our fault that one) but because this week we’ve only left ourselves six eligible players. But if you insist, read on…
You can now get Footballsup plus the latest match reports, team news and scores, sent direct to your phone using a free service called Natajak. All you need to do is register and install it on your mobile. Natajak make no charge for the service, it runs on most phones that can access the internet and works just about anywhere in the world. You can also use it to text, email and even share photos.
There is a veritable hotchpotch of fixtures this week, with Premiership (Spurs 2-1 win over Hull), all lower leagues, FA Cup, Champions League, and UEFA Cup; then more League Fixtures and the Carling Cup final at the weekend. Here are all the upcoming fixtures in full (courtesy of the BBC)…
Paul Hart is looking, after two battling performances, increasingly likely to take the Portsmouth job full time. If he does, he’ll join a bizarrely long line of failed Forest managers who have gone onto bigger and better things. Stuart Pearce, David Platt, Paul Hart, Joe Kinnear, Gary Megson, and Colin Calderwood have all been sacked, or left Forest – and then reappeared with little or no interim at International or Premiership level. Read on to find out more about this absurd trend…
It seems an age since we last did these; our last picks were Michael Carrick (11 points) Craig Bellamy (7 points) and John Paintsil (5 points), so pretty successful. Here are our three to watch this weekend…
Man Utd went five points clear at the top of the Premiership with a 3-0 win over Fulham last night, with goals from Paul Scholes, Dimitar Berbatov and the returning Wayne Rooney.
We’re getting into the business end of the season – there are only thirteen Premier League games remaining. In this article we do a quick run through the divisions, looking at the current leaders, the likely challengers, and the odds for all involved. Your divisional yankee should be Man Utd, Cardiff, Leicester and Rochdale if you can’t be bothered to read on…
After a busy weekend of FA Cup ties, with few upsets but lots of replays, here is the quarter final draw:
Blackburn Rovers or Coventry City v Chelsea
Swansea City or Fulham v Manchester United
Cardiff City/Arsenal/Burnley v Sheffield United or Hull City
Everton v West Ham United or Middlesbrough
These ties will be played on the 7th and 8th of March – but first there are the numerous replays, with Arsenal taking on Cardiff tonight, and the rest on the 24th of February bar Hull/Sheff U, which is on February 26th.
We previously reported that Sky had won four of the six available live football packages; they also won one of the remaining two, leaving Setanta with only a sixth of what’s available – half their current amount.
This leaves the Irish network in serious trouble; it will be difficult for them to justify a static subscription rate with only half the live action. Why they didn’t realise this at the time, God only knows; but they are now trying to sub-license one of the packages from Sky.
Which means Sky make a tidy margin on 1/5th of the Premiership without even showing it.
Strangely, ESPN didn’t get heavily involved in the bidding as many (including us) thought they would; yet Setanta still managed to miss out.
We bemoaned the lack of financial clout amongst the terrestrial channels, precluding the provision of live Premiership football through free-to-air; but after ITV’s shambolic coverage of the Merseyside FA Cup derby replay, when they cut to a tic-tacs advert during the solitary 119th minute goal, plus the BBC’s inability to synch the audio with the video during last night’s Milan derby, perhaps it’s best for all involved if we just leave it all to Sky.
Our sister site, Wakuba – http://wakuba.com – has been getting some press recently. We see it as a genuine way to make money – an alternative to investing in stocks and shares (and we all know how that ended up!). With carefully researched selections, and researchers highlighting relevant trends/issues around players, teams and games, is it really that different from a stockbroker analysing macro and micro economic factors?
