Search: ' Steve Hayes'

Tom Davies reports on the Plymouth takeover, as well as stadium issues at Truro and Wycombe

One of the League’s more enduring messes, at Plymouth Argyle, has seemingly reached a resolution. The local businessman James Brent’s takeover, agreed at the end of October, brings an end to a saga that lasted far longer than it should have. Brent will now take ownership of Argyle, while the city council has agreed to buy and rent back the club’s Home Park ground.

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Tom Davies looks at clubs experiencing difficult times

Beware rich men bearing loans might well be the cautionary mantra of this decade, and the latest to discover the perils of debt are Wycombe Wanderers. Fans’ joy at promotion from League Two has been tempered by a rancorous summer in which managing director Steve Hayes has been accused of bullying the supporters trust into giving up its shareholding to grant him outright control. Hayes, who also owns the rugby union club Wasps, with whom Wycombe share Adams Park, wants to shift both to a 20,000-seat new stadium, to be operated by a separate stadium management company.

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Steve Evans put Boston on the football map, but only by organising a tax fraud that almost landed him in jail – and that many fans feel should have cost him his job. Peter Brooksbank reports

Moments after the end of the televised Conference-clinching win at Hayes in 2002, Boston United manager Steve Evans grinned into the Sky cameras, surrounded by champagne-soaked players and disbelieving fans. “Laps of honour are for champions,” he gloated, making reference to Dagenham boss Garry Hill, who had led his players on a premature lap of glory two months earlier. The slogan assumed instant cult status back in Boston, the club even plastering it on T-shirts in the official shop. Four years later, the phrase has a new twist on fans’ message boards: “Laps of honour are for champions, guilty pleas are for cheats.”

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Do you ever see a picture of a player and come up confidently with half a dozen names for him? Matt Nation knows the feeling, especially with one former Arsenal man

A recent article on European Union expansion  highlighted the problems Slovenia faces in trying to convince people that it is who it says it is. People who try to point it out on a map usually end up putting their finger on Serbia & Montenegro. The flag gets confused with the Russian one. Even George W is convinced Slovenia is half of what used to be Czechoslovakia.

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Dear WSC
There’s something that’s puzzling me about this year’s title race. In every previous season when Manchester United have been trailing by a stack of points Alex Ferguson has talked about the opposition “doing a Devon Loch”. This season he hasn’t mentioned that unfortunate horse once, though. It’s almost as if he’s lost all enthusiasm for racing.
Chris Front, Redcar

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