Wednesday, March 21, 2018
Jaap Stam: Reading sack manager with club 20th in Championship
Tuesday, March 20, 2018
Dino Maamria: Stevenage appoint Nuneaton Town boss as manager
Monday, March 19, 2018
Spirited Spal frustrate Juventus and shake up the bottom – and top – of Serie A | Paolo Bandini
Leonardo Semplici’s minnows have a fighting chance of survival after halting the champions’ charge with a battling display that also boosted Napoli’s title hopes
Leonardo Semplici could have encouraged his players not to worry before their game against Juventus. Nobody expected Spal to get a result against opponents 15 places and 50 points ahead of them. As such, the manager might have told them to stay loose, to enjoy themselves, to go out and take a swing knowing that they had nothing to lose.
Instead he told them the truth. “We have lots to lose,” said Semplici on the eve of Saturday’s game. “We’re running out of games and we need to try to pick up points. We are facing the best team in Italy, and one of the strongest in Europe, but we still need to try to take a positive result.”
Continue reading...Sunday, March 18, 2018
Wigan Athletic v Southampton: FA Cup quarter-final – live!
11.34am GMT
Football is a simple game and football is a beautiful game – sentiments that announced themselves with clarion call when Wigan met Manchester City in the last round of this competition. City, the best side in the country, wove lovely patterns in dominating the ball and dictating the play, but Wigan, the 46th best side in the country, defended aggressively, attacked bravely, and took their chance brilliantly. Add to that a late tackle, exhibition rag-losing, unbridled ecstasy, silliness, schadenfreude and general chaos, and you have a decent answer to the question: “why are you so pitifully obsessed with something so painfully ridiculous?”
And Wigan will fancy themselves this afternoon, for Southampton are a mess. It’s possible that, after being mercilessly plundered, they’ve finally run out of players, except looking down their squad, they still have plenty of them. They might be struggling for a scorer, but they’ve no business being where they are on as bad a run as they are, so it’s far more likely that they simply compounded the error of sacking Claude Puel with the mistake of appointing Mauricio Pellegrino.