The Archive

Simon Tyers looks at how some presenters and ex-players are not cut out for television

“Kayfabe” is a concept that is not widely known outside professional wrestling. Broadly speaking, it refers to the presentation of fictional or scripted events and opinions as reality. The term needs to be introduced to a wider audience as a way of defining what is going on with the viewer text and email sections that litter The Football League Show like overheating Corsas on the hard shoulder of the M25. You would imagine that the appeal of hearing comments about your club from supporters of other clubs would wither over time. On The Football League Show this sense that people are barging in on your business is heightened when the epithets are being read out by Jacqui Oatley’s co-host, Lizzie Greenwood-Hughes.

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Dear WSC
In WSC 272 Jonathan O’Brien finds it remarkable that Celtic’s Bertie Auld “straightfacedly asserts that beating Dunfermline in the Scottish Cup final in 1965 was more important than the title win a year later”. But Auld is not alone in his assertion. No less a man than Jock Stein said in the Dunfermline history Black and White Magic: “It wouldn’t have gone as well for Celtic had they not won this game.” The Celtic history The Glory and the Dream also notes: “The largest framed photograph in [Stein’s] office at Celtic Park showed Billy McNeill borne aloft at the end of the match.”Celtic had won nothing since “the 7-1 game”, a freakish League Cup final triumph over Rangers in 1957. So this win, Stein’s first trophy seven weeks after officially becoming manager, stopped a rot which was threatening to turn Celtic into also-rans in Scotland. Without it the Lisbon Lions may never have been and there may only ever have been one “nine-in-a-row” in Scottish football. And that would never do.
Mark Murphy, Chessington

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Ian Plenderleith reports on how the internet has led to the downfall of a British football pundit whose show can only be heard on the other side of the Atlantic

If a loudmouthed British football pundit based in California decides to broadcast a big opinion on a satellite radio show available only in the United States or by podcast, will anyone care? Well, thanks to the internet the world has become a smaller place and so the unfortunate answer for Steven Cohen, host of World Soccer Daily (nothing to do with the monthly magazine), was a resounding yes. Shortly before the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy earlier this year, he told his audience that Liverpool fans still bore the responsibility for the 96 deaths. After a web lobbying campaign led to sponsors such as Heineken and FourFourTwo magazine pulling their support from the show, it ceased to broadcast in late August, citing harassment and deprivation of the right to freedom of speech.

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The revamped stadium has been open since March 2007. Despite trying his best Cris Freddi just can't get used to it

I went to the opening game at the new Wembley. That sounds like a minor boast, I suppose. If there were anything to boast about. You can only judge a stadium in daylight. Lights at night gloss over things. On an overcast afternoon, the Wembley arch looks like a giant concrete rope. And you stand under it and think: what’s that all about? What’s an arch got to do with it?

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A late summer night out in Selhurst. Manchester City breeze down to south-east London for the early rounds of the Carling Cup where Crystal Palace huff and puff against mega-rich opponents. David Stubbs reports

It’s grim down south. The freshly mint Manchester City and their supporters come down to Selhurst Park like a delegation from Italy’s Lega Nord descending with wrinkling noses on one of the more malodorous outlying districts of Naples. What a culture shock it must be for visiting fans from the regenerated and nouveau riche north-west as they emerge from Selhurst station, with its unappetisingly urinal-like walls, down a ginnel flanked with mistrustful barbed wire and as rank as the breath of an alcoholic in the afternoon.

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