The Archive

Neil Rose welcomes a familiar voice back to 6.06 – a broadcaster who believes football phone-ins are not just about the match

For a radio station never more than a few minutes away from a trail, the return of Danny Baker to 5 Live was curiously unheralded. The addition of an hour from Baker on Tuesdays means that you are now more likely to hear 6.06 of an evening than not, but – and this is the good, nay joyous, news – his show shares only a name and sidekick (Issy Clarke) with those of Alan Green, Tim Lovejoy and Spoony.

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Luxembourg hadn’t won a World Cup qualifier for 36 years – but that didn’t save Switzerland in Zurich. Ben Lyttleton reports

Köbi Kuhn was always tolerated rather than loved during his seven years as Switzerland coach, but the knives are already out for his replacement Ottmar Hitzfeld, just two months into his reign, after last month’s 2‑1 home World Cup qualifying defeat to Luxembourg. Embarrassing, ­embarrassing, embarrassing was the headline in Der Bund, while tabloid Blick claimed that only Hitzfeld’s past club glories were keeping him from the sack.

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There’s very little entente cordiale between the presidents of Marseille and Lyon. James Eastham examines their latest row

Some transfer sagas leave no trace; Hatem Ben Arfa’s summer move from Lyon to Marseille does not fall into that category. The 21-year-old attacker’s transfer marked a new low point in the increasingly fractious relations between the clubs. The sticking point was a contractual clause stating Lyon had to pay Ben Arfa €1.5 million (£1.19m) if they sold him. Instead of reaching an amicable agreement, Lyon president Jean-Michel Aulas and his counter­part at Marseille, Pape Diouf, used it as an excuse to verbally beat each other up over a deal for the second time in three years.

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América de Cali are the South American continental also-rans. They lost three successive Copa Libertadores finals in the 1980s and four in total. But the drugs barons who financed their success in getting there are now the cause of the club’s demise. Henry Mance takes up the tale

 “If they say I’m the best Colombian footballer ever, I must have done something right,” smiles Willington Ortiz. The former striker, who now runs a football coaching school, helped América de Cali to four of their five consecutive league titles in the 1980s with a style of play he recalls as “mucho dribbling”. Yet there was something else that “Old Willy” Ortiz and the América team built around him could not do: win South America’s major club competition, the Copa Libertadores. Three successive years América marched to the final, only to shuffle back to Colombia empty-handed. Few clubs can match América’s serial failure. Valencia have a decent claim, being the only club to have lost two Champions League finals in a row without ever having won the trophy; they also chalked up three consecutive Copa del Rey final defeats in the 1970s. In England, six teams – from Newcastle (twice) to Old Etonians – have lost consecutive FA Cup finals, but all won finals on other occasions.

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Debt is a fact of life for football clubs, but how damaging will it become?

“We obviously can’t compete with the money Manchester City have so there’s no point trying. We’ve got to succeed some other way.” So said a Premier League chairman in late September. But this wasn’t a pragmatic view from someone at a club that would be happy with a mid-table finish. It was Arsenal’s Peter Hill-Wood, whose comments were reported on the day that his team went top after a win at Bolton. The Arsenal board are bucking the current trend by actively discouraging interest from outside investors, in their case Alisher Usmanov from Uzbekistan, who owns a 24 per cent stake in the club.

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