The Archive

The Northern League have their own anti-swearing initiative in place. Owen Amos reports

My first memory of football swearing is, strangely, a good one. It was the mid-1990s, Easington Colliery Welfare, near Sunderland, at home in the Northern League Second Division. The crowd was 60, at best. Easington had a corner. The right-winger jogged over and placed the ball. It was one inch – maximum – outside the quadrant. The referee couldn’t see; the linesman wasn’t bothered. The opposition were too busy shouting “Hold!” and “Tight!” to notice.

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Journalist Terry Daley used to work for Chelsea – at least when it suited the club. It seems Roman learnt a few tricks from Pravda…

“This must be your dream job, I bet your dad must be really proud of you,” is the first thing almost everyone said to me after they found out that I was working for Chelsea’s official publications. To nodding heads and blank stares I’d point out that the money was terrible, the people above me had no idea what fans wanted, didn’t care what they had to say and had less of an idea of what made a good magazine. The response was the same almost every time: “Still, Chelsea eh? And what happened with Mourinho? Go on, tell us.”

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On October 15, England face a Belarus team whose coach used to be an informer for East Germany’s secret police. Paul Joyce reports

“Football trainers shouldn’t mix work and politics,” Belarus coach Bernd Stange stated in March. “That is dangerous.” His critics would argue that Stange has often used this tenet as an excuse to pursue his career while closing his eyes to the political and human consequences of his actions. A media-friendly, yet curiously elusive, figure, Stange was known in the former East Germany as “der Lügenbaron” – a modern-day Baron Münchhausen whose tall tales about his exploits needed to be taken with copious pinches of salt.

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The long throw is back with a bang, as Rory Delap bamboozles Aston Villa. Glen Wilson champions this strong-arm tactic

August 23, 2008, will be noted as the day that a traditional bastion of British football made a comeback, via an injury-time winning goal in the shadow of Sir Stanley Matthews’s statue. Yes, the long throw-in is back.

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Just what the game needs to reconnect with its traditional fan base: a football-branded motorsport franchise. Al Needham witnesses the inaugural outing of Superleague Formula

It’s an obscenely crass and overblown spectacle that wastes millions of pounds a year on something that its detractors claim is nothing more than a season-long procession that clogs up the TV on Sundays, mainly decided by which teams have the most money. So why would motor­sport want anything to do with football?

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