Book reviews | When Saturday Comes

Blue burden

Chris Sanderson assesses Birmingham City’s mixed season and how a return to the Championship has affected the club’s finances and tactics

In a Premier League awash with money and abetted by a hyperbolic media, journeyman teams like Birmingham City face an impossible dilemma. How can we join the celebrity foam party when we turn up wearing M&S slacks, looking for the carvery?

Thursday, July 21st, 2011 - Book reviews

The old alliance

Neil White describes the unique football relationship between FC Twente and Stranraer

In 1981, Frans Thijssen was just about as good a midfielder as there was in Europe. He won the UEFA Cup with Bobby Robson’s Ipswich Town and was named Player of the Year in England. He remembers the European trophy that is now the totemic achievement of Robson’s team appearing as a mere consolation after late-season injuries exposed a lack of depth, costing Ipswich a First Division championship and a place in the FA Cup final.

Thursday, July 21st, 2011 - Book reviews

Wrexham, Port Vale, Rushden & Diamonds

Tom Davies explores the boardroom politics causing trouble at Wrexham, Port Vale and Rushden & Diamonds

Few clubs can have attracted such a remarkable string of inappropriate suitors as Wrexham in recent months. To a backdrop of winding-up orders and threats of disqualification from the Conference play-offs, an extraordinary soap opera has been playing out in the battle for ownership of the club, which now has a fighting chance of a happy ending as supporters stand poised to take control.

Thursday, July 21st, 2011 - Book reviews

Striking lucky

Dermot Corrigan tells of how a player more used to scoring in Drogheda and Derry made his full international debut in Tripoli

On the first weekend in June, most Irish football eyes were fixed on Macedonia, where the Republic of Ireland won 2-0 in a Euro 2012 qualifier. One head though – that of Dublin-born Eamon Zayed – was more interested in Group C of the African Cup of Nations qualifiers, where his Libyan team drew 1-1 away to the Comoros Islands to remain in the hunt for a place at next year’s finals.

Thursday, July 21st, 2011 - Book reviews

Suffolk punch

Success for Ipswich came under a traditional style of ownership. Csaba Abrahall looks back on a local dynasty and would love to know something, anything, about the club’s current chairman

As the first issue of WSC was running off the photocopier in March 1986, all was not well at Ipswich Town. After 18 largely successful seasons in the top flight, an inadequate team, shorn of the bulk of the squad that had tasted domestic and European glory a handful of years previously, was fighting a losing battle against relegation in front of dwindling crowds. The sense of decline was inescapable.

Thursday, July 21st, 2011 - Book reviews