Book reviews

Should NRR replace QPR in the league tables? Thom Gibbs reports on a takeover by Formula One bosses and a steel magnate that seems to promise much more than mere survival but carries risks of its own

On the evening of August 14, 2007, during a League Cup match against Leyton Orient, Gianni Paladini’s world was in tatters. QPR’s Italian chairman thought he had secured a deal to save the club from impending administration. Flavio Briatore, managing director of the Renault Formula One team, was set to take over, until significant shareholder Antonio Caliendo balked at Briatore’s offer. The deal looked dead. Rangers were destined for financial meltdown, possibly complete extinction. They also lost 2-1 to Orient.

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Ray Ranson's consortium ensured Coventry City avoided administration. Neville Hadsley reports

Coventry City have experienced last-gasp escapes plenty of times down the years so, by previous standards, surviving with just over half an hour to spare seemed rather comfortable. But that is how close the club came to extinction in December, when a takeover deal by the SISU consortium – headed by former Manchester City defender Ray Ranson – was finally sealed. Without the deal, administration would have been a certainty and a return to the old Third Division for the first time in more than half a century would have been more than a probability.

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Just occasionally, a thumping win becomes a massacre. Ian Farrell looks back at the most recent time a League team posted double figures

Though the points were totting up nicely, Manchester City’s record of ten goals in their first eight games of this season was nevertheless an underwhelming and depressingly familiar return. When, at the start of November, Sunderland were then subjected to their regulation 1‑0 defeat – the sixth such home win at Eastlands – nostalgic fans couldn’t help thinking back almost exactly 20 years, to a time when a very different MCFC matched Sven-Göran Eriksson’s eight-match stats in 77 insane minutes.

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Richard Barker recalls when a top-flight side last hit nine

When Manchester United entertained Ipswich Town at Old Trafford on March 4, 1995, there was little reason to expect much of a contest. Defending champions United were locked in a struggle with Blackburn Rovers at the top, while Ipswich were going hell-for-leather to clinch the bottom spot.

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The PFA has celebrated its centenary at a time when players aren’t held in especially high regard. But that doesn’t mean the union’s battles weren’t worth winning, says John Harding

In December 1907, a group of Manchester United players entered a hotel in the city centre and created admiring headlines by forming a union. One hundred years on almost to the day, another group of United players, at another city-centre hotel, created altogether different headlines, ones that must have had PFA chief executive Gordon ­Taylor weeping tears of frustration.

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