18 May ~ After a disastrous performance in last weekend's German cup final, Bayern Munich will be hoping to make home advantage count by overcoming Chelsea in the Champions League final tomorrow night at the Allianz Arena. The team and coaching staff seemed at a loss when asked to explain the poor performance in Berlin. Philipp Lahm was right to say Bayern had played well in the first half, but to assert that his team had been better over 90 minutes was contradicted by the manner in which they conceded five goals. Confronted with an incisive and aggressive Dortmund side, the Bayern defence that had been so miserly in the Bundesliga was made to look ponderous as Shinji Kagawa tore them apart.

17 May ~ It is hard not to note the cosmic irony of Kenny Dalglish being sacked on the same day that Roy Hodgson drew almost universal derision for including Stewart Downing in England's Euro 2012 squad. If the fates of Liverpool's two most recent managers already seemed inextricably linked – it being apparently impossible to talk about one without reference to the other – then this confirmed it. Like his predecessor, Dalglish is now an ex-Liverpool manager (although unlike him, for the second time). In purely footballing terms, this was hardly a surprise, following a league season of near-unprecedented poorness, which a Carling Cup victory could do little to positively balance out.

17 May ~ York City fans spent last Saturday at Wembley, where much of the crowd chatter was about how awful the ground was – all-seater, soulless and inaccessible. Today, supporters find out whether such qualities will be recreated at future home games, when the application for York's new stadium goes in front of the local council planning committee. The proposal has left many fans wondering what the purpose of a lower league football club should be.

The message here is simple and shocking – not all castles are big. The legend tells that in the Argentine port of Avellaneda, long ago, before mankind stopped making non-crime-based drama, there lived a gnome. Yes, that's right, a gnome. And the gnome is no more ridiculous a figure than a dragon or Minotaur and some gnomes are capable of breaking your arm. However, the gnome of Avellaneda was more of a passive stereotype gnome who lived on his own in a very small castle, surrounded by water and a large residential area. Because gnomes were known for their magic, some townspeople would approach the castle, rap upon the gate and ask for help from the owner. Here they would be ushered into a low hall where the gnome would regard the individual knowingly and ask a riddle before he would deign to help. Read more

My favourite match ~ Si Hawkins could not bring himself to watch much of the game, but Leyton Orient's visit to Oxford United on the last day of the 2005-06 season remains the most breathtaking day of football he has ever seen

It may be lacking sheikhs, oligarchs and handshake-fuelled feuds but only the basement division of the Football League can throw up a situation quite so achingly dramatic. It was the final day of the 2005-06 season.

Giovanni Trapattoni joins some of his players in encouraging a young Irish supporter to eat his greens. It's not clear what he's saying, but it's sure to be well-intentioned

The book reviews from WSC 303 are online now. Dietmar Hamann's autobiography, The Didi Man, shows the player to be a true romantic who is in love with Liverpool and in awe of the club's former boss Rafa Benitez. Graduation, by Richard Lee, is another promising autobiography. Lee tells the story of his lifechanging season with Brentford, in which the goalkeeper used neuro-linguistic programming to help him deal with his acute mental anxiety. David Weir's autobiography was a missed opportunity according to our reviewer: "Rather than an expansive story about a successful and well-travelled international footballer, Extra Time reads more like a cosy, wee, homespun chat around the fire with the local newspaper." Finally, Up Pohnpei is a fascinating account of a frustrated football writer's attempt to become an international manager.

The new WSC is available now, including a 16-page Euro 2012 guide and wallchart

16 May ~ Not for the first time in his managerial career, Kenny Dalglish has left Liverpool. Back in April 1991 (WSC 50), a Liverpool supporter wondered if he was simply too nice to be a boss.

"Couldn't take the pressure." As a Liverpool fan, watching Kenny Dalglish as a manager was the antithesis of watching him as a player. People often complain about players or officials who don't care about a particular club; the problem with Dalglish as a manager was that he so obviously cared. You couldn't miss it: that furrowed brow, the nervous pacing, the clenched fist held against the mouth. Dalglish suffered as much anguish as any fan.

15 May ~ This Saturday Hibs take on Hearts in the Scottish Cup final. If you can’t remember the last all-Edinburgh final, don’t worry – it was in 1896. Hibs last won the Cup in 1902. Anticipation is high in the capital for the "salt and sauce" final (so called because Edinburgh doesn’t do vinegar on its chips). The game will be a refreshing change for a country usually so intensely dominated by two other clubs. Edinburgh football has almost always been the poor cousin of the Glaswegian version, and the game comes well down the list of things for which the capital is famous (tourism, politics, experimental theatre, banking, insurance, cemetery-loitering dogs, frigid pandas…).

15 May ~ Many clubs are finding it difficult to keep even their most loyal supporters happy these days. But at Lincoln City, times are particularly hard. In addition to suffering dwindling attendances, the Imps recently found themselves the subject of a large-scale protest after the board turned on disgruntled fans. After five unsuccessful play-off finishes under the late Keith Alexander then John Schofield, the Imps struggled for four years. A winless run of 11 games at the back end of 2010-11 saw them slip into the Conference where they had previously played one season, in 1987-88.

Premier League ~ Man City take the title as Bolton go down
The superlatives have been exhausted already. It wasn't that Manchester City won their first top-flight title since 1968, nor that they did it by beating their cross-city rivals on goal difference that was most remarkable. Instead, it was the manner of their victory over Queens Park Rangers: two stoppage time goals to take victory and the title when all looked lost, that will mean this Premier League season is recounted endlessly in “greatest” lists from now on. City were poor. They struggled to break down a dogged QPR defence and became frantic, aimless and ever more edgy as time wore on.

13 May ~ The last time Manchester City won the league, they were grateful to Sunderland for a victory over Manchester United on the final day of the season. On May 11, 1968, City topped the division on goal average only, and while Joe Mercer's side travelled to Newcastle, United hosted Sunderland at home. Many believed that United had the easier game – both the Football League trophy and the Match of the Day cameras were at Old Trafford. But Sunderland beat United 2-1 and City made the Championship certain by winning 4-3 at Newcastle. Today, Sunderland once again play United with the title in the balance.

12 May ~ After Chelsea's astonishing 2-2 draw at Barcelona to secure a place in next Saturday's Champions League final and Manchester City inexplicably dropping points at home to QPR tomorrow to hand the title to Manchester United (you heard it here first), Crewe Alexandra are another striking example that anything can happen in football. In the history of the English game, no team has ever lost their first four games in the fourth tier and managed to stay up. Crewe did just that. They lost to Swindon 3-0, Gillingham 2-1, Rotherham 2-1 and Shrewsbury 2-0, yet at 5.30pm today, Crewe will be a maximum 330 minutes away from promotion as they kick off against Southend United at Gresty Road in the League Two play-offs.

11 May ~ There has been a sad inevitability about the late dip by Sheffield United that allowed our cross-city rivals to steal in on the penultimate weekend and take second place. The Ched Evans court case has inevitably affected the final weeks of United's season, but not in the way outsiders might have expected. Evans contributed 35 of United's 92 goals this season, and while his goalscoring was missed, the psychological impact on the team was clearly visible to the United fans that travelled to Milton Keynes, just 24 hours after the guilty verdict.

11 May ~ Alex Ferguson announced this morning that Chris Smalling has suffered a bad groin injury and will not make it to Euro 2012. That he was even in contention for an England place at the tournament is remarkable. As John Bunyard wrote in WSC 297 (May 2010), Smalling was playing non-League football only two years before he moved to the Premeir League champions.

I first saw it one Saturday as I walked down the side of the Sittingbourne pitch. It was best described as a half-Fellaini: an attempt at an afro curtailed by an over-zealous barber.

11 May ~ The fourth annual Sir Bobby Robson Foundation match will be played at the Riverside Stadium tonight, with the organisers hoping the game will raise £10,000 for the cancer charity. Former Middlesbrough players such as Gaizka Mendieta, Bernie Slaven, George Boateng, Ugo Ehiogu, Craig Hignett, Colin Cooper and Neil Madison have confirmed they will attend. The match kicks off at 7.30pm tonight with a minimum £2 donation required for entry to the Riverside. Anyone unable to attend can help out by contributing through the event's JustGiving page, which is currently just £1,000 short of the desired total.

10 May ~ A few months ago, the world belonged to Shanghai Shenhua, or so you would have thought listening to the club's chairman, Zhu Jun. Didier Drogba, Guti, Matthew Upson, Alvaro Recoba and Andres D'Alessandro were just a handful of the players supposedly on their way to link up with new star striker Nicolas Anelka and their equally illustrious manager, Jean Tigana. Pre-season games were a mass of French flags and optimism. For a fanbase that saluted its players to the tune of La Marseillaise even before the arrival of Gallic duo, it seemed like destiny was written. Yet an inevitable march to victory quickly turned into a very public humiliation once the football started.

10 May ~ In the first in a series of articles considering how England's geography affects its football clubs, the Two Unfortunates blog has analysed why there are no Football League clubs in Cornwall. The county has produced players such as Nigel Martyn and Matthew Etherington, who have both represented England at various ages, but it does not seem to have the population density required for a professional club. Although over 500,000 people live in the county, Cornwall is a remote, sprawling and relatively poor region that relies on tourism and agriculture. At present neither Falmouth nor county capital Truro are capable of facilitating professional football but will Cornwall ever have a club in the Football League?

In the very early days of Portuguese light entertainment television, there was broadcast a programme called Spin The Lion With Hugo Calvino, every Sunday at 6.30pm. It was an incredibly popular game show consisting of four carelessly linked sections. In the first part of the programme, Calvino would welcome the live and television audiences with the song Here We Are Again (God Has Spared Us). Then he would pretend to talk to the lion about how the animal’s Saturday had been, making jokes at the lion’s expense and using his catchphrase: "I beg your pardon! You do know my mother's in tonight!" There would follow a talent show segment and a quiz, followed by the gameshow finale where a couple could win 100 Escudo if the lion, following a big spin in the lion tumbler from Hugo, managed to stagger to a freshly killed zebra carcass within 20 noise-filled seconds. Read more

9 May ~ "That's the first time I haven't bothered watching the Cup final," said a Tottenham-supporting mate to me last weekend, to which I repeated the same sentiment back to him. My team Arsenal were playing Norwich on the same day as the Cup final and although I didn't go to the Emirates, I was in Arsenal Land for the traditional end of season party, which tends to get messy. I went to a pub where bands were playing, people were dancing and at one point fists were flying; very little attention was being paid to Liverpool's match against Chelsea on the TV screen.

9 May ~ An ominous cloud hangs over Scottish football at present. Rangers are in administration, with draconian sanctions imminent. Bill Miller, an American businessman, was named by the administrators as the preferred bidder to take over the ailing club, but promptly withdrew his offer. Whoever takes over will surely attempt to implement the plan proposed by Miller. The blueprint for Rangers' survival, it seems, is to transfer the assets of the current company to a "newco" so the "oldco" can be liquidated, potentially allowing the club to carry on with minimal penalties, while the taxpayer is screwed out of millions.

I was there ~ Phil Town rarely experienced success in Reading, but his move to Portugal was rewarded when Boavista overcame Porto to win the league in 2000-01

Talk about being starved of glory. Until 2001, the only other game I had attended that had warranted a celebratory pitch invasion was in the 1965-66 season. Reading reserves drew 1-1 with Bournemouth & Boscombe in front of a delirious 5,000 crowd at Elm Park to win the Football Combination Division Two title.

9 May ~ Fotbal, by folk legend and Banik Ostrava supporter Jaromir Nohavica, must be one of the finest songs about watching the game ever written. "One beer goes down… and then another," sings Nohavica of the pre-match build-up. But you suspect he and his fellow Banik fans will have been in need of something stronger this season, as their team has spent much of it in the relegation places of the Gambrinus Liga, Czech Republic's top-tier. That Banik retain a fighting chance of staying up is partly down to the even poorer form of Viktoria Zizkov, whom they defeated 3-1 in a crucial fixture on April 28, and the spring freefall of Bohemians 1905.

In 1964 the FA Cup paired Oxford United, in only their second season of League football, with the international stars of Division One's Blackburn Rovers. As the prospect of a giant-killing moved closer to reality, Richard Mason recalls the unbearable tension of such a game's latter stages

Your team is 2-1 up as the match enters its last few minutes. You look at your watch for the umpteenth time. You scream at the referee to blow his whistle. Then you’ll be able celebrate a famous win. But inside you are terrified that it is not to be.