The NI squad she has returned to is markedly different to the one she was last included in a year and a half ago, given the influx of younger players.
That was necessitated by the retirements of Marissa Callaghan, Rachel Furness and Rachel Dugdale.
The only centurion in the current panel, McFadden knew her biggest selling point for getting back into the squad at this later stage of her career was the experience she has, and she hopes to pass on wisdom gained from over 20 years of playing to the younger generation.
“That is what I was saying when I was pleading my case to Tanya. I’ve always got that [experience], even if I’m not fit, I will always do the best for Northern Ireland and our group,” she added.
“I hope I’ve helped them this week, especially Abi Sweetlove. She’s at the start of her career, she’s unbelievable centre-half, she’s the future and hopefully I’ll be able to help her along because I have done it many a time and someone helped me along, so I want to help them.”
So, up next for McFadden and NI is building on a positive second-half display in Ballymena as they go to Reykjavik on Tuesday aiming to overturn the two-goal deficit.
The odds are against Oxtoby’s side given they failed to have a shot on target in the first leg, but McFadden still thinks they have an opportunity if they go there confident.
“We need a little bit more belief. We were able to get in their final third a bit more second half and with the belief, we have a chance.
“If we score early, they’re the big fish with the pressure on and hopefully we get a performance again.”
Fifa president Gianni Infantino wants football to keep an “open mind” about when World Cups are played.
The tournament has traditionally been contested in the northern hemisphere’s summer months – though the 2022 competition, in Qatar, took place in December to avoid playing in the hottest conditions.
“We have summer and winter and in the world if you want to play at the same time everywhere you can play in March or in October,” said Infantino, who runs the sport’s world governing body.
“In December you cannot play in one part of the world and in July you cannot play in another part.
“We need to consider all these elements and let’s see how we can make it better for everyone.
“Maybe there are ways we can optimise the calendar. We are discussing. We have to have an open mind.”
The international match calendar is fixed until 2030, with the United States, Canada and Mexico hosting next year’s men’s World Cup in June and July.
Morocco, Portugal and Spain host the World Cup in 2030 – with Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay holding matches to mark 100 years since the first World Cup was held in, and won by, Uruguay.
Saudi Arabia will host the tournament in 2034.
Meanwhile, Infantino also confirmed Fifa’s desire to further grow the Club World Cup.
The US hosted an expanded 32-team tournament during a major heatwave in the summer, with temperatures in New York reaching a record 39C in June.
This drew criticism from footballers and players’ unions, who raised issues over player welfare and the number of games adding to a packed calendar.
Professional Footballers’ Association chief executive Maheta Molango said in July the competition was devaluing football.
Chelsea beat Paris St-Germain in New York to claim the title.
Infantino, speaking at the European Football Clubs’ general assembly in Rome, said: “When the Champions League was created the first revenue was 40m (euros), now it is 4bn (euros). If the first Club World Cup generated 2bn (euros) in 30 years we should generate 200bn (euros).
“This has created revenues for the clubs. Now we work together to see how we can make it better, bigger and more impactful in collaboration with the clubs and stakeholders because it will benefit everyone.
“I’m biased but it was a huge success from every possible angle. We had 2.5m spectators in the stadiums. We had an average [attendance] of 40,000 and only the Premier League is doing better.
“There is interest in the entire world and we need the interest to boost the national leagues, the European and global competitions.”
Up massively since its IPO, Reddit stock could still have what it takes to deliver wins.
Reddit(RDDT 0.79%) stock has been a big winner since its initial public offering (IPO). Since the day of its market debut in March 2024, the company’s share price has rocketed 606% higher as of this writing.
With such incredible gains across a relatively short period of time, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if Reddit stock has become overvalued — even with the stock seeing a recent valuation pullback. On the other hand, there are some good reasons to think that Reddit stock can continue marching higher.
Image source: Getty Images.
Reddit is flashing very strong growth indicators
With revenue of $1.67 billion over the trailing 12-month period, Reddit has posted sales growth of roughly 49% across the period — but growth has actually been accelerating at an incredible pace recently. For example, the company’s sales increased 78% year over year in this year’s second quarter. Meanwhile, the business recorded a gross margin of roughly 90% over the TTM period.
Even better, the company’s gross margin continues to climb higher. The strong improvements in sales and profitability largely stem from the company’s wins with licensing data from its social-media platform for the training of artificial intelligence (AI) models.
With very strong sales growth and stellar gross margins that have continued to trend higher in recent quarters, Reddit could have the makings of a long-term profit-generating machine. While the stock has already seen huge gains, history could eventually show that it was cheaply valued at current prices.
Keith Noonan has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
SANTA BARBARA — “In this next song,” said Paul McCartney, “we’d like you to sing along.”
Oh, this was the one?
By an hour or so into his concert Friday night at the Santa Barbara Bowl — basically somebody’s backyard by the standards of the former Beatle — McCartney had already gotten the capacity crowd to join in on a bunch of all-timers including “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Love Me Do,” “Jet,” “Getting Better,” “Lady Madonna,” “Let Me Roll It” and “Got to Get You Into My Life.”
But for Sir Paul, even (or especially) at age 83, there’s always a way to take an audience higher.
So as his keyboard player plunked out the song’s lovably lopsided lick, McCartney and his band cranked through a fast and jumpy rendition of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” that left nobody any choice but to hop up and holler about the sweet certainty of life’s going on.
Paul McCartney and his band.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
A sellout pretty much as soon as it was announced, Friday’s show was a kind of warm-up gig ahead of the launch next week of the latest leg of McCartney’s Got Back world tour, which began criss-crossing the globe in 2022 and will resume Monday night in Palm Desert after a nine-month break.
On the road he’s playing arenas and stadiums, but this hillside amphitheater seats only 4,500 or so; to make the evening even more intimate, fans had to lock their phones in little pouches on the way into the venue. (The presence of several cameras swooping around on cranes suggested that McCartney was filming the concert for some unstated purpose.)
“That’s our wardrobe change of the evening,” he said at one point after taking off his jacket, and indeed this was a slightly trimmed-down version of the flashy multimedia production that he brought to SoFi Stadium three years ago. That night in 2022, he played three dozen tunes over two and a half hours; on Friday he did a dozen fewer — no “Maybe I’m Amazed,” no “Band on the Run” — in about an hour and 45 minutes.
The advantage of the smallness, of course, was that you could really hear what McCartney and his longtime backup band were doing up there: the folky campfire vocal harmonies in “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” the propulsive groove driving “Get Back,” the barely organized chaos of a downright raunchy “Helter Skelter.”
Then again, that assumes that tracking those details is why anybody turned up in Santa Barbara.
Though he dropped an album of new solo songs in 2020, McCartney has been pretty deep in nostalgia mode since the 2021 release of Peter Jackson’s widely adored “Get Back” docuseries. He’ll tend the machine this fall with a new book about his years with Wings and an expanded edition of the Beatles’ mid-’90s “Anthology” series; next year, a documentary about the Wings era is due from director Morgan Neville; in 2028, director Sam Mendes will unveil the four separate biopics he’s making about each Beatle, with Paul Mescal in the role of McCartney.
Paul McCartney takes the stage.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
All that looking back can make it hard for even a devoted fan to take in the legend standing before them in the flesh; instead of overwriting memories with fresh information, the mind steeped in myth can train itself to do the opposite (especially when the owner of that mind has shelled out hundreds of bucks for a concert ticket).
Yet you have to hand it to McCartney, whose face bore a dusting of silvery stubble on Friday: As predetermined as this audience was to have a good time, he was tapped into the energy of a musician making minute-to-minute decisions.
He opened the show with a zesty take on the Beatles’ “Help!,” which experts on the internet say he hadn’t played in concert since 1990, then followed it up with one of his quirkiest solo tunes in the disco-punk “Coming Up,” which he juiced with a bit of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” theme.
After a flirty “Love Me Do,” he asked the women in the crowd to “gimme a Beatles scream,” then nodded approvingly at the sound. “Imagine trying to play through that,” he added.
“Jet” had a nasty swagger and “I’ve Got a Feeling” a sexy strut; “Live and Let Die,” meanwhile, was just as trashy as you’d hope.
McCartney told moving if familiar stories about meeting Jimi Hendrix and about his mother coming to him in the dream that inspired “Let It Be”; he also told one I’d never heard about screwing up a performance of “Blackbird” — “Lot of changes,” he said of the song’s complicated guitar part — in front of Meryl Streep. Because his wife Nancy was in the house, he said, he played “My Valentine,” a weepy piano ballad anyone but Nancy probably would’ve gladly exchanged for “Junior’s Farm” or “Drive My Car.”
But then what was that choice if not a commitment to the circumstances of the moment?
