Book reviews

Shotts Bon Accord of the Scottish Juniors are the latest club to be embroiled in legal intrigue. Graham McColl takes up their case

On paper, Scottish Junior club Shotts Bon Accord should be one of the contenders for this season’s Junior Cup. But that’s where their chances of winning the Juniors’ premier tournament will remain – on paper. A plot that looks as though John Le Carré and the Monty Python team have put their heads together has led to the club being taken out of service for the 1995-96 season.

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Mick Slatter looks back at one of Liberia's greatest ever role models

George Oppong Weah is a disarmingly nice guy. He may have bagged the hat-trick of African, European and World Footballer of The Year, yet remains humble. He still has a common touch, passes on much of his sizable earnings and still allows journalists to get closer to him than most Serie A sweepers.

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Osasu Obayiuwana surveys some of the pitfalls that lie in wait for African players hoping to pursue careers in Europe

Top quality African players are appearing in Europe in increasing numbers but amongst all the success stories, like George Weah and Finidi George, are just as many tales of hardship, of players whose naïvete on financial issues has been taken advantage of by rapacious clubs or business managers.

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Tom Davies argues that the one-year ban imposed on Leyton Orient's Roger Stanislaus for pre-match drug taking is both unfair and inconsistent

Two of the symptoms widely attributed to cocaine use are paranoia and confusion. Similar feelings can be experienced at a fraction of the cost by trying to make sense of the contradictory reasons given for Roger Stanislaus’s year-long banishment from the game. Stanislaus has been banned by the FA because a test after Orient’s 0-3 defeat at Barnet on November 25th found “performance-enhancing” levels of cocaine in his blood. He was subsequently sacked by Leyton Orient in order, basically, to set an example to the kids. Football must be seen to be whiter than white, said chairman Barry Hearn, making no reference to the FA’s implication that Stanislaus was a cheat.

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No style magazine worthy of the name would go to press without at least one feature about supermodels, Britpop, Hollywood hunks and… Liverpool players. John Williams got past the security on the door to ask a few questions

More years ago than you would care, or want, to remember, the great Merseyside net-buster, Bill ‘Dixie’ Dean, visited Pathé News in Soho to be interviewed for some football cinema coverage. Dixie once jumped into the crowd at White Hart Lane to smack a local racist and, after a serious road accident, was also popularly thought in the city to have had a steel plate inserted into his head, thus accounting for his thunderbolt headers that started out somewhere near Garston.

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