Good morning and welcome back to The Set Pieces. We had a decent 2015, but we intend to do much, much better in 2016. We asked you what you thought of our coverage and you gave it to us straight, like a friend does, being brutally honest and then holding us tight until the tears stopped. Though a startling number of you suggested that we should shut down all other forms of content and run Championship Manager 2001/02 updates on a daily basis, many of you told us that you wanted more long reads. So we’re all over that. We’ll kick off an alarmingly geeky history feature on Thursday. There was also so much support for Vox in the Box that we’re putting it in the trusty hands of Nick Miller and making it a regular Friday feature. Our Man in Cologne, Archie Rhind-Tutt will continue to report on his travels around Germany. You’ll find him on Tuesday (from next week), and yes, the CM01/02 feature will continue to run on Mondays and Fridays.
This time last year, we said that you wouldn’t find, “booming opinion columns on the issues of the day, because everyone does booming opinion columns on the issues of the day,” but while we stand by the sentiment, we should be bolder. We should boom. But we’ll boom in style. We’ll stay true to that other tenet of ours, “We’ll get people who are good at stuff to do stuff that they’re good at.” If we’re going to discuss Arsenal, we’ll find someone who really knows about Arsenal. If we’re telling you about Truro City, then our writer will be a regular at….*googles*…ah, yes. Treyew Road.
We’ll also have more competitions, more interactivity, more everything. We enjoyed 2015, it was nice. But in 2016, we’re going to be bigger, better and louder. And we very much hope that you’ll join us.
Iain Macintosh
Now, here is your briefing. Let’s start with the news.
Gary Neville still hasn’t won a game with Valencia, but Pete Jensen of the Daily Mail was impressed with his team’s performance against Real Madrid last night.
Jamie Vardy, who seems to have been in the red zone for several weeks, will have minor surgery on a groin issue this week. The Mirror says that he’ll miss the FA Cup tie with Tottenham next weekend.
Chelsea seem to be back on track, but the Guardian’s Barney Ronay wonders what motivated this improvement. Is it that they’re all scared of the impending clear out?
Speaking of Chelsea, Daniel Storey at Football 365 was very impressed with John Obi Mikel’s performance. And rightly so.
And Brentford appear to have invented a new way of doing free-kicks. And you can see pictures over at The Independent.
ON YOUR TELLY THIS WEEK (Assuming that you live in the UK)
For the first time in a fortnight, we all know what day it is. It’s Monday, bloody Monday. But compensation awaits in the form of televised football, albeit with a slow start tonight. The best we can offer you is Sporting Heehon vs Hahtafay on Sky Sports 3 or, if you have state broadcaster MUTV, you can watch the United U21s against their Tottenham Hotspur counterparts. Stick with us, it gets better.
We have reached the semi-final stages of the League Cup and it all starts on Tuesday when goalshy Liverpool look to bounce back from their wretched display at Upton Park by giving Stokalona something to think about at the Britannia Stadium. If that’s not for you, perhaps you’ll consider the Derby of the Lighthouse on BT Sport Europe? That’s Genoa vs Sampdoria and yes, we’re showing off.
It is Epifania in Italy on Wednesday and that means AN ENTIRE DAY OF FOOTBALL on BT Sport Europe. You can watch Udinese vs Atalanta at 1130, Juventus vs Verona at 1400, Empoli vs Internazionale at 1700 and Napoli vs Torino at 1945. If you want more foreign football, there’s a straight choice between Vitoria Setubal vs Sporting Lisbon and FC Porto vs Rio Ave on BT Sport ESPN and BT Sport 2. Alternatively, you can watch Everton vs Man City in the League Cup on Sky Sports 1.
After all that, it’s going to be quite difficult to build up Wigan vs Gillingham on Sky Sports 1 on Thursday night. It does feel like a good opportunity to link to Mitchell & Webb’s football sketch though.
It’s Friday and I’m ready to swing, pick up my girls and hit the party scene. Tonight. Oh, it’s all right. So get up and let this funky groove get you in the mood for PSG vs Bastia on BT Sport 2 or Exeter vs Liverpool on BBC 1. Or just go out, cast off your vain attempt at a January Dryathlon and join an orgy of self-destruction.
Find all the TV listings at Live Football on TV
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Look, we promise we’ll get better at this, but we left the pile of review copies in the office over Christmas and we couldn’t retrieve them because the clock was ticking on the shopping missions and then there were the family visits and before you know it, it’s New Year’s Eve and you’ve got one of those hangovers that’s more spiritual than physical, a kind of creeping malaise of the soul rather than the sort of barely threatening headache that you used to shrug off with a cup of sugary tea and a bacon sandwich when you were in your 20s. We read The Hogfather because that’s a bit of a tradition and we were surprisingly taken by bits of Boris Johnson’s ‘Life of London‘ because we’re fairly convinced that underneath that bumbling, straw-haired exterior something profoundly malevolent lurks, but that’s about it. Sorry.
FROM OUR VAULT
2015 was a very good year for The Set Pieces. We launched, we did good stuff, we won a prize, but nothing was quite as much fun as the Subbuteo competition we hosted in the office back in April. We assembled four celebrity football types (Adrian Clarke, James Horncastle, Philippe Auclair and Rafa Honigstein) threw them into a knockout tournament with four readers (George Osborn (not that one), Laura Jones, Liam Ager and our developer friend Rich Aspden) and then made them flick to kick. We had a beer sponsor and everything. Read all about it here and if you want us to do something similar in 2016, write to us: [email protected]
BEST NON-FOOTBALL THING
Waking up really early on a Monday morning, making a proper coffee, listening to Radio 4, reading a newspaper front to back, eating a proper breakfast and genuinely believing that this is how you’re going to live now.
If you’d like to recommend something for next Monday’s briefing, get in touch by emailing [email protected]
