Updated Goalkeeper stats available

After some happy-fun-time data entry, we can now present you with a fully updated list of European goalkeeper stats, including all players who started a game in the four major European leagues this season.  You can get there by clicking the link below.

European Goalkeeper stats, 2011-12 season

Balanced Sports also offers other collections of stats, like Key Man analysis and Invidivual/Team

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Overachievers/underachievers: 2011-2012 EPL

 After compiling a cumulative Premiership table over the past twenty years, one comment suggested an alternative method of comparing lasting football league performance.  It suggested comparing club-by-club seasonal performance against their average league position (ALP).  As history only provides a certain precedent, the we can also use multiple time periods: say, five, ten or twenty years.

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Chelsea find themselves; win Champions League

Chelsea's win over Bayern Munich during Saturday's Champions League final is a triumph that only three months ago was utterly inconceivable.  The club was desperately short of form, many/most/all players had decided unilaterally that Andre Villas-Boas had no business coaching them and the team played with purposelessness rivalling beheaded chickens.

This is certainly due in part to Villas-Boas'

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The Twenty-year Premier League table

The following is the cumulative Premier League table dating back to the inception of the Premier League in 1992-93.  Although I'm among the first to admit that English football hardly began with that league's debut season, the twenty year mark create an anniversary feeling, allowing reminiscences and us to compile this table.

Movers this year include Manchester City, who climbed from eleventh

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Australia - lacking an identity

Despite two consecutive series wins in
vastly different circumstances, the Australian cricket team still
tricks the eye. In one Test, Ed Cowan resembles a doughty old-school
opener, capable of withstanding the best attacks in world cricket;
the following, he disappears into the sheds at 1/11. During one
match, Shane Watson fights indomitably for a hard-earned 80; the
next, he plays over and

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Where to now for Bolton Wanderers?

The Premier League season concluded
with one of the more exciting final days in recent memory. While it
was certain that either they or QPR would drop to the Championship,
the manner of Bolton's ultimate demise was unexpected but eventually
deserved. Since a promising start to 2010-11, the Trotters slid
rapidly from an FA Cup semi-final appearance to a horrible 2011-12
season.



There was bad

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Kobe vs. Jordan - a tale of two flu games

Kobe Bryant has played a careerlong
game of one-upmanship with the NBA's greatest. This is most
pronounced with Michael Jordan, the player with whom he is most often
compared. It's no secret that Kobe wants to be the greatest ever and
that he's almost painfully aware that to be so considered, he has to
surmount Jordan in achievement and legacy.



There is no end of comparison. Their
careers

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Cardiff City - football's "Indecent Proposal"

How much money would it take for you to
compromise your principles?





Courtesy: itv.com

Cardiff City Football Club, who lost in
the first round of the English Championship playoffs this week, were
the recipient of just such an indecent proposal: 100 million pounds
to permanently re-brand the club, changing the club jersey from blue
to red and dispensing with their Bluebird nickname. City

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My Favourite Cricketer: Justin Langer by Glenn Mitchell

As part of our continuing series, World Cricket Watch and Balanced Sports invited Glenn Mitchell, sports broadcaster and mental health advocate, to write about his favourite cricketer, Justin  Langer.  Glenn's website is glennmitchell.com.au and he tweets @mitchellglenn



I
clearly remember standing in the middle of a rain-soaked Sinhalese
Sports Club in September 1999 as the third
and final

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Where to now for Blackburn Rovers?

When a club is relegated
from their country's top division, any attempts to remedy that
situation are based upon a number of key principles.




Firstly, one can most
often safely assume that the club's owners want the club to succeed.
Pursuant to this, those same owners must also be capable of
understanding the ramifications of relegation both on their balance
sheets and fan emotions. An

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Book Review: Sheilas, Wogs & Poofters - Johnny Warren

by Ben Roberts


This
is my second foray into Australian football literature, the first having been spectacularly less than impressive. The good news is that the now decade-old 'Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters', a seminal work by the late and revered Johnny Warren is
far better.   The bad news is that Warren fell into the standard traps
of all passionate Australian soccer figures.







Cover image

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Football's most operatic week

It may be cliché, but what a week we've seen in football. There have
been more twists, subplots and stories than your average season of The Wire,
passing everywhere from England, through France and Italy to the
Iberian peninsula. To wit, we catalogue (briefly) the past ten days in
football:

1. Chelsea defeated Barcelona (away from home, with the
winning goal from a most unlikely source) in

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Pep Guardiola: football's J.K. Rowling

Pep Guardiola reels into
the Catlunya spring sunset punch-drunk, deserving a rest, his job
well done. Most agree that he's likely to take a significant break
from management – perhaps an eternal one – before moving back to
the scrutiny of club control.



To witness the change inhis appearance from appointment to last week's press conference is to
see what daily hour-long media sessions will do

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Graphic: Pep Guardiola over time

The things four years of crazy media exposure and inhuman stress levels will do to a guy.  The following photo shows Pep Guardiola at his introduction as Barca coach in 2008 and compares it to an image taken at the presser last week in which he announced he was leaving the club for a sabbatical.



Click to enlarge


Photo credits: fourfourtwo.com and thesun.co.uk 

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Book review: Game for Anything - Gideon Haigh

If Bill
Simmons is the everyman sportswriter full of pop culture,
in-jokes and homer-isms, then Gideon Haigh is his antithesis. You
read Simmons as he thinks aloud, a man down at the bar with his
mates. However, he's just
self-aware enough to know that because he monopolises the
conversation he should fling jokes about to keep his audience
engaged. There's obvious research, but done on the

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