Book reviews

Developing local young talent used to be the way forward for Millwall, but they can no longer see the point. Paul Casella takes up the sorry tale

After a close-season tribunal judged that teenage starlet John Bostock’s sale to Tottenham Hotspur was worth just £700,000 to Crystal Palace, their owner Simon Jordan decided it was time to look for a buyer for his club. And he wasn’t the only south London chairman to question the point of developing homegrown talent this summer. Last season Millwall lost youth hopes David Amoo to Liverpool, Sam Walker to Chelsea and Tom Kilby to Portsmouth for combined fees of £400,000. They were all products of a youth set-up that an ailing third-tier club could barely afford to run. The club’s American chairman, John Berylson, was so enraged by the size of the fees that he closed the Millwall academy.

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Manchester City’s windfall is adding to the pressure on Bill Kenwright over Everton’s proposed move to Kirkby, as Mark O'Brien explains

On the closing day of the transfer window, Everton smashed their record by spending £15 million on the relatively unknown Belgian midfielder Marouane Fellaini. After a trying summer, one that Bill Kenwright described as “the worst I have ever known in the transfer market”, it should have been big news, but like just about every other move that day it was overshadowed by the events up the road.

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Al Needham remembers Jimmy Sirrel, Nottingham’s second most famous football manager, who died last month

It’s very easy to see Jimmy Sirrel, who died on September 25 at the age of 86, as someone who worked in the shadow of Brian Clough; a decent enough manager who did his best with extremely limited resources, but could only look on while his neighbour on the other side of the Trent took the glory. That is not the case at all. Sirrel was just as important to the ’Pies as Clough was to the Garibaldis.

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It wasn’t just Derby who were up in arms at QPR’s sudden price hike. Thom Gibbs and his fellow Rangers fans are far from sitting comfortably

How much would you pay to watch Championship football? Coventry have recently offered ticket bundles for three home games against Southampton, Burnley and Derby for the price of £50; some QPR fans paid that last month just to watch their side against Derby. Classed as an “A” category game under a new banding system unveiled 12 days beforehand and seven games into the season, the QPR board deemed a seat in the “Platinum” area of the ground for the Derby game to be worth £50. That gets you a mostly unobstructed view from the middle of the South Africa Road stand, a padded seat and access to a private bar.

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Gretna supporters have attempted to keep their club alive after their dramatic demise, reports Andy Fury

The small town of Annan in Dumfries and Galloway has seen several new footballing dawns recently. The most highly publicised is its own football club’s election to the Scottish Football League. Its other, rather ironically, is the resurrection of the club Annan Athletic replaced in Division Three, Gretna FC.

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