Search: ' Ian McParland'
Stories
With the new Wembley now ten, here is Jeff Hill in 1999 on how its predecessor ingrained itself in football folklore despite its pomposity
Simon Goodley looks back on a successful but deeply uncomfortable season
I have an awful admission to make. I am a Notts County fan (that’s not it) and a strange thing has happened to me during our farcical season. Having had nothing much to celebrate since we won the old Third Division championship in 1998, I spent the majority of my team’s League Two title-winning season hoping that our challenge crumbled.
For Notts County fans the last few months have been like no other. Julian McDougall tries to keep up with things
In the second half of 2009 ordinary long-standing Notts County fans were subjected to a series of psycho-political experiments. Novelists from Charles Dickens to Margaret Atwood have stretched social reality to develop extreme scenarios which allow readers to explore their anxieties about the world – blending utopia and dystopia to produce complexity which reflects the ambiguous nature of human thought. But if a writer had made up events at Meadow Lane this season, their publisher would likely reject it as “too far-fetched”. Sven-Göran Eriksson arrives, Kasper Schmeichel signs, Sol Campbell comes, rumours link us to David Beckham, Roberto Carlos, Roberto Mancini and Kevin Keegan. Sol goes. The Guardian print allegations of corruption on a daily basis. Bust before bloody Christmas.
The Sven circus has rollled into town and pitched up at the league's oldest club. Dave Evans explores the ramifications
The day before Sven-Göran Eriksson was unveiled as the Director of Football at the sixth worst League club in England I said to a friend “we are in danger of turning into a circus”. His reply, echoed by around 90 per cent of fellow Notts fans, was: “I’d rather pay £20 to see a circus than the rubbish I’ve been watching for the past ten years.”