A small portion of despair and enlightenment delivered to your inbox every Friday
7 November 2008 ~
Earlier this week Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour Al Nahyan paid £5 billion to become the major shareholder at Barclays Bank. Expect to hear that he will make the youngest executives redundant, replacing them with expensive Brazilian staff to no great effect.
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 Badge of the week
AS Roma’s badge appears to depict two drunk children trying to milk a bear. Milking a grizzly is a pretty dangerous activity even for an expert – it might be something Jack Osbourne could ask Phil Tufnell and Bez to do on Adrenaline Junkies. However, if we look more closely at our Italian myths and legends we understand that the city of Rome was founded by two brothers, Romulus and Remus, who were raised by a she-wolf after their nasty stepfather threw them in the river. And this is the story told in the picture. The artist appears to have drawn the wolf-bear a little out of scale in comparison to the boys and one might quibble that little Romulus and Remus are going to do their necks in suckling like that. The wolf wants to be lying on her side, surely, to enable freer access to her teats. These caveats aside, it is a tableau suffused with historical drama and you have to bear in mind that other cities don’t have such rich imagery to play with. Were MK Dons to likewise illustrate the birth of their city they would be forced to use an image of a fluttering grid plan held up by a couple of urban theorists. Cameron Carter
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If you’re thinking of having a bet on the FA Cup first round this weekend be aware that Howl regular Dean “Midas” Maynard is backing Blyth Spartans to beat Shrewsbury Town. Dean, who helped Torquay to 4-1 victory over Yeovil at the same stage last year, says: “No one gave me a hope when I backed Torquay United but look what happened.” Hard luck Shrewsbury – unearthly powers are arraigned against ye.
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Long Players The Glorious History Of Football’s Full Length Recordings  Sempre Roma The German 1990 World Cup Squad
Should anyone ever offer you the choice of listening to this LP in full from start to finish or taking a two-week holiday in Milton Keynes with Joey Barton, then quickly pack your bags and prepare for a fortnight of new town high-jinks with the chippy Newcastle United and England midfielder. I swear you won’t regret it.
Austrian soft-rocker Udo Jürgens is the architect of this 13-song sub-krautrock act of cultural homicide. None of the songs comes in at less than a tortuous three minutes, and not for a second does the backing music deign to rise above the level of a 1970s Bavarian wedding band, except perhaps for the not-quite-dirty bass line of single Wir Sind Schon Auf Dem Brenner. Lame puns abound, all of them too elaborate and depressing to explain.
Some statutory Italian lyrics and riffs are chucked in, breaking off from the standard themes of victory, goals, celebration and world unity through football to fantasise about meeting a sultry signorina in the middle of the night. The Kaiser Rap is credited as a Jürgens/Beckenbauer duet, but the latter only gets to speak the words Schau ’mer mal (Let’s see) in the chorus. Perhaps he was banned from the studio for his purple shell-suit. In fact everyone’s wearing shell suits and white socks except for Udo, who picked up some stuff last minute from the Salvation Army jumble sale – a sartorial reflection of the record’s impressively consistent sonic impairment. Ian Plenderleith
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from James Waterson
“Civil Service Strollers FC get the occasional mention in the press for their performances in the Scottish Cup. Their Wikipedia entry also claims that they have a tasty crew.”
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WSC Trivia ~ No 40
In WSC 66, we published a letter from a reader who thought that Sweden's Joachim Bjorklund reminded him of someone:
Dear WSC
Just a few words to express my sincerest best wishes to darling Glenda Jackson in her new career as left full-back for the Swedish national football team.
A Bates
Yorkshire
To our considerable surprise, Glenda Jackson replied (on House of Commons notepaper) in a letter published two months later:
Dear WSC
I am writing to thank you for publication of the letter of A Bates which appeared in your August edition. For years I thought that my footballing talents would pass unrecognised. But now I can hold my head up alongside such greats as Magnus Erlingmark.
And to think that Tranmere Rovers wouldn't look at me...
Glenda Jackson MP
House of Commons
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Stickipedia
A mine of information constructed from sticker cards
 Carlos MacAllister, Argentina Panini World Cup 94
Scotland were represented at the 1994 World Cup by Glasgow-born Ray Houghton who scored the Republic of Ireland’s goal in their defeat of Italy. But when the Panini album was published a few months before the finals, another player with Scottish connections had been expected to take part. A short, ginger left-back with Boca Juniors, Carlos MacAllister featured in Argentina’s play-off games against Australia but was surprisingly left out of their finals squad. Argentinian players are often referred to using their middle name as well as their first name but in Carlos Javier’s case it also helped distinguish him from his footballing older brother, Carlos Patricio MacAllister, a forward with Estudiantes de la Plata. The pair, whose paternal ancestors had migrated from Fifeshire, now run a renowned coaching school in their native city of Santa Rosa.
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