I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks — I’ve been busy with schoolwork and a longterm project you’ll hear about 
later. Anyway, if you’re looking for something interesting to read, check out this Slate piece about Manchester United’s decline. It’s pretty good, though I think it omits some important details: David Gill’s departure, Ed Woodward’s transfer-window nightmare, etc.
Last Tuesday marked the beginning of the 100-day countdown to this summer’s World Cup. That means 
a couple of things: oversized, garishly colored countdown clocks will appear all over the Internet; and the tremors of self-loathing that always accompany English coverage of the English national team will start to intensify.
I don’t have the technological expertise to place a giant clock on In For The Hat Trick’s home page. But although I live in the United States – where, comfortably insulated from the national trauma playing out on the other side of the Atlantic, I tend to handle tournament disappointment stoically, with a stiff upper lip and only the occasional temper tantrum – I know exactly what Roy Hodgson should do to avoid total humiliation in Brazil. So here goes.
The manager: It seems almost inconceivable now, but nine months ago the media loved David Moyes. 
FourFourTwo published a fawning profile. Columnists praised him for guiding Everton to fifth place. And in a fit of enthusiasm, an Israeli newspaper erroneously claimed he was Jewish.
Since then, it has become increasingly clear that for all his accomplishments at Goodison Park – and I’m not convinced there were quite as many as some people think – Moyes is neither charismatic enough to inspire a dressing room full of bloated egos nor courageous enough to put his best attacking players in the same XI. Rooney, Januzaj, van Persie, and Mata would probably form a dangerous, flexible attacking unit, but Moyes, whose Everton team won plenty of games but never threatened to entertain anybody, isn’t interested.
The media rarely misses an opportunity to denounce football’s governing bodies – for corruption, for 
incompetence, for awarding prestigious international tournaments to corrupt and incompetent governments. Indeed, over the last few years – amid stories about problematic elections, dodgy sponsorship deals, and nefarious plots to help Cristiano Ronaldo win the Ballon d’Or – anti-FIFA/UEFA harangues have become a staple of football coverage, an easy way for grizzled sports journalists and renegade bloggers alike to stick it to the man.
So it’s more than a little surprising that in the aftermath of West Brom striker Nicolas Anelka’s celebratory “quenelle” – a sort of inverted Nazi salute popularized by a controversial French comedian – football writers have spent far more time complaining about the stupid, immoral, insensitive behavior of pampered players than examining the UEFA rules governing political expression.
It’s been a bad week for Howard Webb. Fans are still parsing his controversial performance in Chelsea’s 
2-1 win over Liverpool, and on New Year’s Day, David Moyes called his failure to award Ashley Young a penalty “scandalous…an incredible decision, probably one of the worst I think I saw.”
It’s also been a bad week for Mark Clattenburg, whom Southampton has accused of “insulting” playmaker Adam Lallana. (Never mind that, as alleged insults go, this one isn’t particularly offensive.) Clattenburg has been through this before. In 2012, John Obi Mikel accused him of racial abuse. It later emerged that Mikel hadn’t actually heard the abuse – he’d merely heard rumors in the Chelsea dressing room – and Clattenburg was eventually cleared of all wrongdoing. Mikel, however, received a three-match ban for using “threatening and/or abusive and/or insulting words and/or behaviors” when he charged into Clattenburg’s office screaming bloody murder.
NBC’s Premier League coverage: It’s hard to say whether NBC’s Premier League coverage has 
earned such widespread adulation because of Rebecca Lowe’s slick transitions between games and Robbie Earle’s clever studio analysis, or merely because the network decided not to recruit Warren Barton. I honestly don’t know, but I’m pretty certain that NBC won over a lot of doubters simply by not hiring the superhumanly stupid former defender.
The Ted Lasso video helped, too.
Flipping through FourFourTwo’s Top 100 Players list, I kept thinking about Manchester United’s 
midfield. The list is pretty much a catalogue of players United should have signed or shouldn’t have sold. It was hard not to notice that Tom Cleverley and Marouane Fellaini hadn’t made the cut. And that Michael Carrick languished in the mid-70s. And that in 64th place, making his first appearance on the annual list, was Paul Pogba.
Here’s the thing about Pogba: People knew he was going to be good. It’s not as if he flopped, Zoran Tosic-style; left Old Trafford; and then suddenly turned into the best midfielder in Serie A. United sold Pogba because he had started to believe his own hype, or at least his agent had, and Alex Ferguson wouldn’t meet his salary demands. Unlike Ravel Morrison, who has played brilliantly for West Ham this season, Pogba wasn’t lazy, or volatile, or even an alleged sex offender. He just happened to consider himself the next Patrick Vieira. Pogba signed for Juventus about a year and a half ago and has since proved that a) he may well be better than Vieira; and b) Ferguson shouldn’t have been so stingy.
Nothing better epitomizes the current state of end-of-season football awards than the trophy presented 
to UEFA’s Best Player in Europe. I can’t decide whether it looks more like the remains of a long-dead scoliosis victim, or a three-dimensional rendition of Rembrandt’s “Carcass of Beef.”
In a sane world, the UEFA Best Player in Europe award wouldn’t even exist. In the past, football’s two most prestigious individual awards – the Ballon d’Or, created by France Football magazine; and the official FIFA World Player of the Year title – occasionally went to different players, which most people preferred to a boring consensus. But FIFA viewed those periodic discrepancies as a disruption in the Force, and in 2010, FIFA president Sepp Blatter merged the two awards to form a new, 100 percent definitive title: the FIFA Ballon d’Or. Just a year later, however, as part of an “initiative…aimed at reviving the spirit” of the old Ballon d’Or, UEFA launched its own award, undermining the merger’s objective.
Last January, two days after Southampton’s impressive 2-2 draw away to Chelsea, club chairman Nicola 
Cortese sacked Nigel Adkins, the physio-turned-manager who had guided Southampton from League One all the way to the Premier League. Cortese immediately unveiled Adkins’ replacement: Mauricio Pochettino, a young, talented former Espanyol coach who didn’t speak a word of English. “Far-fetched was how the Premier League appeared then to Saints,” lamented Daily Mail columnist Michael Walker, referring to Southampton’s years in the lower divisions. “Far-fetched is how Adkins’ dismissal appears now.”
Walker wasn’t the only critic of Cortese’s decision – Southampton was on a six-game unbeaten streak at the time, and many pundits, including Southampton legend Matt Le Tissier, who said that Cortese had “a bit of an ego problem,” feared that Adkins’ departure would Unsettle The Dressing Room.
Last Sunday, at the end of Tottenham’s 0-0 draw with Everton, Romelu Lukaku’s knee – which, for the 
record, is just as big as the rest of his body – crashed into Hugo Lloris’ head. (Despite Andre Villas-Boas’ complaints and Roberto Martinez’s suspicious attempts to change the subject , the collision was almost certainly accidental.) Lloris was knocked out, Spurs medics rushed onto the field to treat him, second-string goalkeeper Brad Friedel prepared to enter the game…and then, somehow, Lloris recovered. He got up and played the final ten minutes, sealing his seventh clean sheet of the season. On the sidelines, Friedel started to chuckle – that French bastard is so frickin’ tough!
Villas-Boas insists that Lloris felt fine and that the Spurs medical team, the same doctors who saved Fabrice Muamba’s life, decided there was no reason he shouldn’t continue playing. FIFPRO, the world players’ union; the PFA; and even the House of Commons quickly denounced the episode, however, and on Thursday Labour MP Chris Bryant called for “an urgent debate as soon as possible on the dangers of concussion in sport.”
In For The Hat Trick 
