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Stories
by Simon Hughes
Bantam, £18.99
Reviewed by Rob Hughes
From WSC 362, April 2017
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Simon Hart describes the scenes as Blackburn play their first match under the watchful eye of their new owners
There are three Robbie Savages grinning in front of me as I take my seat in the press box high in the Jack Walker Stand. The one-time Blackburn Rovers midfielder is appearing in a book-plugging interview on his former club’s in-house TV channel, playing on monitors suspended from the ceiling of the stand. The sight of Savage, very much a man of his time with blond highlights and perma-tan, is juxtaposed with the more traditional spectacle unfolding on the hill behind the Riverside Stand opposite. This Sunday lunchtime kick-off is still over half an hour away and supporters trail down the brown hillside before crossing a bridge over the River Darwen and filing into the ground. Today is very much about the old and the new.
The behaviour of footballers on the pitch hits the headlines
From rioting at Upton Park to Chelsea’s dubious youth recruitment tactics to Eduardo’s lack of balance, the first few weeks of 2009-10 have produced ample opportunity for moral outrage. Some gloomy observers have chosen to view this as an unprecedented and apocalyptic period for football. Meanwhile, a general sense of opprobrium has been building around a single club: Manchester City.
Agents or club chairmen – who are most disliked? Polling even worse are the growing subset who step from one job to the other. As one agent who helped bankrupt a club faces jail in Switzerland, Dan Brennan looks at the puzzling trend
Letting a football agent take control of your club might sound a bit like handing a burglar a spare set of keys to your house and telling him where the family silver is kept. That is certainly how it must now feel to supporters of Servette, the venerable Swiss club that went bankrupt two years ago and were forced to begin life again in the third division.