The Archive

Vasco da Gama's new president had to overcome electoral fraud before tackling years of neglect. Robert Shaw reports

Like many Brazilian footballers, Carlos Roberto de Oliveira was always known by a nickname – in his case Dinamite. In a career spanning three decades he scored 470 goals for one of the big Rio clubs, Vasco da Gama, as well as having a brief spell at Barcelona. Now he has a new role, as a president of his former club, having defeated one of the most controversial figures in Brazilian football, Eurico Miranda, in an election at the end of June.

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Sven is quietly settling in as Mexico manager while his lookalike makes the headlines, says Martin del Palacio Langer

Mexico has always had stormy relations with its national-team coaches. The process is generally the same. They arrive amid great expectation and, after a few poor results, end up arguing with the press and being hated by the fans. Although the national team got through the group stage of the past four World Cup finals, no coach has lasted more than four years since Ignacio Trelles, who was in charge between 1958 and 1968.

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Dear WSC
I thoroughly enjoyed your blow-by-blow review of Euro 2008, noting with some reassurance that I’m not the only one driven to distraction by the so-called expert input of BBC and ITV pundits. However your assessment of the Holland-Italy game surprised me somewhat. The furious and defiant ignorance of the laws of the game displayed by Clive Tyldesley and David Pleat with respect to Ruud van Nistelrooy’s goal were surely worthy of comment, indeed arguably the most damning condemnation of their failure in their roles in providing insight and ­explanation. Instead, you bafflingly seem to support their case and argue, in effect, that an official ought to base an offside call on whether he believes a player is faking an injury or not. Actually he’d already made that call by not stopping the game to permit treatment to the Italian defender in question, who had in effect left the field without permission and thus had to be playing the Dutch striker onside. One shudders to imagine the Machiavellian tricks that some domestic managers would concoct were it possible to play an opponent offside by tumbling off the pitch in a writhing heap. Next you’ll be condemning cliched and inappropriate English attitudes to the German team alongside an anglicised spelling of “dummkopf”…
Matt Rowson, Watford

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There has been little action in the transfer market, but young talent is a talking point

Anyone who has managed to stay awake while reading reports about Frank Lampard’s contractual wrangling may have noted a comment by his agent that negotiations with Chelsea been going on “for two years”. Nuclear non-proliferation treaties have been wrapped up quicker. So what have they been discussing for all this time?

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Financial restraints are making the Irish leagues consider dramatic changes, writes Geoff Wallis

As AGMs go it was as cosy as they come when the Football Association of Ireland met in Castlebar, County Mayo, on July 26. Chief executive John Delaney reported a healthy increase in turnover, that financial plans were well in place to secure the FAI’s role when the rebuilt Lansdowne Road reopens in 2010, and that their assumption of control over the Eircom League had seen an aggregate attendance rise of 100,000 over the last year. That figure represents slightly more per game than the mere 320 who attended the 4‑0 victory by Waterford (Delaney’s local side) over Longford the previous night.

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