Reviews from When Saturday Comes. Follow the link to buy the book from Amazon.
With talk of the club being up for sale, the heady days of Jack Walker's reign at Blackburn Rovers seem so long ago, Bruce Wilkinson writes
Reports in the Daily Mirror that the owners of Blackburn Rovers could be willing to listen to offers for the club have come as a shock to the team’s supporters, under the impression that the Jack Walker Trust, set up on his deathbed, would run the club in perpetuity.
Likelihood is that Premiership newcomers Crystal Palace will be heading back to the Football League come May. Matthew Barker explains why a power struggle at Selhurst Park isn't going to help
Simon Jordan can be a difficult man to like, but equally one can easily feel rather sorry for him. This, after all, is the man who arrived at Selhurst Park in 2000, sorted through the rubble of the Mark Goldberg era and pulled the club through one of their darkest hours. A seemingly bright young thing, he spent money – lots of it (most estimates home in at around the £30 million mark) – and brought a new zippy business sense to a place that had barely survived the previous two years of calamitous mismanagement and misjudged transfer dealings.
Another summer of transfer-related theatre and drama resulted in some surprising deals and a whole lot of bad feeling, Jon Spurling writes
Sir Alex Ferguson described the summer transfer window as “an annual farce of half-truths” and David Moyes claimed it gives football writers the chance to “peddle irresponsible headlines”. The latest doses of rumour and counter rumour seem to have left many Premiership managers feeling far more drained and insecure than normal. “Yous are talking out of your backsides,” barked an apoplectic Ferguson when a gaggle of hacks suggested that Ruud van Nistelrooy was poised to move to Real Madrid. By simply adding the “ski” suffix to a player’s surname, or deploying the “Real deal” headline, tabloids can give even the most experienced manager nightmares, such is the financial clout of Chelsea and the Madrid giants.
Thanks to a financial incentive scheme from Littlewoods Pools, things could be looking up for Scotland's perennial losers, East Stirlingshire. Neil White explains
For the past two years, the safest bet in British football has not been on Arsenal or Martin O’Neill’s dominant Celtic side. The smart money, if you have enough of it to counter increasingly prohibitive odds, is on whoever happens to be playing East Stirlingshire.
Wigan Athletic's chairman controls clubs involved in both codes of rugby, too, but Ashley Shaw finds that few object to this takeover of a town as the Latics fly high
Pies, piers and rugby league used to dominate Wigan. Yet as a town situated handily between the football hotbeds of Manchester and Liverpool, it comes as little surprise that supporters of Wigan Athletic reject the stereotype straight away.