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I don't know if there's demand for this, but I can see why clubs like Orient are concerned, if West Ham is trying to fill the OS (or Spurs theirs, and QPR theirs) and they're selling EPL tickets for only marginally above what Orient are charing for League One, they're going to eat up all the neutrals in short order.
I'm actually a bit nervous about Spurs' new digs. I wonder if they'll really be able to fill it for the games that aren't so sexy. Arsenal is a much, much more successful club and you see empty seats at the Emirates every time they have a stretch of rough form. I'd hate for the new WHL to look as empty as your average NFL stadium does these days.
Well worth reading the whole thing. There's some very funny stuff in the first half of the column.
One question here is whether we are going to see a new model, in which you build to accommodate a capacity that you expect only to reach a few times a year, with the idea that the cushion provided by television revenue and luxury boxes will allow you to cover the additional costs. That can be a risky proposition if the club is funding the stadium itself.
It's pretty good, actually. Bringing in Avram grant to "help" Rafa Benitez would be the ultimate insult to Benitez, even worse than the Fat Spanish Waiter moniker, I think.
This is true, but we're not talking 20,000 empty seats here, we're talking maybe 200-400 seats tops at the moment. This is with the most expensive tickets in the league.
Arsenal have a huge fanbase, probably the biggest in London. They should always be able to sell out if they want, it's just a matter of pricing tickets correctly. They dropped the tickets on some of the less desirable games this year like Swansea and Southampton and they've sold out just about every game so far. Demand has certainly softened (it's much easier to get tickets now than it was 4-5 years ago, when Red tickets would go in a heartbeat), but they get by.
The thing with West Ham is I have very little confidence they would sell out a 60,000 seat stadium even if they charged £20 a seat. They are a reasonably well-supported club, but that's a very big ask considering they are something of a yo-yo club and their fans are surprisingly pissy about their play. West Ham fans get on their team's back very quickly, as quick as Arsenal fans do.
He has indeed become incredibly prolific on the book front.
I thought Manchester United had the biggest fanbase in London.
Wakka wakka!
Do the Davids get to sell the Upton Park land if they get the OS?
EDIT: To add, Hammers would apparently add retractable seating to cover the athletics track, which is nice to hear.
So, an essentially free 60K seat stadium with better transport AND they get to develop a chunk of London property? Ian Beale gives a hearty applause! (If any of you get that reference, you are a dork.)
edit: Dawson will be fit, too.
Hehe. In my experience, not particularly strangely, it's either Liverpool or Arsenal. Way too many Liverpool fans around.
On another note, heading out fairly soon to see my first game in a European stadium, Chelsea-FC Nordsjaelland. As I've been joking to my friends, maybe I'll see Rafa's first victory...or his last game as Chelsea manager.
With Roman you could wind up seeing both.
Have a good time! Be sure to cheer on Michael Parkhurst...and I have a feeling you'll be seeing Rafa's first win and then a bunch of dumb articles on the internet how "the pressure is off" now.
You're welcome.
I like that he has about 20 sponsors and you can be one, too. Thanks for the interest!
I basically have nothing to do today. I admit it freely.
Prudential should sponsor them, right? Seems only fair.
Probably just go with Celtic-Spartak.
I have no idea. I'm torn, as well. I think I'll watch Celtic-Spartak as the A game and keep tabs on Shakhtar v Juve to see if they bother even running around.
Chelsea going with the A-team, mostly. Parkhurst in the 11 for the visitors.
I will, of course, bring you regular updates from Donetsk. I must confess that I don't concur with the sages in the Stamford Bridge press box, as a draw between Shakhtar and Juventus will be enough to send both teams through to the last 16, with the hosts proceeding as Group winners.
Now, call me a cynic, but if an Italian club whose name is a byword for corruption and a team owned by a shady Ukrainian oligarch can't engineer a draw between them, my complete lack of faith in humanity will need a major overhaul.
Only problem with that is that the European Prudential uses a figure of "Prudence" as its logo.
I don't have access to matches, but would think that Barca-Benfica would be interesting, given Barca's lineup of kids.
edit: scratch that--Cluj is in, Galatasaray is out as it stands.
Somewhere in Bavaria, Gerd Mueller strokes his cat.
My favourite one of these was when Wolfgang Wolf was coaching Wolfsburg.
Where did you see that Bale will be fit? Everything I've read says AVB is hopeful but it is still up in the air.
At which point Bale will surely suffer a horrific season-ending mugging from Charlie Adam, so maybe he should just take his time.
Might not necessarily be a bad thing to rest him as he is on 4 yellows as well. Would be an annoyance to rush him back and have him pick up a yellow and have to sit anyway. Might as well wait for the January amnesty.
Drats. I forgot to set the DVR!
Ha! I didn't even read it.
edit: Rafa must be feeling a real sense of deja vu as he prepares Chelsea for this. I wonder if he'll last as long at Chelsea when they get back from Japan as he did when he won this for Inter.
I'm sure I'm not alone in hoping that Chelsea's fortunes follow those of Inter. Win the Champions League, hire Rafa, fire Rafa, freefall to a 6th place finish domestically...
Hang on, they've done just about all of that already, just in the wrong order.
But seeking asylum in Uganda seems to me an indicator that things are not so hot to trot back in Eritrea.
Modric usually plays a bit higher up, but I can see him moving into a Pirlo type of role as he ages.
Prepare yourself for NCAA-style venues.
Thanks! It was pretty incredible (and, sadly, Parkhurst didn't have a very good game - sorry Shooty!) and I'm definitely going back. Observed some interesting stuff: in particular, you can really see in person why managers and talent analysts like David Luiz so much. He's just so physically gifted; strong, fairly quick, and all of that was on display. I was amazed - like most fans, I've found his good moments exciting and his bone-headed moments highly frustrating, but in person I think I finally understood the potential that I imagine managers see in him. So that was great. Otherwise, had a great time in the game itself, which was generally spoiled by the overall context of Chelsea's no longer being in the Champions League, but otherwise was great!
Also, this is a really interesting result and also curious to see if you guys saw this on applying a kind of Pythagorean expectation to football.
It's amazing how much different it is in person. You really get a feel for which players are the best athletes and you get to see their work off the ball. I wish I could see an entire season live. One day! If we ever move to Glasgow as the gf wants, I'll definitely get a season ticket for Partick.
Udinese: Padelli, Faraoni, Heurtaux, Danilo, Pasquale, Pereyra,
Agyemang-Badu, Pinzi, Armero, Fabbrini, Ranegie.
Subs: Brkic, Di Natale, Benatia, Marsura, Berra, Reinthaler, Frison.
Liverpool: Reina, Johnson, Skrtel, Carragher, Downing,
Henderson, Allen, Sahin, Suso, Jose Enrique, Suarez
Subs: Jones, Cole, Assaidi, Coates, Sterling, Shelvey, Wisdom.
Referee: Duarte Gomes (Portugal)
This was my first reaction too. For purposes of TV viewers which is what matters it probably makes sense. There is something about not having a "host" nation that detracts from the "Great Big Event" feel of it though.
Friedel, Walker, Caulker, Vertonghen, Naughton, Lennon, Sandro, Carroll, Dempsey, Adebayor, Defoe
Subs: Cudicini, Huddlestone, Livermore, Townsend, Stewart, Dembele, Sigurdsson
Panthianikos Team
Karnezis, Seitaridis, Triantafyllopoulos, Vyntra, Spyropoulos, Sow, Vitolo, Sissoko, Zeca, Toché, Mavrias
Euro '80 in Italy (with 8 teams) was the first real tournament with group stages. Before that you had groups followed by home and away two-legged quarters and a final four at a single location (or, in the very early days, a two-legged knockout from the beginning).
There's a pretty obvious selection bias working against that type of player. If you can create and distribute like Pirlo, they put you higher up the pitch. Defensive midfield tends to be the domain of more destructive than creative players.
Probably easier to find comparisons to Pirlo in the libero era of football. Beckenbauer could obviously distribute the ball. But my impression is that he ran directly at defenses than Pirlo, who seems to rarely keep the ball at his own feet. Much better dribbler, and much more deadly from distance...
The current Pirlo doesn't play that differently from Cosmos-era Beckenbauer (though Beckenbauer did play more defense than Pirlo does).
Me too! FSC has the replay starting now. Dunno if I'll make it through the whole thing...
EDIT: On further review, it appears the ball may have come down off the bar and then gone in off the keeper's back. Still a fine header.
Kyle Walker, who's the only one challenging Dempsey for MOTM honors, should get a lot of credit for that goal. It was his pressure and tenacity in midfield that won the ball to set Lennon away and his bursting run past Lennon that helped make the space for Defoe.
"Needing just a draw to progress, Spurs had an air of complacency about them in the opening period, which Panathinaikos controlled for large parts.
Emmanuel Adebayor put Tottenham ahead just before the half hour, but the Greeks, who have never won in Britain, played the better football and deservedly equalised through Zeca just after the re-start."
They must have been watching a different game than I did. Spurs played much better and were much more threatening up until the Panathinaikos goal. The period immediately after the equalizer was the one period where the Greeks were the better side.
Panathinaikos controlled fuhqall in that game except for, as you say, a brief period where they had a couple chances in the second half (and took one of them). Tottenham were extremely assertive in the opening quarter of the game, dominated the first half, and eventually bounced back pretty well after the equalizer.
Sweet. I look forward to the latest entry in Spurs Therapy. The weather looked to be just a little bit more precipitation away from being utterly miserable.
I really like Tom Carroll. Am I nuts or is he modeling his game after Modric? Just the way he makes himself available to receive the pass by taking a step this way or that way to give the passer a better angle and his quick look to play an incisive ball to the wingers or the striker before settling for a safer option if it's not there. He obviously doesn't have Modric's quality yet (or ever, most likely), but it seems he was paying attention the last couple of years. I think he might be ready for a high level loan in January to get a run of games under his belt.
Right now, the guy he reminds me of the most is Joe Allen.
2) Thankfully, we were in the east stand under the roof. I was a little chilly, my wife (my wiiiife) would have probably physically injured me if I'd taken her to a game to be rained on.
3) We went with friends, one of whom is a Spurs fan, who took us to a Spurs pub in the neighborhood before. It was pretty gloriously trashy, just a paved garden and a friendly, chilly lady selling cans of beer, and there were a not insignificant number of moderately offensive Arsene Wenger songs practiced (none racist, so, um, yay Tottenham). During the game, along with just getting to sing "When the Spurs go marching in", I particularly enjoyed the anti-Chelsea taunts - "Champions of Europe / you're not any-more" - that sprung up. The lack of singing at American sports events continues to gall me. At the pub after the game (they said waiting for the train in the hour after the game was basically pointless), they played old Tottenham team songs from the 70s and 80s, which I clearly need to learn. They were somewhere in the range between Meet the Mets and the Super Bowl Shuffle. And half of the guys at the pub knew the words and were singing along.
4) So, the game. I really like Tom Carroll. What I love about him is his aggression with the ball. He gave away possession more often than someone in his position probably should, and he's still too small to win possession back. But most of the time when he gave away possession, it was in attempting a through ball or a direct pass forward. His passing attempts reminded me or Modric or some other great passing midfielder, though his execution was not at the level it needs to be. I feel like Carroll has a real chance to be legitimately excellent, but there's also a real chance that he just doesn't take that step forward in execution and never quite becomes a worthy starter.
5) More on the game, probably this numbering system will break down as I move forward. My friends were really down on Adebayor during the game, I wasn't. He definitely had some bad touches at notable moments, but I thought his workrate was really impressive. He was everywhere to receive the ball, he defended, he finished the one big chance he was given, and he made himself available for Friedel's constant long balls. It wasn't a special game by any means, but I thought he was good, and I can see some of the questionable touches as rustiness.
6) Everyone else already said Dempsey was the best player on the pitch for Tottenham, and that Naughton had himself a real stinker, so, yes, that was also what I saw. I'm excited about Dempsey if he can be the club's primary creative midfielder. I'm worried about our depth on the back line if Naughton can't be trusted.
7) Sandro is a bad man. He clearly frightened Panathinaikos, they seemed happy to just cede possession rather than deal with him one-on-one.
8) The Greek fans were mental. They didn't stop singing, chanting, and performing weird dances all night, even as Pana played maybe 5-10 inspired minutes at most. After Tottenham got the third goal, they all sang something in Greek and held their scarves in the air, waving side to side. My wife (my wiiiife) got the line of the night. She suggested the song translated as "Scarves half off, debt service." Burn, Greece, your country is bankrupt and fascism is disturbingly rampant. And you lost.
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