Reviews from When Saturday Comes. Follow the link to buy the book from Amazon.
Dianne Millen explores the potential pit falls of a groundshare bewteen two rivals
Groundsharing controversies – you go years without them and then two come along at once. After the Falkirk saga comes the controversial announcement that Hearts and Hibs are proposing to sell their grounds, both in traditional working-class areas of the city, to fund a purpose-built stadium miles out of town in Straiton, an area currently best known for hosting the local Ikea.
Could this be the end of the road for Oldham Athletic? Steve Ragg explains how a promising season suddenly went so wrong
From the brink of promotion to the edge of extinction in what seems like no time at all. While hopes of Division One football died with the play-off defeat at QPR, Oldham Athletic may be killed off altogether if a solution to our latest crisis isn’t found very soon.
There are 763 footballers out of work and many clubs face an uncertain future. Barney Ronay looks back ten years to the bright sunrise of the Premiership era, the beginning of the boom when football was just money, money, money
In the summer of 1993 the tabloid press was in the process of acquiring a new footballing vocabulary. The first Sky TV-fuelled English Premiership season had just ended, and suddenly “come and get me pleas” were being issued, “want-away contract rebels” abounded, and Big-Spending Blackburn rubbed shoulders with Moneybags Man Utd as multi-million market madness descended. It all sounded extremely empowering for the soaraway red tops; and there would be plenty more to come. Topped and tailed by the Murdoch corporation, football had gone tabloid.
From foresight to hindsight, sound judgements to naked prejudices, Joyce Woolridge sifts through, as the man himself put it, “the **** in the papers” written about the Beckham transfer saga
David Beckham’s transfer to Real Madrid has provided the press with a close-season story beyond its wildest imaginings. The amount of print dedicated to increasingly wild speculation about the sale of (variously) “The boy who got too big for his boots” or “An England hero” led Beckham himself, according to the Manchester Evening News, to text his Dad in disbelief: “Can you believe all this **** in the papers?” Most of what was written was best described as **** flowing copiously on to the pages of broadsheet and tabloid.
Has any recent transfer been as fateful as Leeds United selling Eric Cantona to Manchester United? Duncan Young recalls the Frenchman’s spell in Yorkshire
It’s difficult to imagine now, but in November 1992 selling Eric Cantona to Manchester United didn’t seem like such a crazy idea. Six months previously he had been the talisman of Leeds’s first championship success since 1974 and the near-mythical reign of Don Revie. The funny thing is, he didn’t actually play that much.