Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Oil and gas has brought wealth to Kazakhstan but domestic football has seen little of this money, says Mark Gilbey
Kazakhstan’s president is an ambitious chap. Twelve years ago, deciding that he was bored with life in the capital, Almaty, Nursultan Nazarbayev opted to up sticks and build a new city 600 miles away in the desert. The move to Astana cost £10 billion, but money is no object for the oil and gas-rich Kazakhstani government. It’s just a shame that they aren’t football fans.
John Turnbull reports on how a book about a Brit who played in the Soviet Union may not be all it seems
Russian studies expert Jim Riordan includes dramatic tales in his memoir published last year, Comrade Jim: The Spy Who Played For Spartak. Such as a live cockroach appearing in the author’s cabbage salad at Moscow’s Higher Party School, where Riordan, a member of the British Communist Party, had enrolled. He also encounters Nikita Khrushchev, Yuri Gagarin and Lev Yashin and plays cricket with members of the Cambridge spy ring. Journalists and football historians in Russia have said little about these incidents. But regarding the central claim in Riordan’s book – that he started two home matches for Spartak Moscow in 1963, becoming the only Westerner to play in the top tier of Soviet football – they have one word: “nonsense”.
Portsmouth part company with Tony Adams after a poor start
Tony Adams’s three month spell in charge at Portsmouth was brought to a merciful end on the same day that Phil Scolari was sacked by Chelsea. The sacking didn’t seem to shake Adams’ confidence in his ability. As he told the Sun, “I can’t wait to get back in. I’ve seen there are six jobs in Holland at the moment.” A few days later, however, David James used his Observer column to blast his former boss, and his “bizarre” approach. It seems that Portsmouth players would have perked up if he yelled at them, like his predecessor.” When we’ve lost some games in the past,” James wrote, “Harry Redknapp has come in and torn strips off everybody. He would maybe sometimes apologise the next day but you needed that."
After ITV failed to broadcast a Dan Gosling's goal against Liverpool questions were raised as to the why the error occurred. Simon Tyers examines the history of football on the channel.
Until the start of February my favourite ever football related onscreen cockup was when the scrolling graphic on Soccer Saturday announced that a player had scored their “9YJ GOAL THIS SEASON”. Trust ITV to take football on television’s standards into the hitherto uncharted depths of high farce in their coverage of the Everton v Liverpool FA Cup tie. Pity Dan Gosling, who might have come off the pitch hoping people would ask each other if they’d seen his goal only to find they were instead asking who hadn’t seen it. Such was the timing, such were the circumstances, that if you’d written it as an ITV sitcom punchline it wouldn’t have been any more credible.
Everton and the BNP recently clashed over the timing of a party campaign. Mark O'Brien looks at how the police deal with disruptons to the matchday routine
From the England team’s Nazi salute in 1938 to the T-shirts worn by Robbie Fowler and Steve McManaman in support of striking dockers, politics has frequently exerted an influence on football. That convergence caused quite some concern on Merseyside when the British National Party announced recently that they planned to conduct a leafleting campaign in Liverpool city centre on the afternoon of Saturday March 14, the same afternoon as Everton were scheduled to play host to Stoke City in the Premier League.Tranmere were at home to Huddersfield on the same afternoon, while Liverpool supporters would also be returning from their early game at Old Trafford, and according to Chief Superintendent Steve Watson of Liverpool North: “If they had all taken place at the same time it would have placed extraordinary pressures on demand and would have affected the ability to police those events effectively.”