Reviews from When Saturday Comes. Follow the link to buy the book from Amazon.
What are the realistic ambitions for those outside the top half of the Premiership? Rob Fitzgerald sums up Tranmere's situation
The growing gap between the Premiership and Nationwide League makes Tranmere fans acutely aware of the limitations of what their club can achieve. We are unlikely see a return of the optimism experienced at Prenton Park during John King’s second spell in charge, when we went from the bottom of the Fourth Division to the top of the (new) First in five years.
What are the realistic ambitions for those outside the top half of the Premiership? Mark Hodkinson sums up his club's situation
The death knell, the clock striking midnight, the end of the world as we know it – this kind of rhetoric has shadowed my support of Rochdale FC since I first dunked a plastic fork in a tray of pie and peas at Spotland back in the 1970s. But for all the talk and creeping fog of pundit fatalism, we’re still here. And being here is OK, especially with a completely rebuilt ground and a team that mounts a routine but flawed promotion challenge on an annual basis. We might even, lordy lordy, escape the bottom division one day soon. We’ve been here 27 seasons now, a long time in hell.
Andy Lyons meets Liverpool chief executive Rick Parry, who discusses his club's perspective on the current state of English League football and their role on the international stage as a member of the controversial G-14 group of elite European clubs
Some clubs claim that they have a duty to their shareholders to be in Europe. Is there less of this pressure at Liverpool through not being a publicly quoted company?
We don’t have that institutional investor pressure but the club has to pay for itself. We consciously incurred heavy losses for a couple of years of around £14 million when we were investing in the squad but you can’t go on doing that. The dilemma, and 90 per cent of clubs would say it’s a nice dilemma to have, is that you invest in a squad capable of getting into the Champions League, but if you don’t get in, you’re suddenly £20 million adrift and facing huge problems. We weren’t in Europe in 1999-2000 and that was a really difficult year for us. In absolute terms the gap between those in the Champions League and the Premier League is bigger than that between the rest of the Premier League and the Football League. I’m not saying we’re unhappy to be in that position but it’s a big gap to bridge.
Former professional footballer Dai Thomas is given a custodial sentence in Cardiff v Leeds FA Cup fall-out, reports Paul Ashley-Jones
The aftermath of the Cardiff v Leeds FA Cup tie has seen the conviction of a number of Cardiff fans including one hooligan, David (Dai) Thomas, who received a custodial sentence for his part, which included throwing an advertising hoarding at Leeds supporters. What has made Dai Thomas the subject of media attention is that he was a former professional footballer with Cardiff City. It was also not his first offence.
Stephen Wagg reflects on the achievements of the first man to manage England in a World Cup finals and how he cultured a generation of managers
Walter Winterbottom lived until he was nearly 90, so a lot of English football lovers below a certain age have probably never heard of him. Still fewer among the club’s global “fan base” will have known, until this month’s obituaries, that he played for a season in Manchester United’s first team. He coached England when the team was no more than a series of grainy and occasional black and white images on the nation’s TV screens and he was gone before the medium got seriously involved with English football.