After spending a fine Sunday afternoon in the wasteland that is Ohio watching West Ham take the on Columbus Crew, we figured a few of you might appreciate this documentary from 1985 regarding the infamous ICF–especially in light of the rumblings regarding the so called riot between the Crew’s Hudson Street Hooligans and the infamous bastards in claret & blue. Its long, and many of the lads could use a haircut, but its quite worth your time…

Posted: July 24th, 2008 under football, soccer.
Comments: 4

Its been a bit, yes I know, but we’re still here, pining away for the downward spiral of our favored footie club (FC Barcelona), drowning our sorrows in pint after pint while the strains of sweet soul music fill the air. While many of you lot will fill the bars today to watch Chelski take on the dark forces of Man U in the Champions League final, we’ll be down at the rubber factory, steel cap boots on our feet, dreaming of what could have been. In other news… Read more »

Posted: May 21st, 2008 under brunette, football, music, oi! anthems, photos.
Comments: 5

Also, not to be total viral marketing dupes, but have you seen Guy Ritchie’s new commercial? Its pretty great:

Posted: May 1st, 2008 under brunette, football, photos.
Comments: none

I recently picked up David Goldblatt’s The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer from my local book shop, and I cannot recommend it more. Hulking out at over 1000 pgs, the tome represents three years of intensive study of the worldwide phenomenon of the beautiful game–presenting one of the best surveys of the sport I’ve yet to find. I recently stumbled across John Turnbull’s excellent review of the book as well as accompanying interview with Mr Goldblatt over at The Global Game and figured it’d be of interest to some of you lot. In other footie news… Read more »

Posted: April 20th, 2008 under book covers, football, soccer.
Comments: 2

If I can stay awake long enough I will comment on the (to me) completely improbable and disappointing semifinal and final matches of the African Cup of Nations.

But I just finished watching Blues v Reds and this is what I have to say: Liverpool need to ink Mascherano, and Chelsea need to find a proper replacement for Makelele.

Claude Makelele is without question my favorite living fussball player.

When Madrid let him go, Hierro said:

“I think Claude has this kind of gift - he’s been the best player in the team for years but people just don’t notice him, don’t notice what he does. But you ask anyone at Real Madrid during the years we were talking about and they will tell you he was the best player at Real. We all knew, the players all knew he was the most important. The loss of Makélélé was the beginning of the end for Los Galacticos… You can see that it was also the beginning of a new dawn for Chelsea. He was the base, the key and I think he is the same to Chelsea now.”

That was at the end of the season in 2003. Two years later, Chelsea won the league for the first time in 50 years, and Mourinho named Makelele Chelsea’s player of the year. Read more »

Posted: February 11th, 2008 under football.
Comments: 1

Oh the game! The beautiful, beautiful game! Of course, we’re talking about football–and not that steroid fueled thick necked yawnfest the NFL–but rather the most popular sport the world over, the one true love of any self-respecting byrd and the joy of every youth on the street. I know we’ve promised you more coverage of the leagues, but just getting boys away from the pubs long enough to scribble or pound the keys has been more of a hassle than we anticipated. The pull of lager, whiskey and cider is too great!

Hopefully you’ve been keeping tabs on neck and neck horse race that BPL has turned into, with Arsenal and Man U scraping and clawing over each other for the glory, every point being worth more than its weight in gold. Meanwhile, amongst the dregs, Fulham struggles to stay clear of regulation–turning it on in the last minute this week to clear three, keeping the dream alive. Then there is the African Cup, with the seemingly unstoppable Cote-d’Ivoire’s thrashing of Guinea and Ghana’s startling ten man upset of African powerhouse Nigeria–will they meet in the final? And finally, I cry myself to sleep over the nightmare that my beloved FC Barcelona’s season has become, so much promise coming in, only to spend most of the year sniffing around Real Madrid’s refuse. Speaking of which, me and some of the geezer’s hit up a viewing of the rather brilliant Zidane, Un Portrait Du 21e Siècle, and I can’t recommend it enough… Read more »

Posted: February 5th, 2008 under football, movies, photos, reviews, soccer.
Comments: 2

I imagine that 90% of the time, the English FA will be the topic of anything that anyone writes for Skinbyrd on the subject of soccer/association football (from here out to be referred to as fussball so as not to offend/annoy anyone). But not right now. This weekend gone by was the start of the African Cup of Nations, hosted this time around by Ghana, and the tournament will continue through February 10. There has been a lot of whining coming from England and France in particular, two nations whose domestic leagues have increasingly come to rely on African players at all positions. Why can’t Africa have their national tournament in the summer when the European leagues are off? I can’t think of a better excuse than this: there is no amount of air conditioning that would help people trying to play 90 minutes in the summertime in Africa. So here we go. Read more »

Posted: January 23rd, 2008 under football, news.
Comments: 2