It started off well enough for Chelsea with Ramires putting them up 1-0 against Liverpool in just the fourth minute, but the quagmire this season has become for the club eventually swallowed them up. Liverpool came back to win 3-1 with their last two goals taking deflections off Chelsea defenders.
This gives Chelsea an astonishing six losses in their first 11 matches — the worst start to a Premier League title defense ever.
HORROR TACKLE! #Halloween comes early with this nasty challenge from Aleks Kolarov captured in training ???? #mcfc pic.twitter.com/KfiR2OvHcT
— Manchester City FC (@MCFC) October 30, 2015
Thanks, Kolarov. Now I’m going to have nightmares all weekend. Not cool.
This has been the Dirty Tackle of the Day: a chronicling of unfortunate events.
The Portland Timbers and Sporting Kansas City concluded their playoff game with an MLS record 22-shot penalty shootout that ended with Portland’s keeper scoring and Kansas City’s keeper missing. But that was just the finale.
Before that, each side had four misses, but none were more incredible than Saad Abdul-Salaam’s, which hit both posts and stayed out.
Leicester City manager Claudio Ranieri said he would fulfill his promise of pizza for all of his players after their first clean sheet of the season against Crystal Palace last weekend and he really wasn’t joking.
On Thursday, Leicester had a full-on pizza party at Peter Pizzeria, where they were able to make their own. And for dessert, they even had Nutella pizza.
Perhaps inspired by the success Bavarian clubs have had with their special Oktoberfest kits, Cologne have now launched a…unique…new strip for their city’s annual carnival, which begins in November.
Manchester United captain Wayne Rooney has regularly seemed nonexistent this season. He was a ghost in last weekend’s Manchester derby and again in Man United’s Capital One Cup loss to Middlesbrough, in which he was even credited with a missed a penalty. Given this, there exists a very real possibility that he has already retired from the game, having recently turned 30, and simply didn’t inform anyone of his departure, leaving Man United to continue selecting him without him actually showing up.
So let’s examine the evidence…
In an incredible interview with Russian news agency TASS, suspended outgoing FIFA president and foot in mouth specialist Sepp Blatter made a revelatory admission: that the host nations for both the 2018 and 2022 World Cups had been agreed upon before the votes were conducted.
The MLS Cup playoffs have begun and Juan Agudelo has taken the opportunity to remind you that he still exists (and he’s still just 22 years old). Agudelo opened the scoring in New England’s match against DC United with a picturesque overhead kick in the 15th minute.
It feels like forever ago that he was touted as the next big thing for the U.S. national team, but, again, he’s still just 22.
The earnest question of whether Lionel Messi could do it on a cold, wet night in Stoke has persisted as a cliched joke for a few years now. So when Barcelona surprisingly sold Bojan, a 24-year-old once hyped as the next Messi, to Stoke City, the only explanation was that Messi personally asked him to go there on an expedition to see if the conditions in this mythical place are as challenging as the fables suggest. This is Bojan’s seventh letter back to his friend.
It was all going so well for Arsenal. After losing their first two Champions League matches, they bounced back to claim four consecutive victories, including decisive wins against Manchester United and Bayern Munich. This proved enough to restart talk of Arsenal winning the Premier League, but then came their Capital One Cup round of 16 match against second-division Sheffield Wednesday.