Ken Early

3 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Ken Early

Last month, Heimir Hallgrímsson decided he would give most of Ireland’s Championship-based players this international window off to make the most of their holidays. It may prove a far-sighted decision, but it didn’t do much for excitement levels in advance of Friday night’s Senegal match, where the vibe was less “do or die” than “let’s get this over with”. So the Irish starting XI contained eight 2024-25 Premier League players, five of whom have just been relegated.

3 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Ken Early

Seventy years ago, the French sports newspaper L’Équipe created the European Cup. Their motivation was to generate content that would help them sell more papers in midweek, but they also no doubt expected French football would take its fair share of “la gloire”. Instead, after France gave the Cup to Europe, Europe wouldn’t let them have it back. Only one French team ever brought the title home, and that was Marseille’s tainted vintage of 1993.

4 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Ken Early

The 2022 World Cup final is remembered as one of the greatest football matches of all time. For Ousmane Dembélé, it was one of the worst nights of his life. Only 41 minutes had elapsed when the fourth official came to the sideline and held up the number 11 which meant, for Dembélé, the ultimate humiliation of being substituted in the first half of the biggest game in the world. He wasn’t injured, he had just played terribly. Argentina were shredding France down their right flank.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Ken Early

People have lately taken to calling it the season of the underdog, but in the end the top five of the 2024-25 Premier League had a reassuringly familiar composition: two American-owned sports-groups, two clubs owned by Gulf states, and whatever the hell Chelsea are. Coming up behind them a couple of maverick oligarchs, followed by the streamlined professional gamblers’ outfits of Brighton and Brentford, then a rabble of mostly American-owned “sports groups” making up the numbers.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Ken Early

The last few weeks of the Premier League season have felt like a drag. In the space where competition used to be, a proliferation of negative questions: is Trent a snake? is Arteta a loser? Was this the most boring league of all time? Then Crystal Palace beat Manchester City in the FA Cup final to show us the real purpose of football: in the end it’s all about people crying in each other’s arms.