Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
The press are having a field day as Chelsea and Manchester United head to Moscow for the Champions League final
By the day of the Champions League final, recycling bins everywhere will have been full to the brim with pull-out previews, all the daily papers, broadsheets as well tabloids, having produced supplements of some sort. Meanwhile, anyone intent on reading the post-match analyses will use up all their waking hours until Christmas.
The complaints of the traditional media that the internet has lower standards is turning out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, Ian Plenderleith discovers, as major organisations sully their brands
It’s well documented that the traditional print media were suspicious of this whole internet thing for years. Despite the worry that sub-standard but low-cost online journalism was going to take away all their readers, they were slow to respond to the ink-free new world, as though by competing they would taint themselves with product deemed to be a mediocre shadow of the revered printed word.
The traditional fanzine is making a comeback of sorts, writes Thom Gibbs
It is hard to miss Mike Harrison. Head to Valley Parade when Bradford City are at home and he’ll be standing outside wearing a retro Bantams shirt, clutching a wad of A5 fanzines. Oh, and he’s 6ft 8in. “It helps that I’m recognisable,” the editor of 24-year-old fanzine The City Gent says. “Most people know me, but I’m always badgering and cajoling new people to write and contribute, because if you don’t do that then you just won’t get anything.”
FC Vaduz have become unwelcome guests in the Swiss top flight, writes Paul Joyce
The 35,365 citizens of Liechtenstein, the principality of only 62 square miles wedged between Switzerland and Austria, barely raised an eyebrow in March 2007 when Swiss troops on exercise mistakenly wandered into their country. An invasion in the other direction, however, is currently proving more controversial.
Zenit St Petersburg may be suddenly popular in one half of Glasgow, but the manner of their success means they have been losing fans in Russia. Saul Pope explains
Not many people outside Russia know it, but the country has two capitals. Moscow, the official capital, is the centre of business, politics and power; its people are seen elsewhere as being arrogant and pushy. St Petersburg, the “Northern capital”, is the country’s centre for culture and the arts; its people are considered to be polite and intelligent, although Muscovites see them as provincial. This dichotomy has largely been true of post-Communist Russian football: Zenit St Petersburg have played a stylish and attacking game, and have become popular among fans outside Moscow, but have always been outshone by the capital’s big guns. Until now, that is.