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12 September 2008 ~

If you know anyone with a renewed interest in the England team since Wednesday, there’s an auction they might be interested in. The Wembley goalline from the 1966 World Cup final, dug up three years later and relaid in a TV executive’s back garden, is to be sold online. All proceeds to chariddee, of course.

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Badge of the week
Scunthorpe’s club crest is a distinctive attempt at the triumphalist communist iconography of Stalinist Russia. It suggests that if the workers (here, the Scunthorpe first team squad) were united and worked very hard for five years while not going to the pub much, they could very well make the play-offs. Strength through labour, commitment to the cause and love of your club are the essential values here, while pretty triangles in midfield are less so. Players, one senses, are rewarded by the amount of ground they cover in a game and the example they set to the whole club. There may be a large poster of defender/assistant manager Andy Crosby waving a large flag and towering above a small opposition strike force, above the words “Through Strength We Bring Peace To All Nations”. There might not be, but the possibility is there. Of course, with the iron and steel industry not such a big employer in Britain these days, the fist in the club crest should more accurately be clenched round a share certificate or Dorothy Perkins gift voucher, but the vigour of the image would remain intact, to inspire all of Scunthorpe to work together, in these difficult times, for the common good. Cameron Carter

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from Mark Robinson
“A freezing night in Bochum, prior to a 2. Bundesliga match against MSV Duisburg in 1995. I’m standing with a group of snow-covered Bochum zine sellers who are also collecting signatures on a petition protesting about the Monday night kick-off, arranged for the benefit of a satellite channel. A group of former players get out of a car and walk past us towards the stadium. One is Rudiger Abramczik, a winger who played in the 1978 World Cup. He stops and asks if the petition is a complaint about the weather. Well, no. Which deity would it have been sent to?”

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Historic Football Websites No 21 ~ Historical Football Kits
There are quite a few sites showing teams’ kits down the ages, but this is the most informative and comprehensive I’ve come across. Right down to showing how the colours of Third Lanark’s socks changed from the 1930-32 period to the 1932-35 period, with a potted club history beneath all the carefully laid out kits. And will you just look at Lincoln City’s sole experiment to deviate from red-based uniforms – a depressingly dark green shirt with black knickerbockers that must have rendered them all but invisible on gloomy winter afternoons between 1897 and 1900. If it’s a slow day at a job you hate, log in first thing and before you know it, it’ll be time to go home, taking a ton of useful hue-based historical football knowledge with you. Ian Plenderleith

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from Nick Dunmore
"Darius Vassell’s religious beliefs are called into question by a Wikipedia contributor."


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Several readers have pointed out an error in last week’s Statto.com feature on the 1986-87 season. Ian Rush did not in fact score in Liverpool’s 2-1 defeat by Wimbledon – that was Kenny Dalglish. The first time that Liverpool lost when Rush scored was in their League Cup final defeat to Arsenal later in the same season. We’re blaming this on a work experience student even though we don’t have any.

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WSC Trivia ~ No 32
In March 1989 WSC arranged for a coachload of readers to go to Albania where England were playing a World Cup qualifier. This generated some publicity and a TV crew even filmed the coach setting off from the WSC office. This was faked a day ahead of the real departure which was late in the evening. Friends of WSC staff boarded the coach for the staged send-off, including someone on sick leave who got into trouble with his employers when the footage appeared on local London news.

We failed to make our Dover ferry connection because the coach’s brakes partially seized up, which meant that we spent part of the night in a bus garage. But spirits remained high. Better that it should happen now, we said, than on a mountain road somewhere in Yugoslavia. A day and half later, the brakes failed again, on a mountain road somewhere in Yugoslavia. It wasn’t a steep gradient, however, and the driver managed to ease the coach to a stop. We then had to pay £20 each in cash to a local tour firm for a replacement coach to take us to the Albanian border. We reached the provincial town of Shkodra in time for the Under-21 fixture, and the first of several rather tense encounters with a group of England hooligans who had also made the trip. But that’s a story for another time.

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Stickipedia  
A mine of information constructed from sticker cards

Rudi Gutendorf, coach, Tennis Borussia Berlin Bergmann Fussball 1976-77
The Berlin club Tennis Borussia were to be relegated at the end of this season, one of only two spent in the Bundesliga, but they were just a brief stopping point for the peripatetic Rudi Gutendorf whose next job was with Kevin Keegan’s Hamburg. Keegan later wrote: “Rudi often conducted team talks in three languages: in German, of course, then in English for me and, finally, in French for our Yugoslav defender Ivan Buljan. I often heard Rudi doing multi-lingual shouts from the dugout - ‘Very nice’ to me, ‘Tres bien’ to Ivan – but he only lasted four months.” Gutendorf took charge of nine German league clubs in a total of 38 coaching posts in a record-breaking 28 countries, many of his national team appointments being short-term contracts organised by the German federation. (His personal website counts 54 jobs in total, although that includes his playing career plus things like “1980: FIFA lecture Philippines”). Given that Gutendorf didn’t hang around anywhere for long, it’s not surprising that he didn’t win a major trophy, the closest he got being to take Schalke 04 to the German cup final in 1969.

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League table courtesy of www.statto.com: the place to go for football stats & odds comparison – English & Scottish stats from 1871 plus European & International

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