Book reviews

European success hasn't brought Liverpool a new stadium or the funds to compete for the league and, as John Williams writes, fans don't know where the club is going

Six months on from winning the greatest ever European Cup final in front of (allegedly) the world’s greatest supporters and in a fashion liable to add at least a few million to any top club’s global fan base, you might be forgiven for thinking this could have been just the time for a new lift-off at a club that had been some 15 years off the elite football pace. And yet, what should now be a buoyant Liverpool FC has looked, on occasions, a remarkably rudderless ship since that dramatic, unforgettable night in Istanbul.

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Paul Gascoigne becoming manager of Kettring sounds like an April Fools joke or a publicity stunt, but, as Toby Skinner reports, the man behind the appointment means business

A month into Paul Gascoigne’s first spell as a manager, things are looking rosy at non-League Kettering Town. The team have been solid since Gazza took charge and have lost only once in the Conference North. The FA Cup defeat to Stevenage saw this century’s highest attendance at Rockingham Road – almost 4,500, compared to the usual 800 or so – and was followed by the slightly over-awed players receiving new boots and the team getting new balls.

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Jon Spurling wonders whether applause is an appropriate replacement for the minutes silence.

Just as views on the responsibility for George Best’s early death are polarised, the same is true of attitudes towards the minute’s applause that was seen at Portsmouth and West Ham to mark his passing. There is a weighty body of evidence that suggests that Best would have approved of such a gesture. On Parkinson last year, he confessed: “I hope I’m remembered for the football and the cheers I brought to grounds, rather than all the front-page nonsense.” A lesser known fact is that he preferred the B-side of Don Fardon’s Belfast Boy – Echoes Of The Cheers – to the song that reached number 32 in the charts and which due to its ubiquitousness over the Old Trafford PA system was an early-Seventies version of Simply The Best.

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Simon Tyers tells the story of one of this summer's more unique characters

Next June Australia will, more than likely, be officially anointed as 2006’s equivalent of the 1998 Jamaica side, the qualifiers full of unlikely UK-based players that will do in the Republic of Ireland’s absence. All five penalty takers against Uruguay have played in England, as has (and does) keeper Mark Schwarzer. The Boro man’s understudy, Zeljko Kalac, has played here, too, but is a rather more unlikely World Cup player, from the point of view of many in Leicester.

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Is it too good to be true? Scotland has been longing for a club to break the Old Firm's dominance but, as Neil Forsyth asks, are Hearts stable enough?

The Scottish Premier League has long been a private title battle between the Old Firm with the other clubs reduced to contesting a UEFA Cup spot, derby wins and even the honour of being a top-six team after the league splits. This campaign has so far been as predictable as ever, but with a significant difference. The catalyst of Hearts’ incredible run (eight games, eight wins at the time of writing) is printed boldly on the team’s strips. Ukio Bankas is not just the team sponsor but also the Lithuanian bank part-owned by the club’s owner Vladimir Romanov. Since replacing former manager John Robertson with George Burley, Romanov has bankrolled an influx of foreign talent to the club that Burley has quickly gelled into a highly effective team.

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