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Another week, another conversation. This time I welcome a terrifyingly well-informed team of Magnus Anderson, Al Ewing and Martin Skidmore to talk about something I (demonstrably, audibly) know very little about – the history, present and pract[…]

Here we are, at last.

Here we stand at the summit of Pop Football achievement, looking back at 63 matches: some wonderful, some perplexing, some illuminating, very few boring. We’ve heard so much pop, enjoyed so many marvellous moments, and […]

There are no losers here. Each Pop World Cup manager set off on a crooked path some months ago, and to fall at the penultimate hurdle cannot be counted as shame. Rather, let’s doff our caps at the achievements of both these two. Carsmile Steve,[…]

The big story of this Pop World Cup, it’s been said, has been the exceptional performance of the African teams. Almost half of the quarter finalists, fully half of the semi-finalists, all drawn from Africa. Only one can make it into the final, […]

Touching distance, now. It’s the semi-finals and, of all the matches in the Pop World Cup, the semi-finals are the most tense. The stakes feel high: win, and you’ll soon savour the feeling of running out in the biggest pop football game o[…]

Can it be that this is the last of our Quarter Finals? So Soon? After this, just four games left in the PWC, and one of those is the third place play-off. We are moving so quickly towards the end of this particular road, and here in the commentary bo[…]

Three quarters of the way through our four Quarters. The tunes, like our managers’ heartbeats, have been largely uptempo, and no-one wants to go home at this stage, not with glory so close. This match sees two of the juggernauts of the early ro[…]

Quarter Final number two, and things are rattling on apace. Battling for a coveted semi-final spot here are Chris R’s Korea Republic side who seem to have hit a convincing K-pop stride – or was it a K-pop peak? – and Germany, manage[…]

If you can’t quite smell the greatest pop football prize of all yet, you can certainly hear it in the distance. For one of our managers, three more songs will take them through to the world championship.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. W[…]