The Warm-Up: Might West Ham actually be quite good?

Whisper this, but might West Ham actually be…quite good this season? Slaven Bilic’s side resembled a flaming bin at some points last term, a mess of a team playing in an athletics stadium with an increasingly beleaguered manager, not helped by his hip problem that meant his anguished looks were combined with an old man’s hobble around the vast technical area.

That was in large part down to a calamitous transfer window, a selection of recruits who made a negligible impact on the team combined with Dimitri Payet’s exit, all of which lead to the increasingly sad sight of Bilic limping around the place and attendees at the London Stadium grumbling more and more.

But this summer everything looks a bit more promising: Joe Hart might not be anyone’s idea of a Lev Yashin clone, but he’s still a very decent keeper; Pablo Zabaleta should at least ensure they don’t have to play Michail Antonio at right-back; Marko Arnautovic is exactly the sort of mercurial talent that they love down there; and then there’s the latest arrival, Javier Hernandez.

Hernandez essentially does one thing, without contributing a great deal to the rest of the team. But when that one thing is scoring goals, you can let him off. In two seasons ay Bayer Leverkusen he got 39 in 66 starts, a more than solid ratio by anyone’s standards, which makes the £16million West Ham have paid for him a comparative bargain, particularly when you consider Arsenal are supposedly holding out for £4million more than that for Calum Chambers.

So might West Ham be quite good? Possibly. Don’t hold us to that. This is, after all, West Ham.

Hellas Verona were probably quite pleased with themselves a few weeks ago. They’d signed Antonio Cassano, a fading star perhaps but a star nonetheless, arriving to dispense a little class in the latter years of his career. Then on July 18, eight days after signing, Cassano abruptly announced his retirement, only to reverse the decision a few hours later.

“This morning I had a moment of weakness,” he said. “I was yearning for my family but the club’s management has asked them to come and they gave me the strength to carry on. I want to rise to the challenge and have a crazy season.”

Then on Monday his wife released a statement claiming that Cassano won’t be retiring, but that he didn’t want to play for Hellas, and that “mentally I don’t feel stimulated to continue at this club!”

But then later on in the day, another announcement came, this time confirming, once again, he was retiring. “My wife Carolina miswrote this. The truth is that I’m retiring,” Cassano said. “I won’t play football anymore. I apologise to everyone at Hellas Verona club – chairman, coach, players. I’m 35 now, and my priority is to stay closer to my wife and kids.”

But don’t take all this as gospel. Frankly who knows what will have happened by the time you read this. Cassano might have changed his mind another few times by the time the day is out.

An eyebrow-raiser at the Women’s European Championships, as 2013 finalists Norway have rather ignominiously been dumped out of the tournament in the group stage, failing to win a game and slinking home before the knockout stages.

Norway lost 1-0 to Denmark on Monday evening, an early goal from Katrien Veje proving enough, as the Norweigians missed a penalty and hit the woodwork twice. This is the first time the 2013 finalists have failed to win a game at a major tournament and the first time they haven’t progressed further than the first round since 1997.

Elsewhere on Monday, the Netherlands qualified for the next phase by beating Belgium, goals from Sherida Spitse and Lieke Martens enough to secure a 2-1 victory, almost pegged back by a slightly weird long-ranger from Belgium’s Tessa Wullaert.

What would you do if someone bites you on the pitch then you face them in a friendly three years later? Barge them over then claim you did nothing wrong? Well, it’s not exactly the most emphatic course of vengeance, but…

The summer of 2017 will be remembered as the Great War Of The Football Club Social Media Accounts. For the whole transfer window, a battle of banter waged to see who could announce a new signing in the most amusing/original way on their social media channels. The whole thing has got rather meta quite quickly, with Roma choosing to ape Southampton for some reason, and it will clearly grow quite tedious quite quickly, if it hasn’t already.

But there are clear winners and losers: Aston Villa and their powerfully cringey WhatsApp conversation and Chelsea making Antonio Rudiger hide in a cupboard are losers, clearly, but then there’s Manchester City announcing the arrival of Bernard Mendy. Think about it for a minute, you’ll get there…

Liverpool seem pretty keen on Naby Keita. But…well…based on this, his potential future colleagues might not be quite so enthusiastic about the prospect.

Not exactly current and of the zeitgeist, but you’ll enjoy Seb Stafford-Bloor’s piece about the making of Robbie Fowler on FourFourTwo.

Romario scored a lot of goals. Some of them were even in competitive games. Feast – nay, gorge – yourself on 30 of them, scored for Barcelona in 1993/94. You won’t regret it.

Pop on your Eurosports to see the final games of Group B at Euro 2017, where Italy face Sweden and Russia play Germany, the latter three being separated by just a single point at the top of the group. If Champions League qualifiers is more your bag, then there’s a lovely old-school ‘late 1970s European Cup early stages’ feel to Partizan Belgrade vs Olympiakos, while CSKA Moscow face AEK Athens in a game which has more of a ‘UEFA Cup quarter-final, 1997’ vibe to it.