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Stories
When there’s no history of football support in your family, the team you’re taken to see as a child can hinge on some unromantic factors
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.
Al Needham remembers Jimmy Sirrel, Nottingham’s second most famous football manager, who died last month
It’s very easy to see Jimmy Sirrel, who died on September 25 at the age of 86, as someone who worked in the shadow of Brian Clough; a decent enough manager who did his best with extremely limited resources, but could only look on while his neighbour on the other side of the Trent took the glory. That is not the case at all. Sirrel was just as important to the ’Pies as Clough was to the Garibaldis.