Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
The art of the programme is alive and well in the lower echelons. Owen Amos flicks through the pages
Once, football clubs had programmes. Now, they have matchday magazines. They have shiny covers and shameless names: Blue Review, Red Watch, or worse. They are, they stress, official – as if, somewhere, there’s a thriving market in knock-off Southend United matchday magazines. And, of course, cliche wafts into every corner, like smoke in a taxi. Worst of all, they cost £3.
There’s less at stake in the East Anglian derby than there once was, and discontent is in the air at the end of poor seasons for both clubs, but Ipswich are at least cheered by the prospect of pushing their neighbours closer towards the third tier and by the imminent ousting of an unpopular manager, as Csaba Abrahall witnessed
It can’t have escaped your attention that the BBC recently moved Countryfile to prime-time on Sunday evenings. I’m not sure why, as it seemed the perfect accompaniment to coffee and croissants in its late-morning slot, but I imagine the unavailability of a large section of the agricultural community twice a year proved too detrimental to the viewing figures. The East Anglian derby hasn’t been played on a Saturday for 11 years and the scene at Diss station on this spring Sunday morning, rural-accented supporters in blue and white, green and yellow, heading to football instead of listening to John Craven’s views on otters, has become a common one.
Neil Forsyth assesses the fallout from the Ferguson/McGregor incident and the somewhat muddled response of their superiors
The Scottish national team has a long, celebrated history of alcohol-fuelled moments of madness and it was about time another one came stumbling into view. After all, it’s been more than 30 years since the glory days of the 1970s – when a drunk Jimmy Johnstone stole a rowing boat during a Scotland camp and was rescued by the coastguard, then the Scotland career of Billy Bremner and two others ended after an altercation in a Copenhagen nightclub following a European Championship game.
Taylor Parkes reviews two films about football fighting which despite contrasting styles offer similarly dispiriting end products
It’s not hard to see why film-makers are so fond of football hooliganism. Like the slasher movie or the zombie flick, the hooligan film is a ready-made genre that requires little imagination – it comes complete with thrills and spills, a handful of simple and durable plotlines, obvious characters and motivations, and the possibility of redemption. It gives your film, however poor, immediate appeal to people who like this sort of thing (thugs or ex-thugs, thin-armed daydreamers with a prurient interest in violence), and you can deflect criticism by claiming your movie is “authentic” and “gritty” –even when it is, in truth, no more realistic than In The Night Garden. The fact that your product is repulsive on every level need not concern you. Indeed, it’s kind of the point.
Leicester’s tussles with Atlético Madrid left fans simmering at injustice but, as Saul Pope recalls, these were heady days
Eleven years ago their fans would have never accepted it, but Leicester City’s UEFA Cup first round tie against Atlético Madrid in September 1997 will probably be as good as it gets. Leicester didn’t win the game, but for a time they were leading thanks to a player once described by the club fanzine The Fox as looking “knackered whenever he ran on to a football field”.