What a Month! What a Year!
Well it’s officially 2013 so Happy New Year everyone! Hope you had an enjoyable, if somewhat over indulging festive period. It was quite the end to the year so as tradition, we look back on some of the stories we covered on the blog last month. Crowd troubles featured heavily as problems in Turkey and Russia both affected games. Remarkably in the latter, condoms were used to smuggle firecrackers into the stadium with one being thrown onto the pitch and blinding the goalkeeper. FIFA must surely act before more of these types of incidents occur. In other new, Football mourned the death of Adam Ndlovu who was tragically killed in a car accident this month. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom in December as we looked at the players, old and new making the news that month. There were features on up and coming stars like Will Hughes, Hachim Mastour and Zymer Bytyqi as well as a look at former star Ronaldo and his battle against the bulge.
Managers featured too, with the returns of Antonio Conte and Harry Redknapp marked out for special note and a sideways glance at Arsene Wenger as he contemplates his Arsenal future. Barcelona’s Tito Vilanova was in the news again as he unfortunately had to step down from his role temporarily in order to continue his battle against cancer. The Barca faithful will be praying for Tito’s speedy return in the early part of this year. Global football politics and issues were talked about in pieces around Gibraltar‘s inclusion finally into UEFA competitions as well as inventor Tim Jahnigen’s remarkable story of how he created an indestructible ball to help kids in poverty across the globe continue to play the beautiful game.
January brings a lot of excitement with it as well with the opening of the transfer window. The key questions of who will Liverpool sign as their new number 9 and the tale of two south american strikers, Hulk and Falcao were answered in last months posts. January also sees the naming of this years Ballon d’Or winners with Alex Morgan looking favourite to steal the crown. It’s also the start of the second half of the season for clubs across the globe with Belgian team SV Zulte-Waregem hoping to continue their form from the first half of the season up until the end of the league campaign. Newcastle on the other hand will be looking to forget the first half of the season and are hoping they can strengthen accordingly so they can avoid yet another relegation battle. Palace fans are hoping they have more than just their cheerleaders to cheer about in the second half of the campaign as well.
2013 is going to be a great year, with lots of exciting stories coming out of the world of football and we will be there to cover them all (well most of them). You can now follow us as well now in the Back Of The Net Blog on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/#!/BackOfTheNetBlog) so please like it now! Additionally if there are stories you would like us to cover and haven’t yet, please let us know using the comments field and we will try to tackle them over the course of the year. With that, enjoy 2013, enjoy the football and enjoy the blog!