Football Daily | Fifa bingo! World Cup playoff draw checks all boxes as Irelands and Wales plot paths

Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now!An audience full of middle-aged and elderly men almost certainly preoccupied with what’s for lunch? Check. Constant reminders that football unites the world? Check. A charming hostess and former Miss Switzerland, Melanie Winiger? Check. Numerous ornate plinths bearing see-through bowls, a trophy or a football. Check. More montages from World Cups passim than were strictly necessary? Check. A dizzying array of acrylic multi-coloured draw balls? Check. “Fifa legends” Christian Karembeu, Marco Materazzi and Martin Dahlin? Checkity-check-check. A shiny floor? Check. Fifa competition manager Manolo Zubiria explaining protocol? Check. Self-important claptrap from an increasingly obsequious and craven “haunted cue-ball” Fifa president? Check.I was 34, I’d spent nine years at Arsenal and there had been a fair amount of discussions with the club. I wanted to go back to France with my family. There were deteriorated relationships with people at the club, although not with Unai Emery” – Laurent Koscielny, now the sporting director at Lorient, talks to Raphaël Jucobin about his controversial exit from Arsenal and that Bordeaux announcement video.I can claim a pathetically weak link to Scott McTominay (yesterday’s Football Daily). For one term he attended the same high school in Lancaster that I attended for seven years. During compulsory games, if it was football, the two best players picked their teams. Me and another lad were always last to be picked, usually being ‘full-backs’, ie standing around shivering and wondering what we were supposed to do when the opposing team came running past us. But I can claim to have pretended to play on a pitch on which Scott, of course, excelled” – Paul Henry.Since Curaçao (population 155,826) is now the smallest nation to have qualified for the men’s World Cup instead of Iceland, may I take this chance to update my comparison (15 October letters) in that the former has a population smaller than the London borough of Hackney (population 266,758) and less than half the size of Croydon (population 397,741)” – Derrick Cameron. This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions. Continue reading...

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