Book reviews

Hull City are likely to be saved from extinction… again. But this is an all to common experience for the club, writes Craig Ellyard

There is little doubt that by the time you read this article Hull City will, once again, have been saved. A “my­s­­t­ery consortium” have asked the club’s creditors to accept 30p in the pound on their out­­­­­standing liabilities. If, as expected, agreement is reached, the consortium, hav­ing already lodged a ­substantial bond, will take over the running of the club. So, all’s well that ends well?

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Just what exactly was Middlesbrough's fascination with some bagless vacuum cleaners? Dave Carter blows the story

I blame it all on my friend Mark. He is a guerrilla comper, a professional competition entrant who specialises in winning prizes without purchasing the products the competitions are designed to pro­mote. It is his fault that I arrived at the Riverside Stadium bleary-eyed at 9.45 on the morning of Middlesbrough’s clash with Charlton Athletic, to be photo­graph­ed standing alongside a purple, top-of-the-range turbo-suction Dyson vac­uum cleaner.

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John Beck's return to Cambridge has delighted some but disgusted others. Simon Knott explains why there is such a difference in opinion

And so, he’s back. The man who gave us our proudest moments as Cambridge United fans returns under a cloud, albeit someone else’s. John Beck’s reappearance in the Cambridge hot seat has been greeted with a few gasps of horror and revulsion. These have mainly come from younger fans, brought up on Roy McFarland’s gentle arm-round-the-shoulders dressing room diplomacy, as well as the horror stories of their parents; there are mums on Ditton Fields who still threaten their naughty children with what Beck might do to them.

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The Worthington Cup final was widely seen as a potential watershed for Liverpool. John Tandy was more interested in what it meant for Birmingham

“Not a cat’s chance in hell”– that’s my favourite way to approach a football match. When you’re so far out the running that anything short of abject humiliation will do quite nicely. The Worthington Cup final fitted the bill. The prevailing mood in Birmingham was that of gratitude: we were just glad to be there, glad of a crumb of attention for a change. The weekend was always going to be more of a carnival than a riot, and with arrests in Cardiff city centre both Saturday and Sunday seemingly somewhere below average, a record police presence for the final seemed a tad superfluous, even given Birmingham’s occasionally shady past.

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The proliferation of cases involving players with fake passports has led to questions being raised about the right of many foreign-born footballer to play in Europe. But, as Pierre Lanfranchi and Matthew Taylor argue, dual nationality itself is not the issue

Nationality, as certain European football clubs are discovering to their cost, is not necessarily a straightforward matter. Just ask fans of St Etienne, who saw their club drop five places in the French league in January when the league’s judicial commission judged that two of the club’s players, the Brazilian Alex and the Ukrainian Maxim Levitsky, had been using false European Union passports. The initial penalty of seven points was first reduced on appeal then reinstated, making their position one place off the bottom of the league even more perilous

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