Mike Holden

Can’t think of a better move for Challinor to keep his “At least the play-offs” record going. Remember: it only counts in full seasons!

Quote from Kim Hellberg yesterday. Middlesbrough top of the league and favourites for the title because they’ve set the highest standard and been the best team in the Championship so far. But this is an example of why they won’t win the league. Bad framing from Hellberg. Demon emotions when things don’t go his way. Victimhood. Freaks out over anything that goes against his best plans and always someone else’s responsibility to fix what’s making him feel bad. Note: Middlesbrough scored after TWELVE MINUTES yesterday. If this was Hellberg’s experience on the touchline so early in the game, imagine where his head goes if Charlton keep it up for 75. Last season, Boro took 31 points from Hellberg’s first 14 matches. Then the pressure came and they started dropping silly points, failing to win in six straight home games against teams mostly relegation candidates. They were their own worst enemy and it starts with the accumulation of needless anxiety like this.

Michael Skubala picking pockets again. The guy who cut his teeth in Futsal knows a thing or two about substitutions. He used to make about 100 a game. Late goals at Preston, Burnley and now Bolton worth an extra 8 points to Bristol City.

"No pictures on a golf scorecard." Meaning the result is all that matters. Chris Wilder's got some of the best phrases.

Gazza was especially fired up for this game because Lake (newly promoted with City) was being talked up as his big rival in an England team that would never accommodate both players. Funny thing is, Lake outshone him on the day but Gascoigne made a decisive impact on the scoresheet and would hold down his place in the England squad thereafter. The rest is history: Gazza goes to Italia 90, after which Lake plays only five more meaningful matches, doing his cruciate twice and never making his England debut. You could argue Lake never stood a chance of ousting Gascoigne for many reasons — media buzz, playing for an unfashionable northern club (which mattered in those days) and his injury record among them. Either way, this particular game wasn’t about Gazza. It was about Paul Lake, the effortless way in which he dictated the play, and how such a promising career turned out to be a football tragedy. Combine Lake’s mind and habits with Gazza’s body and appetite for the big occasion, you’ve arguably got an all-time great 6, 8 or 10. Or centre back. Between the pair of them, they had absolutely everything.

Cambridge v Millwall tonight. Very much looking forward to a proper Cambridge performance against a proper Millwall team.

Read this for some worthwhile context on a big game this Wednesday that you probably didn't realise was such a big game. Let me tell you — passing through the void between the two is quite the experience when you're not ready for it. Just enough civilisation to lose an afternoon in your own thoughts, wondering who they all support and what they get up to.

Monday newsletter on Neil Harris showing his newly-promoted Cambridge players the exit door after an opening day win binaryfootball.substack.com/…

Can someone tell me who's in charge of Lincoln — Chris Cohen or Tom Shaw? None of that joint-manager nonsense. I need one name. It's meant to be a leadership role, not pat-a-cake.

The sad decline of unpredictability in the Championship illustrated in one tweet. I wonder when the current parachute payment structure was introduced 🤔

It’s been a great tournament for memories and I conceded to those who pushed back and said the Mexico game is what a World Cup is all about. But now it’s all done and the nation has gone into meltdown, I believe this has aged well. A known path of purely European opposition (Portugal, Spain, Belgium and France) in climate-controlled stadiums would have been much more preferable to all the wild conditions and opponents we ended up with. We might have risked going out in R32 or R16 but the players had a lot more in the tank back then. If we were serious about actually winning the tournament, this path would have been the easier way to prove it. Tuchel was always going to push everyone to the limit because his threshold for adrenaline, chaos and uncertainty is greater than any other manager out there. And Bellingham was right when he said Tuchel doesn’t understand what it’s like for the players. That tension would have been real behind the scenes long before it surfaced post-Norway. In the end, Tuchel neglected his demons (future pattern-recognition, and respecting the emotions of the tribe) until it was way too late. Then, in one big tidal wave, the whole thing comes crashing down because he suddenly woke up to how much the players were suffering mentally and emotionally. With the Norway fallout still fresh in his mind, and unable to trust them on the technical side, he witnessed their complete inability to manage space or retain possession after the goal, and he made uncharacteristic decisions to ‘help’ them show their spirit. As many people have said, Tuchel went against everything he stood for at the start of the tournament and turned into Gareth Southgate (literally the exact opposite personality type). There’s a lesson for everyone here: do your demons. Don’t go all-in on your saviour functions 24/7 and neglect the shadow sides of your personality. You might get short-term results. You might even feel invincible for a while. But it will always come back to haunt you in the end. No-one is exempt from this, not even one of the best coaches in the world. Carl Jung wasn’t a mug. This stuff is real. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

This is a fair and reasonable pushback. But I’d argue there’s an improvement through each these benchmarks, each one a tiny step forward on the last. Just because the progress is slow and incremental — and the blow up spectacular — doesn’t mean the progress isn’t real. The World Cup is the ultimate survival-of-the-fittest event where it’s almost impossible to get lucky with one big leap at the end, especially when the knockout bracket shaped up like this one did. You have to take out the very best at some point, and usually that’s when there’s so little left to give. It should also be pointed out that this was Game 7 of the tournament. Three of those listed below were Game 6.