When recounting Arsenal's injury predicament ahead of last night's match against Porto, Early Doors made a glib remark that while the Gunners were missing Arshavin, Song, Gallas and Eduardo, the good news was that so was goalkeeper Manuel Almunia, in a cheap bid for sneery LOLs and ROFLs.

Well, who's ROFLing now? Porto, that's who.

Arsenal reserve keeper Lukasz Fabianski put in a calamitous performance that greatly helped the Portuguese side to a valuable 2-1 win in their Champions League last 16 first leg match.

Fabianski's first error - allowing Silvestre Varela's cross to beat him at the

The news that top Premier League managers will more often than not plump for a foreign signing may hardly be a revelation. However, the statistics are on the face of it quite damning.

The Sun's Charlie Wyett has done the number-crunching, and his conclusions read like a post mortem for the English game.

According to the figures, 79 per cent of transfers in the Premier League so far this summer have involved non-English players, while just 30 per cent of the 630 players currently registered in the division are eligible to play for Fabio Capello's team.

The report centres on the spread of

Liverpool may be yet to kick a ball in anger under Roy Hodgson, but the new Anfield boss could barely have asked for a better start to his tenure.

Signing Joe Cole on a free transfer, Steven Gerrard announcing he is staying and shipping out Albert Riera were all boons for the former Fulham boss, even if Cole just happened to plump for the club offering the most money, no one actually wanted to buy Gerrard and Riera was one of the only left-footers in the squad.

But yesterday, as Hodgson officially unveiled Cole, along with fellow new signings Milan Jovanovic and Danny Wilson, he announced two

Well, how about those Cottagers? Fulham's sensational 4-1 win over Juventus last night ensured there will be at least one team from West London involved when the draws for the Champions League and Europa League quarter-finals are made later today.

Such luminaries as Barcelona, Manchester United and Internazionale may be hogging the attention when the balls are drawn in the base of the dormant volcano that is UEFA HQ, but the Cottagers can be justifiably proud to still be involved in European competition at this stage of the season.

There have already been enough column inches about Craven

March 21,
2010 could well prove decisive in this season's Premier League title race after
Manchester United regained control of their own destiny, moving two points
clear of Arsenal and four above Chelsea at the top of the table.

Then again,
it might not.

As the past
two days' action have again proved, anything can happen in this wildly
unpredictable season, which is proving "stranger" (in the words of
Rafa Benitez) than an Antonio Valencia tumble in the penalty box.

Not only
did Chelsea conspire to drop points at struggling Blackburn, but United actually
managed to beat Liverpool. And Nemanja

If you weren't too busy scratching your
head in bemusement when that giant dung beetle was being paraded around in the
opening ceremony, you may have seen the world's biggest football shirt carried
out on to the Soccer City pitch that day.

The shirt was made up of over 600 jerseys
collected by Bjorn Heidenstrom along his cycling trip from Norway to South
Africa in time for the World Cup.

But this mad Viking ex-footballer didn't
just make the 11-month trip for kicks, you know. He was doing it to raise
awareness of the plight of refugees around the world and the work of the UN
Refugee Agency (

Away from the glamour of the World Cup and
just a few miles from downtown Johannesburg lies Soweto, one of the poorest
areas of South Africa.

A visit to the poverty-stricken township is
an eye opener, although it is encouraging to hear that the benefits of the
World Cup are already being felt, even there.

Watch the latest Early Boers video blog from South Africa here:

If the
demise of Setanta tells us anything, it is that the gap between the Big Four
and the rest is even bigger than we thought.

We all know
about the gulf in wealth between the Premier League's
haves and have-mores, but in terms of interest and support, the margin is even
greater.

Setanta
needed 1.9 million subscribers to stay afloat, but fell well short principally
because their package of live rights did not include enough matches involving
elite teams.

Theirs were
the third-choice games, tucked away on a Saturday or a Monday evening, while
Sky continued to trumpet its Grand Slam Slam Dunk