Football Daily | Best, Messi, Cruyff, and now Hayes – football’s pioneers always head west

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Ever since Pelé first slipped on a New York Cosmos shirt in 1975, football players and coaches moving to America have carried an air of glamour. From George Best to Lionel Messi, via Johan Cruyff and David Beckham, there is something of the pioneer spirit in heading Over There, and always the tantalising sense of a bigger picture, the deal that sees ‘soccer’ break America. That has never quite happened, usually because the USA USA USA (let’s get it out of the way) tends to attract players past their prime, or those looking to build their coaching experience – your Rooneys, your Henrys, your Vieiras. With Emma Hayes, it’s a different story.

It was 1994 and I was touring Measure for Measure in South America, where my wife, Tamsin, joined me in Buenos Aires. We had a matinee on the Saturday afternoon of the River/Boca Juniors derby, to which Tam had managed to get a couple of tickets, so off she went with a friend and I went to work. They were still the days for most of us BC (before cell-phones), and when you’d buy the pink’un at 5pm to get the results. I bought one and the headline was: ‘Two Murdererd at Boca/River Derby’. Even for someone who had lived opposite Stamford Bridge in the 70s this was disturbing stuff. To my relief about two hours later Tamsin turned up. Did she know what had happened? No, fortunately, but on a beautiful afternoon she’d been in the stands and noticed it was raining. She looked to the skies to see the opposition stands on the tier above them engaged in an orgy of mass spitting. I can’t remember the result” – Stephen Boxer.

Re: ‘Chelsea 4-4 Manchester City: a comic-book explosion of chaos and screams’ (Monday’s Football Daily). Really?!!! A spoiler right in my inbox? C’mon man it’s hard enough” – Alvar Sirlin.

Shouldn’t England’s upcoming two games be labeled post-qualifiers? Or practice matches. Or pointless wastes of time, energy and CO2 emissions?” – Clive Stone.

Odd looking at yesterday’s Memory Lane (full email edition): a line of rigid, completely immobile frames, featuring pictures of Kewell, Owen, Henchoz, and Hyypia, behind which there was the actual Igor Biscan. Oh wait” – Adam Smith (and no other Biscan-bashers).

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