Search: 'Kevin Drinkell'

by Kevin Drinkell
Black and White, £14.99
Reviewed by Pete Green
From WSC 293 July 2011

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Kevin Drinkell was a great centre-forward whose career never quite hit the top. There's a credible argument that he was unlucky not to have made the England squads of the late 1980s. This was partly down to the wrong transfers at the wrong times, admits the player in this autobiography, and partly due to the intransigence and skulduggery of Robert Chase, his chairman at Norwich, in handling approaches from Manchester United and Tottenham.

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David Ogilvie’s only regrets about Stirling Albion’s finest hour are that he wasn’t there and that he has never seen the 20th goal. And yes, you read that right

In a year when Liverpool won the European Cup and Scotland’s rugby team won the Grand Slam, and in the month that Bob Geldof went from being a pop singer to the man behind Band Aid, an unremarkable football club also made headlines nationwide.

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The decline of Scotland and Austria was encapsulated by a Champions League game in 2000 featuring hardly any Scots or Austrians, as Cris Freddi recalls

This being the Champions League, Rangers weren’t expected to stay around for long. It’s been the story of their lives for the last decade or so. This time at least they’d given themselves a real chance of reaching the second round, winning their first two group matches 5-0 against today’s opponents and 1-0 in Monaco. But this was a right rollercoaster of a group, and by the time they arrived in Graz they’d taken only one point from two matches with Galatasaray, while Sturm had won 2-0 at home to Monaco, who then thumped the Istanbul side.

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Phil Ball remembers Grimsby Town's 1979-80 season

There’s pleasure in purgatory. Thus speaks the Grims­by Town supporter, a strange creature stuck out in the wilds of north-east Lincolnshire, miles from any­where, in a cut-off place with a cut-off mentality to boot. If you are handed the burden of following this club from an early age, you very soon learn that you are likely to spend the rest of your life having the piss taken out of you, a curious state of affairs which nevertheless hardens you and makes you all the more determined to face things out – to go into the world, as Val Doonican might have put it, walking straight and looking at your adversaries in the eye.

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Gary Oliver analyses the impact of any premature elimination from European football for Rangers

Following Rangers’ trouncing in Gothenburg, acting skipper Jonas Thern complained that he had suffered cramp through having to cover for colleagues who had gone AWOL. But it was not only certain players whose whereabouts were unknown: Walter Smith vanished until the following week, it later emerging that he had been in hospital for a minor operation. Numbed by watching his latest batch of expensive imports capitulate in almost unimaginable fashion, Smith would have had little need for an anaesthetic.

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