In Reading’s Championship-winning campaign last season, manager Brian McDermott played a 4-4-2 system in all but two of their 46 League matches. Yet already this season, the Royals manager has employed two very different central midfield formations in order to combat specific opposition. The summer addition of Danny Guthrie has given Reading a new creative [...]

After weeks of speculation, Liverpool striker Andy Carroll has opted to join West Ham on a season long loan. First preference Newcastle backed away from a deal, opening the door to a move to Upton Park. West Ham only paid £1mil  for a loan fee to sign the England international, pay his full wages for the season, [...]

Headlines were made when Sir Alex Ferguson dropped Wayne Rooney for Manchester United’s second league game against Fulham last week. He was dropped in favour of new United player Van Persie. The move has sparked numerous reports about him getting close to the Old Trafford exit door. Ferguson is understood to have been dismayed by [...]

Saturday’s match sees Everton travel to West Brom in search of a club record. Avoid defeat and Everton create a new club record for unbeaten Premier League games; the convincing win at Villa Park tied the previous best (11). David Moyes’ men are in fine form with three defeats in 26 and just one defeat [...]

With the long awaited transfer of Luka Modric to Real Madrid finally completed last weekend, all eyes turned to who his replacement would be at Spurs. Having witnessed the first two games of the new season it is evident that we were missing the ability of Modric to keep the ball and create from deep. [...]

*Part 5 now unavailable PLEASE FIND LINKS FOR PART I, PART II AND PART III AT END OF POST Introduction: the foundations (part 4/4*) – Midfield and Concluding Statement  This is a four*-part series of articles that aims to introduce football coaches and fanatics to basic concepts in a systems football approach (such as tiki-taka). [...]

Swansea appeared to ease past promoted West Ham in last Saturday’s lunchtime kick-off at the Liberty Stadium, but what really happened? Here’s my match report. The game actually started very well for West Ham, very bright, active, attacking well, and put Swansea under pressure early on, but defensive errors cost the Hammers, this was a [...]

With names being linked to Liverpool FC left, right and centre we thought we’d look at two interesting names that are causing a lot of debate on Twitter. Two of the players linked are young England internationals with a lot of promise and have experience of playing at the highest level already: Theo Walcott and [...]

 This was a game that neither team could lose given both Norwich’s 5-0 drumming at Fulham and QPR’s perhaps more painful 5-0 defeat at home to Swansea.  Therefore, it had a 1-1 draw written all over it. Norwich really should have won this game and some sharper finishing would have given the Canaries three points but it was [...]

Lineups   Liverpool continued with Rodgers implementation of a 4-3-3. Sterling was given the nod on the left side of the front three and Gerrard was given his roaming role in the ‘hole’. After the early loss of Lucas, Allen had to pick up a lot of the dirty work that the Brazilian covers. Shelvey [...]