The club season is now done and dusted, it is now time for a summer of Youth Championships, World Cup Qualifiers and Women’s Football to get us through this barren period. There’s not even a Copa America to keep us entertained this time around, I have a feeling it is going to be a long couple of months.
So before you pretend to like Formula 1, T20 Cricket and the Tour De France it is time for my ever so slightly delayed Real Football Man review of the week – I’m running late but reading great!
Zinedine Zidane showed just how it easy to play Football Manager with the best team in the world as Real Madrid crushed Juventus on their way to back to back Champions League successes.
That is arguably doing Zidane a disservice as his Los Blancos side were ruthless at the Millennium Stadium, if you really try hard enough you might be able to engineer a Millennium Falcon pun but I do not know enough about Star Wars, so I’ll leave that one up to you.
The evergreen Gianluigi Buffon is perhaps now showing signs of Dutch Elm disease as he evoked the spirit of a Stoke era Shay Given last Saturday. As glittering as his career has been it may just be that father time has caught up with him with his display in Cardiff.
Still after as winning as much as he has for both club and country no-one is going to dig him out too much are they, now if it was everyone’s favourite calamity goalkeeper Adam Bogdan on the other hand….
At Arsenal, all is quiet for now, while Liverpool had to say sorry after getting the footballing equivalent of a telling off from the school headmaster after bullying one of the Year 7s. That was because they had to commit an embarrassing backtrack when trying to once again snare another Southampton player.
This time it was on your bike in regards to Van Dijk, not only that but it did display that Southampton are not a bunch of pushovers after all, although something has to be said for Liverpool’s extensive scouting network only getting as far as the English Channel.
Garry Monk is set to break his vow of silence by becoming the new Middlesbrough boss, the 38-year-old who looks like he has not slept since last August takes over the Riverside Stadium hot seat after Aitor Karanka was sacked in March.
While Hull have used their 2017 UK City of Culture status to acquire the services of former Russia boss Leonid Slutsky, I’ve been to the KCom Stadium once before. I guess you could say I’ve been to Hull and back.
Scotland vs England is on later this evening, a lazy writer would have made a reference to the SNP’s performance in the General Election, thankfully I’m not one of those, you can have Theresa May doing an absolute David Moyes while in charge of the country.
Gareth Southgate’s Under 20 counterparts have reached the rarity of a World Cup Final. They take on the might of Venezuela tomorrow lunchtime, and if they win, get ready for everyone expecting every squad member to be fast tracked to Russia next summer.
You can see almost see the headline now on the back of Monday’s Sun – “Get Kyle Walker-Peters On The Plane”
Although that said Maitland-Niles of Arsenal was unlucky to lose what was thought to be a safe Conversative seat at the hands of Labour on Thursday night.
That concludes my whistlestop tour of what has happened in the world of football, I’ll be back at the start of July once I’ve got my summer holiday out of the way. Until then.