The Archive

It's taken a while, but football clubs are slowly getting an official presence on Facebook to match the fan-made pages. Mark Segal logs on to see who's ahead of the game and who's getting left behind

As Simon Cowell found out at the end of the year, you underestimate the power of Facebook at your peril. The campaign to make Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name the Christmas number one was a classic example of how social media, and Facebook in particular, is changing the way people connect with each other.

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The 2010 World Cup draw has revived US interest in a meeting with England 60 years ago, as Ian Plenderleith reports

In an era when English football seems to carelessly treat its pre-1992 history as an embarrassment that only serves to complicate clean-cut Premier League records, the United States is paradoxically looking to resurrect a past that will help it to feel more accepted in the global game. Unfortunately for the US, that past largely consists of a single game – the 1-0 victory over England in the 1950 World Cup.

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A home game against the reigning champions is often a foregone conclusion. On this occasion things went very differently as Neil Hurden saw the hosts comfortably dominate their out of form visitors

It’s the Saturday before Christmas, it’s uncharitably cold and my mind is dis­orientated by mixed signals. Only three days before, Fulham performed heroics in the St Jakob stadium in Basel, hanging on to win 3-2 and to secure a last 32 draw against UEFA Cup holders Shakhtar Donetsk in the Europa League, the financially poor but spiritually enriched man’s Champions League.

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For two clubs in north-east Italy relegation from Serie A was just the start of the problems. Gavin Willacy saw the trouble unfold

If Sheffield Wednesday, Reading or Ipswich get relegated from the Championship in May, their fans would be safe in assuming that the beleaguered club will kick off next season in League One. And if Southampton stay in the third division, you can at least expect them to be on the starting line again come August.

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Jonathan Wilson revisits a former footballing preoccupation and laments the loss of a once unique part of any ground

Reading fans’ accounts of their first visit to a stadium, it seems most are struck by two things: the pure greenness of the pitch (which seems odd given how ungrassy most pitches of two or more decades ago look by comparison with modern football) and the intensity of the noise.

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