Arsenal, Norwich, Liverpool, Newcastle: The top 10 FA Cup giant killings of all-time

Luton Town became the first non-league club in 24 years to beat a top flight side on Saturday as the Hatters beat Premier League Norwich City 1-0 at Carrow Road. Paul Buckles men rode their luck against the Canaries, but super sub Scott Rendell wrote his name in FA Cup folklore with a winner 10 mi...

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Whose name is on the FA Cup? Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Man City, Man United?

The FA Cup Third Round gets under way this weekend and everyone is dreaming of Wembley. Even the big boys, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Man City, Man United and Spurs will all be looking forward to a sunny day under the arch in May. But who will win the FA Cup this season? Chelsea are the current ...

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The View Outside The Premier League: Fleetwood fire blanks and Pompey players get to know each other

A new football season always throws up some unusual stories on day one but there can have been few beginnings to a campaign quite like Portsmouths. Amazingly Pompey came away with a point from their first League One encounter despite sending out a whole team of debutants. Before he joined the sou...

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The 10 worst opening day defeats in the modern game

The new football season in England kicks off on Saturday and everyone will be going into the first game full of optimism and hope for a successful season. Unfortunately, some fans may be left crying in their beer come Saturday night. You see, football can be a cruel, cruel game. It can take that op...

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Fantasy Football 2012/13 is here

Do you think you can do a better job than the professor Arsene Wenger? Could you out-muscle Mancini at defending title winners Manchester City? Then this is your chance to prove it! Squarefootballs Fantasy Football is back for another season and we want as many participants as possible. Last season...

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England: World in Motion or Three Lions - What has been the greatest song?

England take on France this afternoon in their first game of Euro2012 but expectations of Roy Hodgson guiding the country to glory are as low as those racist yobs in Poland and Ukraine who are grabbing all the headlines. Music could hold the key. England have had some notable tournament songs i...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: Chelsea win, but there were plenty of losers in the final day of football

There are some days that it simply doesn’t pay to be a non-football fan. We have a tendency in this country to lurch en masse into things and render them inescapable to the more indifferent among us. We latch on to an event, a past time, even a television talent show and let it consume us until we...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: A final day fanfare for Sky and the Blues

It all came down to this then. It’s been a gruelling journey, epic in its fluctuating fortunes as the favourites for the crown jostled back and forth. Each weekend millions looked on, eagerly cheering their chosen heroes, willing them to put in the performance that would clinch the prize they so ...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: A long time ago in a Stadium far far away, ITV began their FA Cup Final coverage

The 2011-12 football season will probably be looked back upon with a real intrigue in future decades. It has been a long, incident-strewn expedition encompassing an abundance of controversy, drama and despair. It is hard to remember another campaign with more extraordinary talking points. The Luis S...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: A bad week for some as United falter and the Olympics fail to inspire

It ended with Liam Gallagher bopping along to his own record at the Etihad last night in the her-uge title showdown between the Manchester giants on Live Ford Monday Night Football. Basking in his own genius is probably a nightly ritual for Gallagher junior but what certainly hasn’t been a regular o...

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The top 10 dives in football history

Manchester United’s Ashley Young and Chelsea’s Didier Drogba have caused controversy over the past fortnight by diving to win penalties and going down quicker than your average High Street hooker. Ashley Young started it all off by winning a cheap penalty against QPR’s Shaun Derry, when the tough m...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: Time is running out for the Football League Show but Reading and the Saints defy the odds

Back in the hazy midsummer days of August 2011, while hoards of frenzied teenagers were marauding their way through the streets of London setting fire to police cars, looting Poundland and generally ruining Boris Johnson’s holiday; I was indulging in a regular pre-season pursuit. Like every footba...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: Tevez, title races and titillation in a terrific week of football TV

Well, it was a helluva’ few days in the Premier League title race last week wasn’t it? The fortunes of the twin Manchester clubs are weaving increasingly erratic patterns as the burden of the top trophy begins to heap its weight on their slumping shoulders. The last seven days or so have seen a numb...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: A tough week of watching tough men taking tough action; and then there was Gary Neville on Super Sunday

There are many boulevards open to footballers when the time finally comes for them to hang up their boots, delete Sir Alex’s number from their Blackberry and say goodbye to the pantomime-drudgery of the Premier League. Obviously, the twin favourites for many pros are either a cushy job coaching the ...

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Did Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley really play football together?

As football fans, in our lives rarely is there a greater spectacle than a mouth-watering Champions League semi-final between two expensively assembled sides. Rarely is there a more exciting prospect than the thought of Arsenal and Manchester City at loggerheads, with both teams in need of three ...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: One year on from Keys and Gray but is Sky burning any brighter?

It’s been around fourteen months since the corridors and offices of Sky Sports were rocked irrevocably by the now-infamous sexism scandal surrounding part-man, part-ape Richard Keys and his bosom buddy Andy Gray – the worthy winner of Nuts magazine’s 2006 ‘TV Personality That Most Resembles a Baby...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: A tough week for the ‘football family’ but the future’s looking bright, and looking orange for the Toon Army

It has certainly been a difficult old week in football. Quite rightly, the grave events surrounding Bolton’s Fabrice Muamba dominated all stratums of the game over the past seven days, and by extension all of the football coverage too. This resulted in a strange ambivalence amongst the week’s acti...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: Failure, hope and horror – just another weekend in the lives of Leicester City and ESPN

Despite the fact it has reached the ‘business end’ of the competition, I have so far abstained from reviewing ESPN’s FA Cup coverage; this is for two purely righteous reasons. Firstly, I believe that everyone should have the opportunity to watch England’s foremost domestic cup competition and I a...

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Beckham, Best, Henry or Cantona: Who were the coolest footballers to ever live?

We would all like to be footballers, right? The money, the women, the cars. Oh, and the playing of football. That’s pretty good. But some are cooler than others. Too cool, even. So cool they make everyone else look like silly, awkward, emasculated chumps. So who were the 10 coolest footballers to e...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: A mad Mario meets a melodic Manc and the result is perfect harmony

The twin worlds of football and music have not always been cosy bedfellows. Lest we forget the audio abominations that still stain jukeboxes up and down this land: ‘Fog On The Tyne’, that god awful attempt by Ant and Dec to appeal to people other than 12-year old girls during the 2002 World Cup, ...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: QPR’s cautionary tale of success, greed and sweaty men is a real winner for the BBC

In every avenue of the vast road map of life, there have been distinguished comedy legends. The political world has Boris Johnson, Gordon Brown and Margaret Thatcher; in the music fraternity we have all had a good giggle at Keith Richards and Gareth Gates; and let’s not forget Jordan… she doesn’t re...

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The View Outside The Premier League: Cardiff Complete A Bad Week And Dave Jones Takes the Wednesday Hot Seat

Of all the teams not to encounter after the disappointment of their Carling Cup Final defeat,West Ham would have been top of Cardiff Citys list. Sam Allardyce brought his brand of ultra-professional football to South Wales and took three valuable points back to London. Results like this one give am...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: Youth vs. experience at Wembley as Sky take on the BBC in a battle of broadcasters

So, it was a giddily exciting weekend as the competition that ranks just above the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy in most clubs’ priorities came down to its final two contenders; the mighty Merseysiders from Liverpool and the Championship underdogs of Cardiff. As is customary in these circumstances, th...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: An evening of Eurotrash as United make their Channel 5 debut

European football returned to our screens last week as our plucky English clubs once more ventured to the four corners of Europe to mix it up with some of the mightiest names in continental football; goliaths such as Barcelona, Inter and FC Metalist Kharkiv could all be on the horizon. As the week b...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: No handshake for Evra and no love lost between the partisan pundits at Sky

Think about this for a second. How many times do you think you have seen Luis Suarez’s hand this weekend? Ten times? Twenty? A hundred? I’m sure I’ve seen his wandering hand more than I’ve seen my own two in the past 48 hours, such has been the swirling media-frenzy since he refused to settle his di...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: Serious lessons to learn from Fashanu’s footballing family

I’m fairly certain we can all agree that football has its fair share of problems. If it is not the shady transfer dealings of murky agent types skulking around the bins at Tottenham’s training ground, it is the ignorant grunts of ill-informed morons as they boo a man purely for being the brother of ...

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A Scott to be England captain . . . Why Parker is the right man for Fabio

So its official, John Terry has been stripped of the England captaincy AGAIN! After previously having the armband removed as a result of his alleged affair with Wayne Bridge’s ex-girlfriend, his latest dethroning comes as a result of the on-going race scandal involving Anton Ferdinand. Stripping T...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: A prosperous week for Liverpool in the cups but off the field is a different story

The days leading up to the weekend’s FA Cup Fourth Round ties were not particularly pleasant for many football fans, a week in which the unseemly and murky face of football was glaringly apparent. Many column inches were devoted to the tax-evasion trial of Spurs manager Harry Redknapp, as well as th...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: Confusion reigns at City as Coleman fluffs his lines

Have you played Football Manager 2012? You may wonder how a game brimming with data, facts and incalculable statistics comes to contain such a dearth of information. Well, in the early stages of the games development, some spotty oik is charged with the task of finding someone close to each of the 7...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: An incident-packed week at the BBC leaves Savage short of support and Lineker lost for words

They say a week in football is a long time and it can certainly be said that there was enough controversy, incident and wonder crammed into the last seven days of football to keep Joey Barton’s Twitter account going for years. The fallout from the Manchester derby, the return of Scholes and Henry, t...

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Racism is in the spotlight but what is being done to tackle homophobia?

The FA stamped down on Luis Suarez’s racism towards Patrice Evra. And it’s quite right that they did, isn’t it? For when we look back into the past, and certainly in football’s past, we see things that are shockingly vile. In the seventies and part of the eighties, black footballers were subjected ...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: Manchester disunited but the magic of the FA Cup is alive and well

The much talked about magic of the FA Cup was present in abundance this Sunday during the huge third round Manchester showdown, in fact there was more magic contained in the 90 minutes than during a Paul Daniels swingers party. Chris Foy’s card tricks, a disappearing City captain and most mystifying...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: A football overkill but Fabregas’ Barcelona adventure keeps us watching

At the top of this article you will see, if you can get past the crass, self-congratulatory overuse of my own name, that the tagline for this column mentions that there isn’t enough football on the TV. Obviously this pithy line is actually nonsense as there is in fact far too much football clogging ...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: Stelling and his merry mates bring festive cheer and genuine fear in the absence of any football

If we boil it down, there are two distinct ways to spend the festive period. You either endure the holiday wallowing in a pit of desperate desolation, alone with no hope of joviality, good tidings or communal kinship. Sat crestfallen in front of Eastenders on Christmas night, nursing a bottle of gin...

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The View Outside The Premier League: Southampton Dominant At St Mary's And Its Presents For The Cellar-Dwellers In League Two

Southampton have had a few blips on the road of late but everyone feels warm and comfortable at home over Christmas and the Saints found life at St Marys as welcoming as ever. Crystal Palace drew the holiday short straw of a trip to the South Coast and went down 2-0 to the Championship leaders. Pal...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: A battle of wits ends in defeat for Worthy’s warhorses, but football marches on

Let’s face it. Our footballing heroes don’t have the greatest reputation when it comes to brainpower and academia do they? A cautionary glance at the post-match interviews every week on Match Of The Day show us superstars struggling to grasp the complexity of questions such as, “How do you feel the ...

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The View Outside The Premier League: Sheffield Wednesday And Huddersfield Serve Up A Christmas Cracker

A few weeks ago the Sheffield Wednesday-Huddersfield Town encounter shaped up to be a collision between a 100 per cent home record and a record unbeaten run - but Wednesday have been held at home recently and the Terriers lost their sequence on 43 games. The match still turned out to be an epic enc...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: A love-in for O’Neill as marvel Martin ruins Rovers’ day

It was clear at 1pm on Sunday what the overriding theme of the day was going to be on Sky Sports’ Live Super Sunday. Ed Chamberlain, growing more and more comfortably into the role of football anchorman, opened the afternoon’s football coverage by loudly proclaiming, “Sunderland’s new era begins tod...

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The View Outside The Premier League: Southend Fall At Cheltenham And Crawley Take Advantage

Cheltenham staged National Hunt racing this weekend but Southend were the big fallers in Gloucestershire as they went down comprehensively to the towns football team. Their defeat allowed Crawley to open up a bit of daylight at the top of League Two. Cheltenhan are well in the promotion mix so the ...

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England: Euro Draw Could Have Been Worse But This Will Not Be A Walk In The Park

Depending on your national orientation, emotions following last Friday’s Euro 2012 group stage draw will have been mixed. If you are Irish, you will presumably be quite gutted that, having qualified for your first major finals in 10 years, perennial powerhouses Spain and Italy were drawn in your gr...

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England: The Group May Be Tough But Let's Be Positive!

Ah, the old draw. It was an interesting affair, as it always is. England have managed to avoid the two Groups of Death (which look insanely, absurdly hard) and have found themselves in an easier group than many other nations find themselves in. It is of course not easy, just easier. Sweden, de...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: The rise and fall of the sprightly Savage is far from a waltz in the park

Do you remember the first time you ever saw Star Wars? That intoxicating and bedazzling rush of pure unadulterated excitement as you sat slack-jawed, unable to wrench your eyes away from all the bright lights, whizzing space ships and questionable acting? And perhaps you also remember the desolate f...

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The View Outside The Premier League: Southampton Lose Again While Bristol Rovers Stage Goal of the Season

Saturdays Championship results would have delighted the bookmakers as both Southampton and West Ham United went down to unexpected defeats. Middlesbrough and Leeds United were both beneficiaries as the top two lost, while Doncasters victory threw more gloom towards Coventry City. Nigel Adkins has e...

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The View Outside The Premier League: Bristol City Are On The March As Northampton Keep On Crumbling

Bristol City posted the eye-catching result of the weekend when they overturned Championship leaders Southampton. As so often happens, the arrival of a new manager has produced a sharp upturn in performance - the gaffer in question this time is Derek McInnes, who is adding yet more lustre to the re...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: A hair-raising spectacle on Saturday turns to sombre reflection on Sunday

Take a look around you. Chances are that if you are reading this in a public place; a library, at your office while you should be working or perhaps even on the Tube, then someone close by is displaying some facial hair that seems to be a little out of place. These moustachioed menfolk are either un...

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Get your Christmas football books here

With Christmas around the corner, attention will be turning the old chore of shopping for the festive period. The dreaded question is about to raise its ugly head. What do I get for the football fan in my life? As usual the great and the good of the football world are telling their story. There ar...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: A test of comedy quizzing is passed with help from the inspiring Irish

Ok, before we go any further let me first congratulate the Irish team on their impressive qualification for the European Championships next summer. There was the inevitable party mood for the second leg of the Republic of Ireland v Estonia match last Tuesday and I’m sure there are not many that begr...

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The View Outside The Premier League: Huddersfield Make It 43 Games Unbeaten as the Cobblers struggle

Huddersfield Town are mentioned a lot in this column but it could hardly be otherwise when a team goes 43 league games without defeat. Thats what the Terriers achieved this weekend when they ground out a hard-fought win over Notts County. This run sets the record for the Football League surpassing ...

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Outside the Box – Football on TV: Spain conquered, but Fabio gets a reality check from a Spurs and England legend

I don’t know if you noticed but the greatest footballing nation of recent years popped over during the weekend. You could quite legitimately be forgiven for letting it pass you by though, as the life of an England supporter over recent times has left the vast majority of us bare husks, bereft of hop...

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The View Outside The Premier League: Fleetwood Sit On The Chairboys, Charlton Show Their Class as Swindon KO Huddersfield

This weeks View Outside the Premier League is really an FA Cup round-up because the Championship is on hold due to internationals and League One and Two sides scrapped it out in the First Round proper. Instinctively we look for non-league success but these events arent quite what they used to be, a...

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