1.“Michael Thomas’ goal with just 38 seconds remaining took the League crown south to Highbury, drawing the starkest of lines under Liverpool’s season. The squad duly dispersed for summer, most of them broken and emotionally lost.”
2. ‘In that first season of top-flight football Parma did not even have a fixed training location. The players travelled to the club’s Tardini stadium every morning and got changed in the dressing rooms before boarding a bus – sometimes it would take them to facilities owned by another club, sometimes to whatever patch of council-owned land could be found in their home town.’
3. ‘The students who couldn’t wait to get away from home and who are working in London and Boston for the summer wish that their timing had been better. Every night on their televisions they see a country in carnival, a Dublin city gone mad. In no other June in their memories did people wander around the streets all night beating drums, did guards on point duty ask passing motorists the score, did total strangers embrace each other in crowded pubs. It was the wrong summer to go away.’
4.‘I was eight, I think, and just for a cthange, Newcastle United were flailing. They were old-Second-Division bad, beginning a spell of six years in the wilderness, a spell which Kevin Keegan ended, this time — the first time — as a player. It was 1978-79, a season which would conclude with a home game against Wrexham and a gate of 7,134, a post-war low. And so whatever else I was, it was not a glory-hunter.’
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'The wrong summer to go', Klopp the hero and more of the week's best sportswriting
1. “Michael Thomas’ goal with just 38 seconds remaining took the League crown south to Highbury, drawing the starkest of lines under Liverpool’s season. The squad duly dispersed for summer, most of them broken and emotionally lost.”
In the Independent, Vincent Hogan hails Jurgen Klopp as Liverpool’s drought ends.
2. ‘In that first season of top-flight football Parma did not even have a fixed training location. The players travelled to the club’s Tardini stadium every morning and got changed in the dressing rooms before boarding a bus – sometimes it would take them to facilities owned by another club, sometimes to whatever patch of council-owned land could be found in their home town.’
For The Guardian, Nicky Bandini looks back on the superb Parma side that captured so many imaginations.
3. ‘The students who couldn’t wait to get away from home and who are working in London and Boston for the summer wish that their timing had been better. Every night on their televisions they see a country in carnival, a Dublin city gone mad. In no other June in their memories did people wander around the streets all night beating drums, did guards on point duty ask passing motorists the score, did total strangers embrace each other in crowded pubs. It was the wrong summer to go away.’
30 years on, Maeve Binchy‘s depiction of Ireland in the haze of Italia 90 is just what your Sunday needs. From the Irish Times.
4. ‘I was eight, I think, and just for a cthange, Newcastle United were flailing. They were old-Second-Division bad, beginning a spell of six years in the wilderness, a spell which Kevin Keegan ended, this time — the first time — as a player. It was 1978-79, a season which would conclude with a home game against Wrexham and a gate of 7,134, a post-war low. And so whatever else I was, it was not a glory-hunter.’
A brilliant personal tale of love, loss and football by The Athletic’s George Caulkin.
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