Obscure Footballer of the Week #7: Ronnie O’Brien

Obscure Footballer of the Week returns. TFN Editor Hugo Greenhalgh profiles Irish footballer Ronnie O’Brien…

How could a nominee for Time’s Person of the Century fade into obscurity? A man whose name at one point, sat alongside Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi? Irish footballer Ronnie O’Brien was an overnight cult celebrity and one of the first true “Year 2k” internet sensations. While the fad wore off quickly and his career was largely forgotten, he merits discussion as more than just a novelty figure but as one of the first European footballers to make their mark in America, in the pre-David Beckham MLS era.

Born in Bray in 1979, O’Brien was a member of the prodigious Ireland youth side that included Robbie Keane, Richard Dunne and Stephen McPhail, and won the U-18 European Championship in 1998. At the time he was a Middlesbrough player but failed to break into the first team and was released in 1999. This was when O’Brien’s career took a bizarre twist. Typically a Boro cast-off of his ilk might expect a move to somewhere like Hartlepool or perhaps back to the Irish league; what O’Brien did not expect was a call from Italian giants Juventus. Continue reading

The Top 10 Moments of Football ‘Blunditry’

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David Ahluwalia takes a look at the worst moments of football punditry…

For many of us, being a football pundit looks like the easiest job in the world. Relaxing on comfortable sofas, often with a cup of tea, and stating the things that are blatantly obvious with as many clichés as humanly possible seems like a job any fan could do.

Sometimes however, being a pundit isn’t quite so simple. Every so often we find our pundits, whether they be players, managers, referees or presenters, being a little too relaxed with their vocabulary, or making terrible analogies to describe a game. These often have the fans in fits of laughter or in a state of sheer shock at their stupidity and complete lack of self-awareness. Gillette Soccer Saturday regularly comes up with some moments of magic, but the team at Sky Sports are not the only ones who have had a blunder or two. Continue reading

Mesut Ozil and Wayne Rooney: the Opposite of Opposites?

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In the fifth instalment of ‘Tacticle Your Fancy’, Simon Smith compares the style and roles of Mesut Ozil and Wayne Rooney…

The recent debate about what’s wrong with Mesut Ozil has really captured my imagination, perhaps almost as much as his unlikely summer transfer itself did. Everyone seems to agree that there’s something wrong with the way he is playing at the moment, and yet there seems to be so much inconsistency in the reports.  Sure, we can agree that he has a tendency to ghost in and out of games and perhaps it is fair to see he isn’t the most proactive player off the ball.  The jump I find hard to make is how we get from this very general observation to the very niche and specific problem of why he is out of form: surely this is how he plays always, when in form as well as out?

The excellent two minute debate about whether he should be left out of the starting XI to face Manchester United by Sky Sports News was simply thrilling, in that while the panel managed to point out some home truths about the player, they all seemed to miss the point somewhat.  It was a brilliant display of how big generalisations about players lead to a misinterpretation of specifics in games. Continue reading