• Video Of The Week: Manchester United vs West Bromwich Albion – December 1978 | Twohundredpercent
  Ian King links us to rare footage from a match between United and West Bromwich Albion. United lost 5-3, but it's always a delight to be able to watch such rare and extended footage from the past. Also interviews with Bryan Robson, Ron Atkinson and Cyrille Regis.
• City Should Worry… Not Us
  Reckons Scott as he reviews the Carling Cup semi-final
• Gary Neville faces censure for middle-finger gesture at Carlos Tevez | Football | guardian.co.uk
  Gary Neville could be in trouble with the Football Association after he reacted to Carlos Tevez's first goal in the Carling Cup semi-final by raising his middle finger towards the Manchester City striker.

  If true — and the evidence says most likely it is — then I don't think there's much to complain. Although, considering the stuff players say to each other and the ref these days (easily lip-readable stuff) you'd think there's some inconsistency in applying the rules here.

• Tale Of Two Strikers Forced Out And Obsessed With Former Club
  Scott on Adebayor and Tevez

• Glazer's SOS to Man Utd stars | The Sun |Sport|Football
  A weird one from the Sun. Which is why I intend to be wary. It's a bit odd the owners would go, cap in hand so to speak, to the players. When things start going badly you'll see a deluge of these stories. So best not to get carried away, and wait and watch.
• Glazers could take £130m out of Manchester United next year | Football | guardian.co.uk
  Nestling in the small print of the 322-page bond prospectus are provisions allowing the Glazers to take £70m out of the club's cash reserves (includes the money they have received from selling players such as Ronaldo.) The document also reserves for the Glazers the legal right to pay £25m out of the club in a dividend, and half of what is termed "consolidated net income".

  Another investigative piece from David Conn.

• David Beckham: I won't celebrate if I score against Manchester United
  "I wouldn't celebrate if I scored. It would take me a split second to compose myself and remind myself I couldn't celebrate" How would you react if he scored?
• Sky Sports | Diouf mentor surprised by rise
  Mame's Swedish coach on Diouf's rise at United
• Martin Samuel: The Glazers may be bad for Manchester United but that is good for the game.
  Martin Samuel weighs in (no pun intended) on Manchester United, ownership, debts etc. Not a fan of him personally, but read it anyway.
• Manchester United are still the best in town, says Gary Neville
  Neville on City, Carling Cup and Tevez.
• Fergie admits mis-diagnosis over Berbatov's injury
  Sir Alex Ferguson has admitted he got it wrong in expressing his fears that Dimitar Berbatov was struggling with his knee injury again

While I’ve always wanted to devote posts with regular news-y bit,s I’ve tried to look around for a solution that helps me post links without much hassle and with a few choice remarks of my own suffixing them. I think I’ve finally found a neat way of easily posting them in a batch, by date, on a daily basis, and will be trialling it starting tomorrow.

So don’t panic if you see a post popping up tomorrow looking slightly different. (Or maybe not looking slightly different, if things work out fine in the back end.)

Hopefully you’ll all like it. And if I’m satisfied with it I’ll be glad to stick with it — and will make this a daily feature.

If you think you’d like to bring to my notice interesting links you’ve encountered during the day, do feel free to post them in the comments or send them to me through the contact page (can be found in the top menu of this site.)

… for the Soccerlens Awards 2009.

Yes, it’s that time of the year again. There are several categories and before the actual voting begins, sometime in the near future, sites have to be nominated. So if you think we deserve to be on the list of nominees, then go on, nominate us. Here’s how you do it:

1. Go here.

2. Select the category that fits us best (I think Team blog, Team Specific Writer, and Community. But if you think there are others that may have slipped our notice feel free to nominate us there.)

3. Copy-paste the award categories list in an email, list your nomination for each as many categories as you care about, and then send it through email to awards@soccerlens.com. And please do nominate other football sites / blogs that you might read.

Cheers.

The Guardian has been rattling off story after story on the Glazer debt, giving me an image of a press room chock full of Shakespearean monkeys rattling away feverishly at their keyboards. And, whilst some of them have gotten repetitive, quite a few of them have been good reads.

The blogosphere isn’t far behind though, and there is some good material going around over there too.

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Let’s be clear here: let’s just stop making excuses for our team. We can go on about our dominant possession; throw stats out in the air on how much of pitch area our players covered. And perhaps go on a rant about sides parking their bus against us. Or, how unfair Cameron Jerome’s goal was.

But what’s the point?

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While I’m on a linking spree let me add this one too.

United Rant has a very good break down of the debt situation — this is in light of our mooted interest in exchanging our “debt for bonds”. Those who don’t want to break their head to understand the financial intricacies, can read Ed’s piece which tries to explain it to a lay person.

When you’re done laughing at City (linked in the last post) it’s time to get a dose of reality here.

… that United is a better supported club than City, then here’s some proof:

1. City don’t seem able to sell all their tickets for their first semi-final in 30 years.

2. We’ve had better attendances than City every season since the 40s.

This is akin to saying the sun is brighter than the moon, but some people would like definitive proof even today.

I woke up at 6:45am in time for the 7am kickoff, my local time. I was up late the previous night; stayed up till 4am, in fact. But late nights are quite common during weekends, by my standards. About 60 minutes into the game, overwhelmed by a combination of weariness and an unprecedented ennui watching the game, I gave in and involuntarily dozed off. In my mind the game played on as Rooney fashioned a comeback 3-1 win.

When I woke up, I carried on with my day, only to fire up the Guardian a few hours later to read the match report. Only then did the 0-1 scoreline dawn on me. Funny story — not much on poignance value — but true.

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I was contacted by ESPN (Asia) to do a small interview with them, taking stock of the season so far. I believe it will be up on their site in a day or two. But one of the questions that had me stumped was when I was asked to name an unsung hero for us this season. I think Fletcher had been unsung in past seasons, but there have been enough noise made about his importance this season. And Park Ji Sung has been too mediocre to qualify (Maybe his cause may have been helped if his name was Park Ji-Unsung.). Anyway the main impression I got was we have blown hot and cold far too often to have any heroes, sung or unsung.

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