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The Archive

Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.

 

Story of the blues

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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Bernd Stange

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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Final fling

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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The complete pits

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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Seasonal variation

The Russian League plan to switch to playing through the winter, but James Appell wonders if anyone checked the weather forecast

Russia in winter is not an especially pleasant place, even when you’re wearing a thick coat. It can’t be any better wearing football kit. But the Russian Football Premier League (RFPL) have in recent years been considering moving the season of the top two divisions from summer to winter, in keeping with the majority of Europe’s major championships. Russia’s footballers will have been phoning through orders for thermal underwear since July 29 when the RFPL officially unveiled the plan to switch to an autumn-spring season by 2012. “The most important of our goals is the move to an autumn-spring system,” RFPL president Sergey Pryadkin told the press. “It’s difficult to give a fixed time-frame at this moment, but we expect this to occur in an even-numbered year where there will be a break for the European Championship or World Cup. It’s possible that it will be 2012. This is the way forward from a commercial point of view.”

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