A small portion of despair and enlightenment delivered to your inbox every Friday
5 September 2008 ~
Despite Kevin Keegan only officially leaving Newcastle United last night, the “King Kev” range had already been discounted on the club's website on Tuesday – among other items “He's Back!” mugs and “Walking in a Keegan Wonderland” T-shirts were half price. We were hoping to link through to this but sadly it's already disappeared from the online shop – Mike Ashley knows about retail, you see. Something you might have seen in the overblown coverage of the whole affair is a banner urging Newcastle fans to make their feelings clear by not going to games. But at least one man in Newcastle has noticed the questionable spelling.
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 Badge of the week
Barnsley’s badge is quite nice really. There’s certainly lots to see in it. On the right we have a miner dressed casually for a linen party with a Davy lamp perched rather dangerously in his breast pocket. Mind you, Health & Safety was rubbish in the days when we still had coal mines. The man on the left is clearly a romantic figure – a wavy-haired DH Lawrence type who has perhaps taught himself Marxism by torchlight down the pit; here seen stealthily stoking his home-made petrol bomb in preparation for a revolutionary outrage. Astride the badge, which bears the usual interchangeable municipal iconography, is a baleful winged creature. The main thing one can glean from this crest is how much nicer working men’s shirts were in the old days. Just look at those manly billows. The Latin motto on the bottom literally translates as Spectacles Agenda, suggesting that people who wear glasses are motivated by shadowy forces. And Pol Pot, for one, would agree. Cameron Carter ---
from Mik Henry
“Huddersfield midfielder Jim Goodwin seems to have had his Wikipedia entry adapted by a disgruntled Scunthorpe fan.”
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Historic Football Websites No 20 ~ Aki Riihilahti
The site of the Finnish soccer sage used to attract visitors fascinated by his tortuous English, free association of ideas and scatter-gun humour. Seven years on and Aki is still writing columns, despite having moved on from Crystal Palace to Djurgarden IF by way of Kaiserslautern. He’s mellower, and more at home with the language, but still worth a read. “Everything changes,” he recently mused. “I saw in my time at Palace around 200 hundred games and team-mates, one promotion and relegation, 7 managers, 10 physios, 2 sets of furniture and an endless amount of memories, details and good people. But there was only one Dougie Freedman.” Another day, another Stockholm museum: “I had the luxury of choosing between Swedish or English tour, but after the first jokes from fat geek speaking nasal sounds through his glasses I decided to go solo anyway.” As you’d expect. Ian Plenderleith
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This week in history ~ Division One, September 6, 1986
Results
Glyn Hodges scored the goal at Watford that took Wimbledon two points clear at the top. They then slid into the bottom half after taking one point in six games, but finally came sixth which was to be their highest ever League placing.
Wimbledon’s average crowd of 7,810 was the lowest in the First Division since Stoke’s 5,605 in 1906-07. One of the other two promoted teams, Charlton, also drew under 10,000 on average, as tenants at Selhurst Park. Charlton stayed up on the final day by winning to home to QPR while rivals Leicester drew at Oxford.
Man Utd won their next match, 5-1 against Southampton, but they didn’t get out of the bottom half until February and finished 11th; Aberdeen manager Alex Ferguson replaced Ron Atkinson in November with the team one place above the relegation zone.
Villa’s goal against Oxford was a Simon Stainrod penalty. He was to be their joint top scorer with six goals alongside centre-half Allan Evans, all of whose goals were from the spot. Villa sacked manager Graham Turner a week later after a 6-0 defeat at Forest. His replacement was Billy McNeill, from Manchester City, who also ended up going down (with Mel Machin in charge).
Newcastle’s 3-2 loss to Sheffield Wed was the first time they had begun a season with three successive home defeats. They were in the relegation places at Easter but finished five points clear of the drop thanks to a flurry of goals from Paul Goddard who was signed from West Ham in November.
After a slow start Everton won the title by nine points from Liverpool. After the two had swapped places a couple of times, March 28 proved to be a crucial day. Everton went top by winning 1-0 at Arsenal while Liverpool were beaten 2-1 by Wimbledon at Anfield – it was the first time that Ian Rush had scored and been on a losing side.
Rush was second top scorer with 30 league goals, three behind Clive Allen of Spurs who also scored in the second minute of the FA Cup final, which Coventry won 3-2.
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WSC Trivia ~ No 31
The building door next to the WSC office had been empty for while. Then suddenly a new cafe appeared almost overnight, with a bar, and tables and chairs. Great, we’ll go in at lunchtime. Look, there are people sat at the tables. But no one seems to be serving – they’re just sat there surrounded by empty cups. Now here’s a big van, and another. Someone’s bringing out arc lights. Oh, it’s a video shoot. All that effort and it’s all going to be taken down again in a day. Just for the sake of Natalie Imbruglia. And here she is miming at a table with her guitar. They’re blocking the roads, redirecting traffic. Someone’s sat on the pavement with a clipboard on their knees shouting into a mobile: “Tell Sasha I called... Sasha, no, yes, tell her I called.” They’re all drinking out of polystyrene cups from a takeaway. That’s because they’d found out that there isn’t a good cafe nearby. The song wasn’t even a hit.
Further to our recent Trivia item about student helpers, Tim Turner says: “I too did work experience at WSC, in the winter of 1990, and although I’m not sure you can take much of the credit, I did go on to forge what you might loosely term a ‘career’ in journalism. I seem to remember spending most of my time on the phone to independent record shops in Hull and Bristol, trying to persuade them to either (a) pay their bills or (b) take more copies of the magazine, and occasionally both. I was also sent off to the Maltese consulate to collect a rare photo of a football stadium in Valletta that was needed to illustrate an article. The bloke there behaved as if it was the oddest request he’d ever experienced.”
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Stickipedia
A mine of information constructed from sticker cards
 Johnny Giles, Leeds Utd and Dietmar Bruck, Coventry City Wonderful World Of Soccer Stars, 1969-70
So you need to find a shot of Coventry’s German-born full-back Dietmar Bruck. But all you’ve got is a picture of his head and time is running out. Wait a minute, though. Johnny Giles is a similar build, so let’s just stick Bruck’s head on Giles’s body, recolour it, adding a nice brown tan to the legs, reverse the image and shade in the background a bit. It might be 40 years before anyone notices. Best not to let Dietmar see it, though, as he’s got a bit of a temper. ---
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