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Search: 'Luzhniki Stadium'

Stories

Artificial intelligence

wsc319Gary Andrews explains how 3G pitches are becoming a more attractive option for non-League clubs, despite resistance from the FA

As the 2012-13 non-League season reached its climax, plenty of clubs will have envied Maidstone United. This wasn’t due to the Stones’ league position – they finished second in the Isthmian League Division One South and were promoted through the play-offs – but instead it was because of their 3G pitch, which registered just one postponement during the season. Non-League is more susceptible to bad weather than higher divisions but even allowing for the inevitable winter postponements, this year’s extended cold snap, snow and rain led to huge fixture pile-ups across the divisions, as reported in WSC 314.

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Thinking Inside The Box

308 SahaReflections on life as a Premier League footballer
by Louis Saha
Vision Sports, £14.99
Reviewed by Simon Hart
From WSC 308 October 2012

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It was in the wake of the darkest hour of his life in football, when injury robbed him of the chance to play in the 2008 Champions League final, that Louis Saha began writing down the thoughts filling his troubled mind. Saha wept in his wife’s arms in the Luzhniki Stadium that night and would soon leave Manchester United for Everton, yet his writing became a crutch and eventually led to a book that is quite unlike your usual footballer’s offering.

“Eclectic” is how Saha describes his approach in the preface to Thinking Inside The Box, in which he combines memoir with musings on a range of football-related topics: media, money, racism, fans, music. And eclectic is a fitting word for a book that does not list medals won or goals scored but instead references Sir Trevor McDonald, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the Leveson Inquiry, quotes Sean Penn, questions the French education system, praises the Bakewell tart, and cites statistics about CCTV cameras and anorexia sufferers.

It starts with Saha’s wry observation that his name means health in Arabic. “Me: plagued by injury,” he notes. It is certainly ironic that a player who acquired a reputation as injury-prone, even work-shy, should provide two poignant passages on the pain of missing matches. As well as the 2008 Champions League final, when his asthma meant he could not take the painkilling injection administered to Nemanja Vidic, he recalls his nausea after the booking that ruled him out of the 2006 World Cup final, adding lyrically: “My throbbing head was trapped in the referee’s pocket.”

Saha, with his evident love of the “paradise” of English football, denudes any notions about himself “not caring”. He does the same for the one-dimensional image of the footballer, writing with empathy about team-mates yet acknowledging their weaknesses. Wayne Rooney is capable of smashing a mobile phone in anger on the team bus yet also of answering every question in a quiz. Nicolas Anelka, a contemporary at the Clairefontaine national academy, had “tenacity, tinged with a touch of madness”. There is even understanding for young players who use prostitutes rather than risk kiss-and-tells.

The book’s French title, Du Quartier Aux Etoiles – “From the streets to the stars” is a rough translation – evokes his journey from a poor district of Paris under the guiding hand of his disciplinarian father, an immigrant from Guadeloupe, but while retelling his rise Saha provides a broader scope by including the thoughts of old team-mates like Patrice Evra, Thierry Henry, Zinédine Zidane and Phil Neville, and his manager at Old Trafford, Alex Ferguson.

Translated from French, the book has an idiosyncratic style – “bro” and “lol” crop up a lot while a chapter on money introduces an imagined “Mam’zelle Starfucker” and “Mr Bling”. Saha’s approach to money betrays an ambivalence – he lists his expensive cars yet worries his children are spoiled. Meanwhile, he gives his wife Aurélie a chapter to offer a WAG’s perspective, laments the demise of traditional values and yet declares that total honesty is the wrong approach with a woman “because what you say goes in one ear and comes out through her mouth, with added ammo”.

This ambivalence is a virtue of a book that asks questions while seeking no easy answers. It is not something you heard every week at Goodison Park, but full marks to Saha for trying.

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Turf wars

wsc303Visiting teams complain about the pitch, but the Luzhniki Stadium deals with the Russian weather, writes Sasha Goryunov

In May 2008, Chelsea and Manchester United contested the Champions League final at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. There was something unusual about the playing surface: it was grass. For one match only, turf was brought in from Slovakia. In fact, this was the second set of imported grass. The original failed to take root and had to be replaced just two weeks before the game. John Terry might wish they hadn’t bothered.

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Seasonal variation

The Russian League plan to switch to playing through the winter, but James Appell wonders if anyone checked the weather forecast

Russia in winter is not an especially pleasant place, even when you’re wearing a thick coat. It can’t be any better wearing football kit. But the Russian Football Premier League (RFPL) have in recent years been considering moving the season of the top two divisions from summer to winter, in keeping with the majority of Europe’s major championships. Russia’s footballers will have been phoning through orders for thermal underwear since July 29 when the RFPL officially unveiled the plan to switch to an autumn-spring season by 2012. “The most important of our goals is the move to an autumn-spring system,” RFPL president Sergey Pryadkin told the press. “It’s difficult to give a fixed time-frame at this moment, but we expect this to occur in an even-numbered year where there will be a break for the European Championship or World Cup. It’s possible that it will be 2012. This is the way forward from a commercial point of view.”

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Pitch invasion

Forget about dodgy bounces at Kenilworth Road, plastic is back and, if it can get past a bit of red tape, could be the answer to football’s problems. As Steve Menary explains, they’re even complaining about the quality of the grass in Amsterdam

This was supposed to be the year of the artificial turf revolution, so where is it? Not that awful plastic stuff that left players with terrible burns, but a hi-tech mixture of man-made fibre and real grass has been allowed in the Champions League, UEFA Cup and Intertoto Cup for the first time this season.X

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