Letting a lead slip twice, missing a penalty and conceding an 89th minute equaliser all resulted in Manchester United throwing away ‘silly points’ against Fulham, but Sir Alex Ferguson will be in no mood for niceties as West Ham visit Old Trafford on Saturday in a match at would seem the perfect antidote to a disappointing visit to London last weekend.

Continue reading “Manchester United vs West Ham United: Preview”

• 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.

As Christmas approaches, Betfair is giving all Man Utd fans something else to get excited about – a free to enter poker tournament with tickets to an Old Trafford fixture for the winner and a signed United shirt for the runner-up.

Entrants go head-to-head with other Reds fans, making the winner the finest poker playing United fan – unofficially at least!

The top prize is two seats at Old Trafford for the visit of Portsmouth on February 6 while the runner-up will receive a signed United shirt. The third placed card sharp lands a $100 bet with Betfair with fourth and fifth taking free bets to the value of $50 and $25 respectively. The next five entrants win a free $10 bet.

The tournament takes place on Wednesday December 16, and entry is simple – there are just a few easy instructions to follow:

Continue reading “Manchester United poker tournament – win a signed shirt, free tickets and more”

I was contacted by the folks at Killing Cancer. A charity to help promote the use and development of a little known cancer treatment — PDT.

The club has also been involved in this and will send out brochures to season ticket holders. But either case, it’s always better to reach out to a wider, more global audience as well. So I thought it would be just as well great to promote this initiative on the site.

More importantly, Sir Alex Ferguson has joined this and has sent out an open letter to everyone. The PDF containing the letter can be downloaded here, but I thought I would anyway paste it here for the benefit of those not able to open the file:

Continue reading “Ferguson joins fight against cancer”

Pardon the overly extreme headline — and this will be a short one, I promise — but it’s things like these that rub bloggers or independent reporters the wrong way. You would expect the mainstream media to follow basic journalistic etiquette; if it’s a quote you attribute the source, or give credit where it’s due.

About four days ago we had published an exclusive Vidic interview on this site. Today you will have seen the same quotes plastered over The Sun and Skysports.com — I don’t want to link back to those articles but you can easily find them. [Thanks to Stephen Darwin for bringing it to my attention]. As far as I know right now, these are the two mainstream outlets that have published them. None of them credited us. I don’t want to go on a longer rant about doing the right thing, or cry out to them about wanting attention from the mainstream press, but I feel it right to call these people out on this act because I have seen plenty of bloggers face the kind of injustice the press seem to get away with.

*

Rant over. I will post something United related later in the day. Till then comment away.

Will be a very short preview this. I think a lot has already been said post-Burnley that all we can hope for is a response from the side. We travel to Wigan who under Roberto Martinez are committed towards playing a positive, attacking brand of football. On the plus side, it means we should find more space when we have possession. However, a depleted defence could be under severe pressure if Martinez’s tactics work.

Speaking of which, Rio Ferdinand will now be out for a month. This is a worrying trend. Ferdinand from the second half last season was stricken with a lot of niggling injuries, be it his back or groin and I am a bit more worried about his increased propensity at picking up these injuries. Jonny Evans also spoke about the likelihood of undergoing surgery on a troublesome ankle, which means we will be without our main centre backs. However, for now, Vidic will return and Evans will play through the pain. Brown is also thereabouts and O’Shea floats in and about.

I would like Richie de Laet to get a start at right back with Vida and Evans in the centre. Evra would take his customary left back berth. Carrick and Fletcher will play in midfield, with Valencia on one wing and if Nani is fit he’ll be on the other. Up front it will once again be Berbatov and Rooney. Ferguson admitted that his strikers haven’t been upto much and they need to step it up.

I will end this preview here.

Prediction: 2-0 to United.

The 09/10 Premier League season starts in 2 weeks and the inaugural Football Media Fantasy Football league is now open for business.

There are a host of prizes to win, it’s free to join and it’s based on the popular and very easy to use premier league fantasy football game.

How To Play

Continue reading “Red Rants and Fantasy Football – The 09/10 Fantasy Football League”

The folks at the Guardian got in touch with us to inform our readers about their package titled, The Season. This is a preview package for the upcoming season and it includes comprehensive information and preview for all sides — and for our purposes, lots of Manchester United as well.

So here what they say about their package:

Continue reading “The Guardian’s 09/10 Season Package”