By Brian Sears 16 December 2010 West Ham have their troubles to spare, gazing up from the bottom of the Premier League to see which lucky club is going to poop on them next, fearing that they’ll be in the dreaded basement place by Christmas and generally fretting about how soon Avram Grant’s taxi will […]

By Brian Sears 16 December 2010 . Liverpool’s loss to Newcastle in the Premier League was followed by a dull 0-0 with Utrecht but history says things should improve with their teatime game on Saturday at home to Fulham. The London team have never won at Anfield in the Premier League in nine attempts, five […]

* SARAH HAMES is a lawyer by education but swapped the bar for the piste, then PR. She knows her sport from the inside, the offside and blind side, with a portfolio stretching from the hallowed corridors of the All England Club to the expanses of the Southern Ocean… . . . . . By […]

By Nick Harris 12 December 2010 John Higgins completed a dream return from suspension late on Sunday night by winning the UK Championship final 10-9 after a nail-biting comeback in an epic to-the-wire final in Telford against Mark Williams. Snooker has made far too many headlines for the wrong reasons in 2010 but this was […]

By Nick Harris 8 December 2010 Charlie Adam, Blackpool’s best player, won his recent tribunal hearing against his own club over a £25,000 bonus row but won’t emerge from the episode with much, if any, financial benefit, sportingintelligence can reveal. His ‘winnings’ have mostly been spent on fees and expenses, including a costly QC. The […]

By Nick Harris 8 December 2010 Kentaro is best known for event management, including arranging Brazil friendlies. It also had the rights to the first and only England pay-per-view match on the internet, against Ukraine last year. Now the agency, which sportingintelligence has learned has been described as “like family” by Venkatesh Rao, the MD […]

By Brian Sears 8 December 2010 Of the 436 Premier League goals scored this season, 181 have come before half-time (or 42 per cent), leaving a sizeable chunk of 255 goals (58 per cent) in the second half. Most clubs – 15 from 20 – scored most of their goals (a majority) in the second […]

By Brian Sears 8 December 2010 Aston Villa have been kings of the Midlands in the Premier League era; in 16 of the 18 completed seasons they have finished higher in the table than all their rivals from the region. For season by season detail, see the table below. This is a proud record, based […]

By Nick Harris 7 December 2010 As the Fifa vice-president Jack Warner claims that the world governing body could not have voted for England’s 2018 World Cup bid because of the English media, sportingintelligence publishes an extract from a secret Fifa document (scan at bottom of page) that shows some of his own colleagues believed […]

By Nick Harris 6 December 2010 An anti-homophobia group that campaigns for equality in football has criticised the decision of Fifa’s executive committee to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, a nation where homosexuality is a crime that can carry a five-year prison term. That sanction is not theoretical – Qatar has had cases […]