Reviews from When Saturday Comes. Follow the link to buy the book from Amazon.
Viewed as romantic story in the FA Cup, Team Bath are considered very differently at league level. Tim Lezard explains why they are attracting hostility from their opposition
You probably remember Team Bath FC as the plucky students who lost to Mansfield Town in the FA Cup back in 2002, in front of 5,000 fans.
Few promotion parties have been as damp a squib as Lewes' and, as Joel Abraham explains, it's been all downhill from there
How do you reward a promotion-winning team? In Lewes’s case, you sack the manager and sell the entire squad. The Rooks’ first ever Blue Square Premier game against Kidderminster Harriers saw ten of the starting XI making their debuts, led by a manager who had never managed before. Four months and 12 defeats later, they are rock bottom of the league, and will in all likelihood be returning to the Blue Square South considerably worse off than when they left it.
David Norris's goal celebration in support of jailed friend Luke McCormick upset many, including the bereaved family. Csaba Abrahall reports
Shortly after his former team-mate Luke McCormick had been imprisoned for causing the deaths of ten-year-old Arron Peak and his brother Ben, eight, in a drink-driving accident, Ipswich midfielder David Norris told the local Evening Star newspaper that he intended to stand by McCormick, a close friend from their time together at Plymouth, while insisting: “I don’t want to do anything that causes them [the Peak family] upset.” These are two aims he seems to have had immediate difficulty in reconciling.
What’s it like to have not seen your team play for 15 years?Matt Nation makes an unsentimental return to Ashton Gate
The point behind school reunions, find-your-mates websites and other sewers of nostalgia has always seemed rather moot. There are reasons why people haven’t seen each other for half a lifetime. The hugs may be cloying, the air-kisses sloppy and the compliments gushing, but they do not alter one crucial fact. If they had wanted to stay in touch, they would have.
Former star Stefano Borgonovo has motor neurone disease and, as Matthew Barker explains, some wonder if football is to blame
On October 8, a team of Fiorentina veterans played a Milan XI made up of current and former players, in a fund-raising match for Stefano Borgonovo. Now 44, Borgonovo is suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or motor neurone disease (MND), a condition that progressively paralyses the body when nerves that connect the brain to the spinal cord, and then to the muscles, die off. There is no known cause, with the majority of victims dying within two to three years of first falling ill.