Early Doors - Your morning briefing blog

Didier Drogba faces one of those ubiquitous FA probes over comments made in his autobiography over his red card in the Champions League final.Drogba was sent off late in extra time for a girly little slap on Nemanja Vidic, and said that he ought to have gone the whole hog...More

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Question: When does abnormality become normality?Answer: Yesterday.That was the day when Stoke and Hull won Premier League games against prestigious opponents and nobody batted so much as an eyelash.That's Stoke City and Hull City.Hull overcame West Ham at the KC Stadium to place themselves third, just behind Chelsea and Liverpool, and...More

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International week is over, leaving us free to get back to the serious business of the Premier League, right? Wrong. With the likes of Robinho, Cesc Fabregas and Martin Petrov all returning home with injuries, there is plenty for their club bosses to moan about following the latest round of...More

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A week ago it would have seemed unthinkable that a 5-1 win would be greeted with grunts of dissatisfaction and a subsequent 3-1 win in Belarus would be treated as a famous victory, but it's funny how things turn out. Belarus - just as Macedonia did before them - proved...More

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The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of communism in Europe might have been great news for hundreds of millions of people, but Early Doors still rues the day the East Germans got into their Trabants and turned left.Democracy, prosperity and freedom are all very...More

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Early Doors cannot say it wouldn't be annoyed if it had to sit on the bench while Chris Iwelumo missed open goals, but Kris Boyd's international 'retirement' seems a bit far-fetched.Justifying his decision to keep Boyd on the bench against Norway on Saturday, Scotland boss George Burley pointed out that...More

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Early Doors never thought it would see anybody leap to Ashley Cole's defence.This is a man who embodies everything odious about the modern game. Who left his boyhood club to chase money; who became the face (or the back) of anti-respect when he turned away from a referee; who played...More

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We all know there are not meant to be easy games in international football any more. We all also know that's absolute bunkum.There are still easy games and Kazakhstan at home is one of them.Kazakhstan are officially worse than New Caledonia and Equatorial Guinea. They have nobody of note -...More

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Early Doors doesn't understand the world any more. Is there money in football or not?On the one hand, West Ham are in grave danger of getting credit crunched so comprehensively they will soon be nothing more than one of those small metal cubes that used to be a Ford Sierra.English...More

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Has anyone else noticed that you never see Cristiano Ronaldo and Gok Wan in the same room?There would scarcely be a point to international weeks if Ronaldo didn't use them to open boutiques.The Manchester United man was recently in Lisbon with his family to unveil the second branch of his...More

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