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SW Hoops said:
Possible click-bait we are interested in Dundee goalkeeper Jon McCracken, 25. On a possible free at the end of the season.
Inside knowledge @Steelmonkey ?
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Not doing great today...

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In at his near post...not great keeping

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Adel makes it on to this list...

Football's great entertainers - ranking the biggest showboaters​

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ByAlex Bysouth
BBC Sport Senior Journalist
This was as close to being a viral sensation as it got before we lived by the algorithm - starring in a three-minute Saturday morning segment of flicks, tricks and 'tekkers to the backdrop of early noughties beats.

Ronaldinho was a regular protagonist, so too Jay-Jay Okocha, inspiring wide-eyed kids and optimistic adults to attempt the same magic manoeuvres in playgrounds and sparsely-grassed pitches up and down the land.

www.bbc.co.uk

Football's greatest showboaters ranked: Ronaldinho, Neymar, Balotelli, Kerlon

We all love to watch the players with the flicks and tricks, the mavericks with the magic manoeuvres. Here, BBC Sport ranks football's top showboaters.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk


The streets will never forget...​

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Lee Trundle scored 91 goals across two spells with Swansea

We're into real 'the streets will never forget' territory now, pure 'Barclays' if you will, those nostalgia-craved minds have forged into folklore. Mavericks on a mission to entertain.

Bums waved goodbye to plastic seats whenever Adel Taarabt got the ball, defenders winced and tried to close their legs. Fans found him infuriating and unforgettable.

Neil Warnock, Taarabt's boss at QPR, where he arguably enjoyed the best football of his career getting them promoted from the Championship, labelled the Moroccan the "most talented player" he ever coached. Taarabt was dazzlingly destructive.
 
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Just in case any of you still dream of the play-offs or maybe the final. Dates announced:

Friday, 8 May 2026

Championship A 1st leg (6th v 3rd) - 20:00

Saturday, 9 May

Championship B 1st leg (5th v 4th) - 12:30

Monday, 11 May

Championship A 2nd leg (3rd v 6th) - 20:00

Tuesday, 12 May

Championship B 2nd leg (4th v 5th) - 20:00


Saturday, 23 May

Championship final - kick-off TBC
 
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Ranger4ever said:
Just in case any of you still dream of the play-offs or maybe the final. Dates announced:

Friday, 8 May 2026

Championship A 1st leg (6th v 3rd) - 20:00

Saturday, 9 May

Championship B 1st leg (5th v 4th) - 12:30

Monday, 11 May

Championship A 2nd leg (3rd v 6th) - 20:00

Tuesday, 12 May

Championship B 2nd leg (4th v 5th) - 20:00


Saturday, 23 May

Championship final - kick-off TBC
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Just working out where we'll be assuming we finish 6th.... Friday 8th just out side Madrid, 11th Córdoba and 23rd heading up to the Duoro Valley.... doubt they'll be many bars showing those games
 
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sb_73 said:
Touching article
www.nytimes.com

Paul Clement idolised Dave, his England footballer father. Then, aged 10, his world changed

Dave Clement took his own life six years after his international debut. His son Paul, now Brazil's assistant, relives the day he found out
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

Steelsy can doubtless find a way round the paywall.
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Paul Clement, right, with father Dave, in a picture believed to be taken in 1976 Paul Clement

Paul Clement idolised Dave, his England footballer father. Then, aged 10, his world changed

Oliver Kay
By Oliver Kay
March 24, 2026Updated 6:35 am UTC

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Paul Clement’s home office is full of mementos of a fascinating football life.
A large glass cabinet contains medals, trophies and signed shirts from his successes working alongside Carlo Ancelotti as a coach at Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich. There is a replica of the European Cup following his Champions League success with Madrid in 2014. There is a Premier League manager of the month award from his brief spell in charge at Swansea City.
There is even a man of the match award that Didier Drogba passed on to thank him for his support during difficult times at Chelsea.
The newest additions relate to his role as Ancelotti’s assistant with the Brazil national team, gearing up for this summer’s World Cup. He shows off a baseball cap in that familiar canary yellow. “Every time we meet up, you get a new one,” he says. “I’m up to eight now.”
But Clement’s most precious souvenirs are those left by his father Dave, a redoubtable full-back in the Queens Park Rangers team pipped to the league championship by Liverpool in 1976. The England No 2 shirt is framed and hung on one wall. In the cabinet, he keeps his dad’s five England caps, embroidered in blue-green velvet.
Paul, 54, has a picture of himself wearing one of the caps, from his father’s debut against Wales in March 1976 (50 years ago this week) and one of Dave wearing another from a game against Italy later that year. They are standing in front of a Christmas tree and Paul reckons it was probably that same year, which would put him at four years old and his dad at 28, around the peak of his formidable powers.
“My memories of my dad are vague,” he says. “I know I went to games to watch him, but I don’t really recall that. What I remember is going to the training ground with him and waiting at the side of the pitch while he was doing his training.
“He was a fitness fanatic. He used to go out running, playing squash, always doing push-ups at home. He had this absolutely ripped physique. Nearly all the players are like that now, but they weren’t 50 years ago. Ray Wilkins (the late former Chelsea and Manchester United midfielder) told me he roomed with my dad on England duty and said he was unbelievable: ‘Come on, Ray. Let’s do some press-ups.’
“Ray was, like, ‘Dave, give me a break!’”

He smiles to himself. There are other things he remembers, like feeling proud when his dad came to watch him play for his primary school team. “That’s a nice thing, isn’t it?”

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Paul Clement with one of his dad’s England caps from 1975-76

But he also remembers, as a 10-year-old, waking up one morning in 1982 to find his family home in a state of chaos and confusion. He could sense “something weird was going on” and was told he wouldn’t be going to school that day — and then his grandfather told him why. His father, whom he idolised, had died.
He felt “confused, not really understanding”.
“And then some family friends picked up me and my brother Neil, who was only three, and took us to London Zoo,” he says. “My family obviously needed us out of the way and to try to take our minds off things. I remember going around the zoo in a daze. When you’re young, you don’t really understand it. It’s weird. As you get older, you start to understand it a little bit more.”

Dave Clement won the last of his five England caps in February 1977 at the age of 29.
In June 1979, after making 472 appearances for QPR, he was sold to Bolton Wanderers. By the start of the 1981-82 season he was at Wimbledon, battling to avoid relegation from the old Division Three (now League One). In January 1982, he suffered a broken leg, which left him fearing the end of his career. Two months later, at the age of 34, he was found dead in his father-in-law’s flat in Battersea, London.
The coroner recorded a verdict of suicide.
Since the Munich tragedy in February 1958, in which eight Manchester United players were among the 20 fatalities, only two full England internationals have died while still active professional footballers. One was Laurie Cunningham, killed in a car crash in Madrid in July 1989 while playing for Rayo Vallecano. The other was Clement.
Even today, there is something of a taboo around mental health issues in professional football. In 1982, it was almost unheard of.
“I was at a Premier League game recently and there were big messages flashing up on the scoreboard and all over the stadium about mental health, about suicide,” Paul says. “It’s so important to raise awareness. But within the game, there is still probably a stigma. And if you think about what leads people to that, it’s depression, it’s anxiety.
“People are on different parts of the scale, aren’t they? The professional football environment is very difficult for someone who is struggling in that way.”

He ponders the difficulties of his father’s final years: from being an integral part of an outstanding QPR team and playing for England, to being sold to Bolton where he and his family did not settle, and then finding himself in the lower divisions, playing in front of meagre crowds, on a meagre wage, struggling to make ends meet, wondering how he might support his family beyond the next few years… and then suffering a broken leg that brought those worries into sharper focus and left this fitness fanatic laid up, immobile, wondering if he would ever play again.
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Dave Clement, left, in action against Kevin Keegan of Liverpool

“I remember him breaking his leg,” Paul says. “I remember days where he was in bed, his leg in a cast, and not in a good way because he knew he was coming towards the end of his career. He was in a full cast when he passed away, almost right up to the hip.”

The coroner cited Clement’s depression, heightened by his concerns over his football career. But he also recorded that, in an anxious state, Clement believed he had cancer; a pathologist report said there was no sign of it. There had also been a history of mental health issues in the family. He had also lost his brother in traumatic circumstances three years earlier.
Paul says that, growing up, he was left with a lot of unanswered questions: “Why? How bad were you? Why didn’t we see it? Or did we? I probably didn’t at that age.”
But, over time, he has learned of a confluence of different concerns and factors — genetic, personal, physical, professional — that must have snowballed over a short space of time, leaving a greatly respected footballer and a much-loved husband and father feeling helpless.
Paul wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a professional footballer.
“That was a big inspiration for me,” he says. “I played to a not bad level, but I was never going to be good enough to be a pro. I knew that quite early on. My PE teachers at school were quite inspirational and I knew from about 14 that I wanted to be involved in teaching and coaching. I knew what I needed to do in terms of A-Levels and university, so that’s what I did.”
He was in his late twenties, a sports science graduate teaching PE at a secondary school in Surrey and studying for his UEFA A Licence coaching qualification, when the opportunity arose to do some part-time coaching work at Chelsea’s youth academy.

From there, he joined Fulham on a full-time basis and then returned to Chelsea, where he went from under-16s coach to under-18s to reserve-team manager and then working with the first team, initially under Guus Hiddink and then under Ancelotti, who has described him as “dynamic and intelligent”. The Italian took him to PSG, Real Madrid and Bayern before they teamed up with Brazil.
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Carlo Ancelotti and Paul Clement on the Bayern Munich bench in 2016


It has been quite a journey: from PE teacher to Premier League manager, Champions League winner to the threshold of a World Cup with Brazil.
“Amazing,” he says. “Even when I went into Chelsea and Fulham, I was thinking I might have a career in youth development. I never thought I would get to this level. But it’s been a real acceleration of learning: managing in the Premier League, coaching some of the biggest clubs in Europe, coaching Brazil.”
Your dad would be proud, wouldn’t he? “Yeah, don’t you think?” he says. “And also Neil, my younger brother, had a really good playing career (briefly at Chelsea and then for a decade at West Bromwich Albion, where he made 292 appearances, 103 of them in the Premier League). Our dad would be proud that both of his boys have had good careers in football and he would be proud of everything our mum has done for us.”
Paul was speaking to The Athletic before it was reported last week that his brother Neil, 47, was the former Premier League footballer arrested by Spanish police as part of a drugs investigation on the Costa del Sol. He has been released pending further investigations.
Life has not been easy for the Clement family. Neil’s off-pitch difficulties date back to his playing career, which, like his father’s, was punctuated and ultimately cut short by injuries. A career as a Premier League footballer is often imagined to insulate someone from the stresses and struggles of a more humdrum existence. In many instances, it compounds them.

Coaching is hardly the most secure environment, either.
Paul has had four manager or head-coach roles — at Derby County, Swansea, Reading and Belgian club Cercle Brugge — and, despite some notable results, has not made it to a year in any of them. His work as Ancelotti’s assistant has brought more success. The opportunity to go to the World Cup with Brazil was something beyond his wildest dreams and the thought occurs that his father, part of an England squad that narrowly lost out to Italy in qualifying for the 1978 tournament, would have been particularly proud of that.
Fifty years ago this week, Dave Clement made his England debut against Wales, appearing alongside Ray Clemence, Kevin Keegan, Trevor Brooking and others.
Improbable as it might sound, QPR were top of the old First Division at the time, with only six games to play. They won five of their last six games to remain top of the table, but were then left to wait another 10 days for Liverpool to conclude their campaign with a rearranged game at Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Inspired by Keegan, Liverpool came from behind to win at Molineux and QPR’s hopes of a first league title were dashed at the last.
Half a century on, QPR have held a series of events to honour the greatest team in their history. Before a Championship match at Loftus Road in September, goalkeeper Phil Parkes, defender Frank McLintock and midfielder Gerry Francis were paraded on the pitch. So were family members of those who had passed away, such as Stan Bowles, John Hollins, Clement and manager Dave Sexton.
“My mum went along and she was presented with a shirt with my dad’s number on the back, which was really nice,” Paul says. “My son, who’s also called David, went along too. QPR have done some really nice things over the years. They’re so good at remembering their former players.”
He is grateful for the Football Association’s support, too. In 2023, it presented his mother Patricia with a red “legacy” cap embroidered with the number 917 to represent Dave’s position in the timeline of the England men’s team. “It’s nice that (the FA) do that,” Paul says.

He leafs through some old photographs of his dad that he has collected over the years: one of him and Keegan with ice lollies after training with England; one with his QPR team-mate Dave Webb who, for reasons unclear, is wearing an old-man mask; another, in England action against Italy, of him in a confrontation with the great Giacinto Facchetti, who, as Paul says, “has his fist clenched and looks like he’s about to clock dad”.
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Dave Clement, right, with Kevin KeeganPaul Clement
The pictures capture Clement training in his prime — the hairstyle unmistakably 1970s, the physique far more 2020s.
So does a video found on YouTube where he is interviewed by Norwegian TV, speaking articulately about a range of issues, including his belief that the English football authorities would have to open up to greater commercial possibilities, such as shirt sponsorship, in order to pay players better or risk losing them to European clubs.
He predicts “a big movement of players throughout Europe” and he was certainly right about that.

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The video contains the surprising revelation that he has been thinking about a post-football career in catering — “a wine bar restaurant or a sandwich bar or maybe a pub”. He is also seen addressing QPR’s young players as the club’s union representative, impressing upon them the need to continue with their education because “you’ve got to be prepared for the worst”.
But there is also a hint at the anxiety that lay beneath a calm exterior.
Clement talks of “very high peaks” as a professional footballer, but also says that a “depression sets in” after a bad result. It chimes with something Paul remembers about being in the car with him on a match day, asking him questions and finding him uptight, “already in that game mode” — and with things his dad’s former team-mates have told him over the years, about his pre-match nerves, so severe that he would frequently vomit in the toilets shortly before kick-off.
Above all, though, the video captures Dave Clement as a family man, teaching his young son how to use a putter, laying the foundations for a new driveway with Patricia at their home in Surrey. “Family must always come first,” he says.
“Time goes by so quickly,” Paul says. “And as you grow into adulthood, you start to think about what your own life would have been like, how involved he would have been, how different the family unit might be, whether our lives would be different.
“But it’s important to remember my dad for who he was and not for what happened at the end.”
 
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Not sure if this has been linked elsewhere on the site.
We're looking to buy the Central Coast Mariners. They are a bit of a basket case behind the scenes so it might make sense..

football360.com.au

English Championship side 'expected' to buy A-League club - with new coach in charge?

EFL Championship side Queens Park Rangers are ‘expected’ to be the new owners of A-League club Central Coast Mariners, according to Code Sports.
football360.com.au football360.com.au
 
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ozzieranger said:
Not sure if this has been linked elsewhere on the site.
We're looking to buy the Central Coast Mariners. They are a bit of a basket case behind the scenes so it might make sense..

football360.com.au

English Championship side 'expected' to buy A-League club - with new coach in charge?

EFL Championship side Queens Park Rangers are ‘expected’ to be the new owners of A-League club Central Coast Mariners, according to Code Sports.
football360.com.au football360.com.au
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A shame we didn’t go for the Phoenix.
 
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