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16 May 2008 ~

We’re sneezing and coughing here – it must be FA Cup fever. Having been spared a Big Four borefest, we don’t mind who wins. All that matters is that TV reporters don’t grab Tony Adams for a few words before or after the game. He’s big and he’s intense and, worst of all, he’s in constant contact with his emotions. As he said at a sponsors’ lunch earlier this week: “When the spotlight's on there's no hiding place and it takes tremendous courage to actually make yourself vulnerable and put yourself out there. I'm very, very proud that I've got no PR training and I never ever want any. You're going to get me, warts and all, and Harry's very similar. Sometimes you can get undone by that, but we could all sit here and say nothing.” Please do that, Tony. Brrr.

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Badge of the week
As you would expect, First Vienna are so-named because they were the first football club created in the Austrian capital, by another group of those British workmen who spent their free time abroad hacking at each other's shins when they might have been reading or learning a musical instrument. The badge was devised by one of their early players, William Beale, and based on the three-legged emblem of his native Isle of Man. The current design features the chubbiest legs seen in a football context since the heyday of Francis Lee, but in Beale's original they were distinctly stick-like while the ball resembled a leather casey. Since the 1970s Austrian clubs have been permitted, scandalously, to add sponsors’ names to their official titles. In First’s case this currently involves Fernwärme, a heating company. But they have fared far worse. In the 1980s, they were known as Rank Xerox Vienna and, the shame of it, McDonald's Vienna, a connection that involved a dirty great big M despoiling the shirts. Sibneft Chelsea sounds about right, though.

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It is surely only a matter of time before every football writer on the national press gets his own Wikipedia entry. But such recognition can prove to be a burden, as has been the case for the Daily Mirror’s Oliver Holt. His column in the Mirror this week contained a good-natured, if overlong, acknowledgement of the feuds that led to the rewriting of his Wiki entry by supporters of Reading and the “crude, lewd and somewhat crass observations of a group of liberal intellectuals purporting to be fans of West Ham”. What he was referring to has already changed but handily Wikipedia keeps an archive of all the previous versions of its pages, however questionable.

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Historic Football Websites No 6 ~ The Global Game
I’ve been singing the praises of this US-based site ever since it was founded over five years ago, in both WSC and other publications. Yet whenever I ask people if they ever read it, they claim they’ve never heard of it. Which just goes to show my gargantuan influence on football internet reading habits. Rather than risk repeating myself, I’m just going to repeat one of my previous testimonials, which appears on the site’s front page: “Its strength is to look at, or link to, the game as a cultural, political and often personal reflection of a world where sport is just the starting point for an enlightening insight into life’s triumphs, cruelties and creative force.” Or, as site author John Turnbull puts it: “Our interest primarily is in the role of football in daily life around the world, the more remote from us the better. We are a one-person operation, with no budget, no sponsors, few advertisers and no FIFA connections.” Now tell me you’re not curious. Ian Plenderleith

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Following on from our reference to When Saturday Comes the film in last week’s Howl, has anyone seen what we assume to be Joan Collins’s sole appearance in a football film, L’Arbitro? It claims to be based on the life of FIFA referee Concetto Lo Bello who refereed the 1968 European Cup final. Lo Bello was also Christian Democrat mayor of the Sicilian town of Syracuse, albeit only for five months. The keywords “Soccer”, “Sicily” and “Sex Comedy” suggest a plot based around a series of humorous misunderstandings in which semi-naked footballers have to hide from Joan Collins’s jealous husband, so we can’t think why it remains obscure.

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This week in history ~ Division Two, May 18, 1963



Results

The 35-year-old Tommy Harmer, who had spent most of his career with Spurs, only got one goal in the eight games he played for Chelsea but it proved to be vital. Victory at rivals Sunderland left Chelsea needing to beat Portsmouth at Stamford Bridge the following Tuesday. They won 7-0 with four goals from Bobby Tambling, who was the division’s top scorer with 35, plus a penalty from the 20-year-old Terry Venables.

Another veteran scoring his only goal of the season was Stanley Matthews, who got Stoke’s second in their defeat of Luton. Matthews, who was 48, played 31 games in his side’s title-winning season and was to play another ten matches at the top level before retiring in 1965.

Luton, who had been FA Cup finalists four years earlier, were on a slide that took them from Division One to Division Four in five seasons.

Brian Clough hit 24 goals in as many games for Sunderland before a knee injury in the Boxing Day match with Bury brought about his early retirement. Both the Tyne-Wear derbies had drawn crowds of just over 62,000 but Newcastle’s gate for their last home match, against Preston the preceding Saturday, was just 13,552.

South African striker Albert Johanesson, one of the first black players to make a big impact in League football, scored in Leeds’ thrashing of Swansea. Don Revie’s side were to be promoted the following year and four players who took part in the Swansea game went on to win the League title – Jack Charlton, Paul Reaney, Norman Hunter and Gary Sprake.

Portsmouth’s wing-half Jimmy Dickinson was the last remaining link with the club’s championship-winning teams of 1949-50 and 1950-51. Their top scorer with 19 goals was the fearsome Ron Saunders, later to win the league as manager of Aston Villa.

Having beaten Southampton, Charlton could escape relegation by winning at Walsall in their last match. They duly survived with a 2-1 victory, their second goal coming from Keith Peacock, father of Gavin, who became the first substitute used in a League match on the opening day of 1965-66.

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from Simon Melville
“I know Intro of the Month is in the paper version of WSC, but you have to admit that this is a hell of an intro from the Garforth Town website's match report on their recent home game against FC United of Manchester, written by Daniel Fletcher.”

In April 1945, Soviet writers such as Ilya Ehrenburg gloated that the Red Army hordes were marauding through the Third Reich and “the lair of the fascist beast”. Sixty-three years later, the red hordes of Greater Manchester and numerous other places descended on peaceful Garforth as Town looked to enjoy their proposed end of season carnival devoid of trouble. While the day was memorable, the questionable conduct of many led this writer in particular to ponder as to why the fixture was treated by the visitors as Leeds versus Manchester United in a hotbed of activity at the Genix Healthcare Stadium.”

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WSC Trivia ~ No 15
In the early days of WSC we used to take copies of the latest issue to shops around central London in a Ford van whose bonnet would sometimes spring up, partially obscuring the driver’s vision. This didn’t seem dangerous on our main delivery run, to Sportspages bookshop a couple of miles from the WSC office, as the traffic was so slow that we could have walked it in half the time. Towards the end of its useful life, the van was stolen from outside the office. However, it was soon found only a hundred yards away with the bonnet, a built-in anti-theft device, proudly in the upright position.

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Stickipedia  
A mine of information constructed from sticker cards

Ivan Golac & Radomir Antic, Partizan Belgrade Fudbaleri i Timovi, 1974-75
Two Yugoslav defenders who played in England and have since had contrasting experiences as managers. Having made over 150 appearances for Southampton, Ivan Golac spent a year as boss of Torquay then, in 1994, became the only Dundee Utd manager ever to win the Scottish Cup with a defeat of Rangers. Golac, who claimed to have learned English from Rolling Stones records, left Tannadice the following year after a poor run of results and has since worked in Iceland and Ukraine. Radomir Antic scored the late goal at Man City that kept Luton in Division One in 1982-83, triggering what a WSC contributor rightly described as “an erratic cavort” across the Maine Road pitch by David Pleat. Antic has since coached six clubs in Spain including Real Madrid, Barcelona and Atletico Madrid, with whom he achieved a league and cup double in 1995-96. Many years before, Antic had encountered a future WSC staff member at a branch of Our Price Records. He wanted to buy a copy of Infidels by Bob Dylan but it wasn’t in stock. Today he could probably afford to pay Bob Dylan to perform it in his back garden.

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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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