The Archive

More football coverage doesn't necesarily mean any more information. Paul Ramon vents on a pet hate

Jerry Seinfeld has a joke on how it is amazing that the amount of news that happens every day always just exactly fits the newspaper. Suffice to say he doesn’t read the sport sections of the British press. While in the past decade or so the sport pages have multiplied, often even into their own pullout sections, the amount of news has unsurprisingly refused to follow suit. This leaves each day’s few notable events padded out by stories as irrelevant and disposable as an unofficial biography of a teenage pop star.

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It was a record-breaking day for the home side but not one Grimsby fans would want to remember. Pete Green watched their local rivals deny them the three points desperately needed to help preserve League status

You can tell it’s a Lincolnshire derby day: there are five people in the pub instead of four. Alright, I’m exaggerating a bit, but as local rivalries go Grimsby against Lincoln is a fairly polite and respect­ful one all round. Though knots of giddy schoolboys do their best to keep the police busy, it’s the charity fundraising fixture between fans’ teams that typifies the tone. For most, out here on the far, featureless tangent of the Humber estuary, the football is as distant a distraction as the low tide that recedes a mile from Cleethorpes seafront.

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An ex-Danish international turned Walsall into cup specialists in his one season as manager. Tom Lines recounts the tale

In the summer of 1997 an overweight man in his early 40s walked into the offices of the Tamworth Herald and asked to speak to the sports editor. He claimed to have played in a European Cup final and wanted advice on securing a job in local football. Accustomed to humouring eccentrics with tall tales to tell, the journalist listened patiently before sending him on his way.

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John Chapman looks at how enduring financial problems have finally bankrupted a top-flight Belgian club

The francophone Belgian city of Mouscron is close to both the country’s border with France and the linguistic boundary with Dutch-speaking Flanders. Its football club, Royal Excelsior Mouscron, has drawn fans from all three communities. Entering the First Division in 1996, Mouscron never challenged for the title but introduced some useful players, most notably the Mpenza brothers, Émile and Mbo.

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Most of the controversy in the Portuguese season so far has happened on the sidelines. Phil Town reports

It’s been a vintage season for punch-ups in Portuguese football, with tunnels featuring strongly. In October, Benfica’s top-scoring Paraguayan striker Óscar Cardozo and Sporting Braga’s Brazilian defender André Leone were sent off at half time at Braga and subsequently suspended after the referee reported that they had been having a go at each other in the tunnel.

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