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Search: ' Hughie Gallacher'

Stories

Turf Wars: A history of London football by Steve Tongue

360 Turf

Pitch Publishing, £9.99
Reviewed by Si Hawkins
From WSC 360, February 2017
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Stramash

Tackling Scotland's Towns and Teams
by Daniel Gray
Luath Press, £9.99
Reviewed by Gavin Saxton
From WSC 287 January 2011

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Daniel Gray – a social historian, Englishman and Middlesbrough fan exiled in Edinburgh – decided last season to explore his adopted homeland through its lower-league football teams. So, picking out 12 fixtures around the country, he set out to learn about Scotland and its football. The result is this series of vignettes, 12 chapters each based around a match, but for the most part an excuse to delve a little into the history of the home teams, the towns that host them and the connections between the two.

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Division One 1926-27

Neil Rayment looks back at that rarest of seasons – one in which Newcastle actually won something

The long-term significance
In the days when FA Cup finals were played at Wembley, Cardiff became the first team to take the Cup out of England when they beat Arsenal 1-0. As well as becoming a question beloved by pub-quiz compilers ever since, the game was also notable for being the first final to be broadcast live on the radio. In order to help listeners get a sense of what was happening, the commentator referred to a grid printed in the Radio Times, which divided the pitch up into eight sections. It has since been claimed that this was the origin of the term “back to square one”, though that phrase doesn’t crop up in surviving radio commentaries from the period.

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Division One, 1930-31

Mike Ticher recalls Arsenal's first championship – the same season that saw Manchester Utd relegated

The long-term significance
Arsenal’s first League title (and the first by any southern club) set them on their way to their domination of the 1930s. The previous year’s FA Cup final victory over manager Herbert Chapman’s old club, Huddersfield, was neatly symbolic, but the championship cemented the north Londoners’ arrival. It had taken Chapman six years to win it, but then the floodgates opened, with three in a row from 1933-35, another in 1938 and a second Cup win in 1936 – though he didn’t live to see most of the silverware, having died in 1934.

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“Referees respond to authority”

With footballers receiving unprecedented levels of public attention, Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association, talked to WSC about the things that keep him busy

There has been a series of violent incidents in high-profile matches lately. Are footballers getting out of control?
It’s always been difficult. We have tried all sorts over the years. We’ve worked to make sure that players know the laws of the game, we’ve got referees to visit clubs, we’ve tried to have ex-players as referees. One thing I was disappointed about over this past weekend [February 12 – involving the games at Chelsea v Wimbledon, Newcastle v Man Utd and Leeds v Spurs] is that referees lately seemed to have grasped that we were out of touch with the rest of the world and that not every foul deserved a caution. We saw some great games as a result, then the wheels came off. Someone asked me, where do you see football today, on Valentine’s day? I said, well, we don’t want any more massacres. But football is a microcosm of society. They’re saying to me “oh this is a really sad time for football” as though there is some­thing we could do to make sure it would always be on the straight and narrow. I said we’ve had prisons since civilised society began and we’ve haven’t got less now. You can fill the prisons up but it doesn’t mean to say you’ve got law and order.

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