Howard Hockin @howiehok34 ?

Since television started ruling football, there have been some strange kick off times for many a match. 11am, 5pm, 10:30am, occasionally even 3pm on a Saturday afternoon. Now however, ITV have raised the bar by placing an FA Cup semi-final between Chelsea and Spurs on a Sunday at 6pm, to lock viewers into the final episode of [...]

There is an indelible image from last season’s Manchester-themed FA Cup semi-final. It is a photo taken just after the final whistle, of a bare-chested Pablo Zabaleta screaming with delight into the camera lens. It was reminder, if one was needed, that here was  a man with cult-hero status at Manchester City football club. But what [...]

For some it seemed more important than the match. Samir Nasri, Arsenal fans’ arch-nemesis, was returning to the Emirates for the first time (in the league) since his contentious move to Manchester City last summer. Ever since that move, he has been the devil incarnate. He only moved for the money, you see? Arsenal fans cannot contemplate [...]

As it seems increasingly likely that the Premier League title race is fizzling out to a predictable conclusion, the inevitable recriminations will begin as to how it all went wrong for Manchester City. There’ll be plenty of clichéd nonsense in there – the mind games of Alex Ferguson, City “bottling it”, the bad team morale that [...]

I once watched an Alex Ferguson press conference on Sky Sports News. He commented on the danger of Wigan being cast away at the bottom of the table. He said that once a team was cast away at the bottom of the table, it was hard to recover, because being cast away historically meant relegation. The [...]

Oh Fernando. All he wanted was to be loved. Throughout his 25-hour goal drought, he was the black sheep of the family, shunned by those he cared for. Every hour, every minute seemed to last eternally. I was so afraid Fernando. But then the evil Andre Villas-Boas departed. Roberto Di Matteo took over, and a hug [...]

There was a football match recently in the football league, a competitive match between two teams only a few miles apart. There is no love lost between the respective fans, as is often the way in a (near) derby. The chairman of one of the teams had recently died, a tragedy their fans were reminded of [...]

It’s been coming for a while now, and before long it will come fully to fruition. Football will become a non-contact sport. A bit of an exaggeration of course, but that’s how it feels sometimes. Tackling seems to be a dying art. Hard but fair has been lost from the game. Any contact sees the opposition [...]

I haven’t been very kind to Kenny Dalglish in the past. I questioned his appointment as manager as I felt it a decision made by the heart not the head (a view that backfired at first, now I’m not so sure). I also detested the morose approach to the press, which borders much of the time [...]

The Champions League Group Stage has rarely delivered as much excitement and drama as the brain-melting hype may have implied, due to the usual suspects virtually always progressing to the knock-out stages. And the usual suspects almost always include the English participants. Even when Spurs debuted last season, they progressed in style. An even stronger Premier [...]

The criticism will be immense. There will be the inevitable claims of failure. Twitter will fall over with taunts from rival fans, mostly Arsenal ones mocking Samir Nasri for deciding to leave their club. The knives will be out, and sharpened, then thrust forward. The message will be clear: that with a “warchest” of £500m/£600m/£1 billion [...]

When you start off reading a football autobiography, your hopes aren’t always that high. Perhaps a few inside stories on players you know, insight into managers, the odd anecdote – the usual stuff. Having said that, nothing quite prepared me for the contents of this book. I had fairly clear memories of Andy Morrison, and his [...]

There’s a lot of misinformation in the world, especially in football. Rumours, speculation and tabloid apologies hidden on page 27 two years after a story – it’s hard to know what’s true and what isn’t sometimes. But more prevalent are the generally held beliefs about certain aspects of our game. Here’s some beliefs I consider to [...]

It was the night before September 28 th, and a creature was stirring. Manchester City were in the news again, for all the wrong reasons. A 2-0 defeat to Bayern Munich in the Champions League seemed almost like an irrelevance compared to the events that had happened just off the pitch, as Carlos Tevez, sick of being [...]

Wednesday was a very strange day in my football-supporting life. I left work at 3pm, and two hours later, rushed into the City of Manchester stadium under familiar grey clouds just in time for Sergio Aguero to open the scoring against Porto in a Europa League 2 nd leg game. I was one of the lucky ones, [...]

The vultures are circling. Roman Abramovich and his cronies are watching training sessions now, which is never a good sign. Andre Villas-Boas is a man under pressure, squatting on the touchline suggesting he may be trying all means to avoid eviction. Statistically, Villas-Boas is the worst Chelsea manager since Ruud Gullit. By the time you read [...]

Twitter and football were in the news again this week, with the non-story in the Telegraph of certain City players getting annoyed at the tweets of certain United players, as more and more footballers join the twitter revolution. Tedious stuff, but it shows that footballers need guidance when communicating with the real world. The other week, [...]

The Stuart Pearce years at Manchester City are not cherished by many fans. With his hands tied, Pearce had a difficult job keeping City in the Premier League, a job he succeeded in. But boy was it dull. I remember sitting in the North Stand one blustery afternoon, trying to remember the last time I had [...]

We’ve all done it. You know how it is. You’re at a football match, and an opposition player has made an accusation of receiving a racial insult from one of your players. So naturally you spend 90 minutes booing the opposition player’s every touch. At the back of your mind, a little thought flickers – is [...]