Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Six months after winning La Liga, Bernd Schuster has been sacked by Real Madrid. Phil Ball thinks it was always a mismatch
And so Bernie Schuster is gone – he of the porn moustache and the Pringle sweaters. Sacked by Real Madrid, by “mutual agreement” five days before the clásico at the Camp Nou, he has walked off after 18 months with a paltry €7 million (£6.6m), and is currently taking calls on his mobile for his next job, from the leafy confines of Madrid’s swankiest golf course.
Sion's mecurial chairman has been through 18 managers in five years – including himself. Paul Joyce examines the chaos
Christian Constantin’s two spells as president of Swiss team FC Sion have been nothing if not colourful. After taking charge of the side from the Valais region in 1992, the autocratic Constantin guided Sion to two league titles and three Swiss Cup victories in five years. Yet the 130 transfers that took place in this period left the club fatally overstretched. Constantin quit in 1997 after Sion failed to qualify for the Champions League, leaving debts of 13.4 million Swiss francs (then £5.5m). Unable to recover, Sion were demoted to the third tier in June 2003.
It is not only the FA Cup that mixes minnows with giants: county cups do so, too. Gavin Willacy champions these wrongly neglected events
Having despatched Northern League Second Division strugglers Prudhoe, Newcastle United face the University of Northumbria in the cup quarter-finals. This is not fantasy football, FIFA 08, or Football Manager. It’s the Northumberland Senior Cup, one of the many county cups that feature Premier League giants taking on not only players who are unknown outside of their front doors, but whole teams that few people have even heard of. In the midst of the 21st century sports business world, they are as much of an anachronism as the Boat Race, the Varsity Match or cricket festivals.
Foreign players are becoming common in the Conference – there’s even an ex-Barcelona man at Northwich, writes Michael Whalley
You might expect a Blue Square Premier club to be giddy with excitement after taking a former Barcelona first-teamer on trial. Yet Nigerian defender Gbenga Okunowo’s arrival at Northwich Victoria in early December created so few ripples that the club didn’t even mention it in their next programme.
What would you change about football? WSC writers look ahead to 2009 and ask, sensibly enough, for preparation for a global dystopia and for players to learn the laws, which will never catch on
After sneaking an away win at Bristol City a few years ago, Brentford created a minor stir by warming down on the pitch within minutes of the final whistle. Home fans regarded the winners’ touchline-to-touchline trudging to be “unnecessarily provocative” and, via a flurry of letters to the local paper, demanded an apology from the club.