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Marcos Alonso believes Chelsea teammate Ross Barkley can fill England's creative void in midfield.
Alonso was on the field for Spain in Monday night's loss to the Three Lions, in which Barkley was instrumental for the visitors third goal.
Read more on Tribal FootballThe former England winger discusses the racism he faced when he joined Rangers and why having ‘all the badges and every award going’ never landed him a top coaching job
Mark Walters cannot help smiling about the time Mo Johnston, his then teammate, received a bullet in the post. “I said: ‘Mo, you’ve taken the pressure right off me!” he recalls of the death threat sent to Johnston after the striker, a Catholic and former Celtic hero, joined Rangers in 1989. “We had a good laugh about it,” says Walters. “I had all sorts thrown at me – bananas, darts, a pig’s leg – and I had letters from the Ku Klux Klan telling me where I should go and what I should be doing with myself. But I never got a bullet! Unless you’ve been in a professionals’ dressing room, it’s hard to explain the humour.”
Laughing off or blocking out hatred had been Walters’ modus operandi since long before he joined Rangers in 1987, when he became the only black player in the Scottish Premier League. He encountered abuse that may seem almost unbelievable today but says it was, in one respect only, easy to ignore because racism is boring and paying attention to it would not have helped him to fulfil his ambition of becoming a successful footballer. He achieved that, playing for his hometown club Aston Villa before winning three Scottish titles with Rangers, a cap for England and the FA Cup with Liverpool.
Continue reading...Chelsea’s defender, on loan at Vitesse Arnhem, draws comfort from Sergio Ramos after three red cards in his fledging career
As the referee reached for his back pocket less than half an hour into Vitesse Arnhem’s Europa League qualifier against Basel in August, it was easy to imagine what was going through Jake Clarke-Salter’s mind. The Chelsea defender’s previous loan, at Sunderland last season, was overshadowed by back-to-back dismissals and now another red card – and a harsh one, too – was about to be shown in his direction. Holding his head in his hands, Clarke-Salter had only one thought: “Not again.”
Pulling up a chair at St George’s Park ahead of England’s Under-21 game against Scotland on Tuesday, Clarke-Salter talks about “a massive learning curve” as he reflects on those red cards and his loan experiences, starting two years ago at Bristol Rovers, where he ended up having a metal plate inserted in an arm after a painful fracture-dislocation of his elbow.
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This time about a year ago, before Mohamed Salah at Liverpool began to push his way to the front of the queue for the nation’s attention, a debate was taking place over whether the increasingly reliable Harry Kane was good enough to be regarded as genuinely world class. Now the same thing is happening in reverse to Alexis Sánchez. By the time the Chilean left Barcelona for Arsenal his credentials as one of the world’s elite were impeccable. Last month a journalist in Santiago made contact asking for information on why Sánchez was failing so badly at Manchester United.
Genuinely world class. The first word ought to be superfluous, though in football discussions it never is. No one quite knows the parameters here. Some would argue you have to be good enough to hold down a place in a notional World XI, to take part in a pan-galactic match against Planet Zog. Others think that might be a bit harsh, and suggest that any pan-galactic contest would surely be organised along World Cup lines and would therefore require a squad of 23 players, perhaps even a couple more. So you could envisage the criterion as being enough players to form a trial match between the best two sides in the world.
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The ESPN FC crew answer your tweets on Kylian Mbappe's links to Real Madrid, Philippe Countinho's woes at the Camp Nou and much more.
Arturo Vidal's disgruntled social media posts showed a lack of respect towards his Barcelona teammates, the Catalan club's general manager has told Mundo Deportivo.
Vidal posted an angry face emoji on his Instagram story following Barca's Champions League win over Tottenham last Wednesday, when he only came on for the final few minutes.
The Chile international then sparked a fresh controversy after Sunday's draw at Valencia, when he was an unused substitute, after posting and then deleting...