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15 August 2008 ~

Boo. Among the many transfer sagas that have lurched on through this summer the one we’ve been enjoying the most was Newcastle’s pursuit of Fabricio Coloccini from Deportivo La Coruña. This was concluded today with the Argentine centre-back likely to be the squad for Sunday’s match with Man Utd. We’d been paying attention to the drawn-out deal because that impetuous soccer nut Mike Ashley had Coloccini’s name printed on the back of his Toon shirt several weeks ago, and we were picturing his look of crestfallen puzzlement if the deal failed to happen. Is that what we’ve come to? Yes, yes, it is.

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Badge of the week
Racing entrepreneur John Batchelor made the news earlier this year when he announced plans, later rebuffed, to take over ailing Mansfield Town and rename them Harchester United after the club featured in Sky’s Dream Team. York City had been subjected to some of Batchelor’s inane marketing ideas when he briefly took control of the club in 2002. The most glaring was the redesigning of the badge. The chequered flag reflected the connection to Batchelor’s motor sports team while SC stood for soccer club, which was supposedly going to help market York City in the US. After Batchelor departed a year later, York reverted to being a football club with a new badge based on the city’s coat of arms. The renaming of the club’s stadium Bootham Crescent as KitKat Crescent sounds like a Batchelor stunt but was the result of a sponsorship deal with Nestlé, owners of the local Rowntrees factory. Mike Eason

Manchester City lost to Midtjylland last night. Although not one of the better known Danish clubs, longer term Howl readers will have had some extra information with which to impress their friends and colleagues as they featured in Badge of the week back in April.

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It’s a long time since we’ve looked forward to a book as much as Footynotes: The Ultimate Countdown of Football Trivia by comedy songwriter Richard Digance and guffawing Sky man Chris Kamara. Our excitement has been prompted a line in the publisher’s blurb: “A big fan of football, Digance is happy to make jokes at Kamara’s expense, thus forming a comic partnership the equal of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.” Quite how this will manifest itself in print is unclear. Might there be a hint of sarcasm in the blurb’s tone?

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Historic Football Websites No 17 ~ The Brian Glanville Column
It is my firm belief that Brian Glanville will live forever. Every week he posts his column to the World Soccer website, still as bitterly passionate about the incompetence of FIFA and the FA as he has been for the last half century. There’s every chance that he’ll mention the Chelsea Casuals, the Sunday side he ran for many years, and the Solti-Lobo scandal of the 1970s. He’s not keen on Mrs Beckham. This week he writes, somewhat typically: “As a schoolboy Arsenal fan, I still remember, though I didn’t see it, the remarkable match between Aldershot and the Gunners in 1942.” You may be able to telegraph his opinions several paragraphs in advance, but you always want to read on. The legend lives. Ian Plenderleith

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Spotting players (and managers)
from Gareth Meadway
“Squeezing onto the 18.23 train from London Charing Cross to Hayes, I saw Neil Warnock returning home after a day out in London. He was accompanied by – presumably – his wife and son. They were laden with bags from Covent Garden’s Jubilee market so they’d obviously been on a shopping trip to celebrate scraping past Hereford in the League Cup on Tuesday night. He was on the phone quite a lot but not loud enough for me to hear anything. Which, let’s face it, is probably a blessing where Warnock is concerned.”

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WSC Trivia ~ No 28
WSC’s previous office was on the top floor of a four-storey building shared with three other companies. Visitors would get in via an intercom but we weren’t able see them until they turned up outside our door. One of the other companies was the Environmental Investigation Agency who were running a campaign against North Sea whaling. One day they told us to only admit visitors by opening the front door ourselves rather than buzzing them in, as they had heard that some Norwegian whalers, in London for a conference, were going to stage a counter-protest outside their office. At lunchtime the buzzer went and a voice said “I vant to com in”. We asked who they were. There was a delay, then “Post, you haf post”. By the time we went down to the ground floor they had gone, having thrown a tin of white paint over the window. This was first of several such incidents – it seemed that every time they were in town they’d drop by with a tin of matt emulsion. But we got off lightly – they might have squeezed the remains of a whale through the letterbox.

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Stickipedia  
A mine of information constructed from sticker cards

Mike Smith, Egypt coach Football 1987
While playing for Corinthian Casuals and working as a teacher, Mike Smith was a member of the last Great Britain squad to compete at the Olympics, in 1960. Having not played or coached at League level he was a surprise choice as Wales national manager in 1974. However he was a big success, taking the team to the latter stages of the European Championship in 1976, where they lost Yugoslavia in the quarter-finals. Leaving the Welsh set-up after five years, Smith then had a brief spell at Hull City which included a first ever relegation to Division Four in 1981, before a three-year stint with Egypt where he is credited with laying the foundation for their only World Cup qualification to date, in 1990. After returning to Wales as an assistant, he became manager again in 1994 but left after just over a year following six defeats in nine games including a 5-0 thrashing in Georgia. Smith was also responsible for launching the international career of the tangentially Welsh Vinnie Jones. Even that second spell might be remembered with some fondness by Wales supporters, though, given that Smith was succeeded by Bobby Gould.

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