Search: 'Ruud van Nistelrooy'

Seb White looks back over the season where Gary Johnson’s insatiable Yeovil Town strolled to succes

The long-term significance
In the summer of 2002 the Football League finally approved an extra promotion/relegation place between the top tier of non-League football and Division Three. In 1987 the controversial election process had been replaced with one promotion and relegation spot between the two. Strict ground regulations saw three clubs in the mid-1990s being denied promotion, this and the increasing good fortune of non-League sides in the FA Cup saw a clamour for change.
 The decision to increase movement between the divisions has been vindicated with all the teams that finished in the top six this season now members of the Football League. Three other sides – Barnet, Stevenage Borough and Burton Albion – have also made the step up. The extra promotion place has also done those relegated from the Football League a favour with Shrewsbury Town, Carlisle Utd, Exeter City and Torquay Utd all returning via the play-offs.

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Six months after winning La Liga, Bernd Schuster has been sacked by Real Madrid. Phil Ball thinks it was always a mismatch

And so Bernie Schuster is gone – he of the porn moustache and the Pringle sweaters. Sacked by Real Madrid, by “mutual agreement” five days before the clásico at the Camp Nou, he has walked off after 18 months with a paltry €7 million (£6.6m), and is currently taking calls on his mobile for his next job, from the leafy confines of Madrid’s swankiest golf course.

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Dear WSC
I thoroughly enjoyed your blow-by-blow review of Euro 2008, noting with some reassurance that I’m not the only one driven to distraction by the so-called expert input of BBC and ITV pundits. However your assessment of the Holland-Italy game surprised me somewhat. The furious and defiant ignorance of the laws of the game displayed by Clive Tyldesley and David Pleat with respect to Ruud van Nistelrooy’s goal were surely worthy of comment, indeed arguably the most damning condemnation of their failure in their roles in providing insight and ­explanation. Instead, you bafflingly seem to support their case and argue, in effect, that an official ought to base an offside call on whether he believes a player is faking an injury or not. Actually he’d already made that call by not stopping the game to permit treatment to the Italian defender in question, who had in effect left the field without permission and thus had to be playing the Dutch striker onside. One shudders to imagine the Machiavellian tricks that some domestic managers would concoct were it possible to play an opponent offside by tumbling off the pitch in a writhing heap. Next you’ll be condemning cliched and inappropriate English attitudes to the German team alongside an anglicised spelling of “dummkopf”…
Matt Rowson, Watford

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You Are The Ref challenge is back and testing would-be refs, writes Ian Plenderleith

In the future, everyone will be a referee for 15 minutes. Ruud van Nistelrooy’s goal for Holland against Italy at Euro 2008 not only prompted a fervent discussion about the offside laws, it also exposed the fact that players, ex-players, pundits and fans alike for once had something in common – very few of us are truly familiar with the laws of the game. By a nice coincidence, the BBC website chose Euro 2008 to revive the You Are The Ref column that puts exactly such unusual scenarios to its reader, and then lets them get on with exposing their own ignorance.

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The Uncut Story of a Football Genius
by Daniel Taylor
Aurum Press, £16.99
Reviewed by Ashley Shaw
From WSC 247 September 2007 

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Daniel Taylor of the Guardian has penned a diary of the last two seasons at Manchester United from a pressman’s point of view. Rarely have two seasons brought such contrasting fortunes – after the loss of Ruud van Nistelrooy and Roy Keane in the first, most writers predicted United would struggle in the second, only for Alex Ferguson to turn the tables spectacularly with a title win that earned the astonished admiration of fans, players and journalists.

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