The Archive

This season's Championship has been a strange affair, says Tim Springett

The Championship, we are told, is the fifth richest football league in the world. That doesn’t alter the fact that it will always be the poor relation of the Premier League. The financial gulf between the two continues to grow and one could be forgiven for thinking that Derby’s abject experience this season served as a deterrent to many teams in the Championship to strive for promotion. It was a division that, in 2007-08, nobody seemed to want to win.

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Points deductions have set the agenda in League One, writes Huw Richards

This was the Year of the Asterisk, with three teams – Leeds, Luton and Bournemouth – suffering points deductions. It also saw our Premier League-fixated national media, not for the first time, missing the point lower down. Hypnotised by the spectacle of Leeds and Nottingham Forest, regarded as Premier League members-in-exile, so far down the tree, they ignored the fact that much of the season was dominated, and the best-quality football played, by teams with a radically different provenance. Doncaster and Carlisle have both spent time in the Conference, while Swansea nearly went there only five years ago. If nobody quite reached the sublime heights attained by Blackpool in the later stages of 2006-07, there was some genuine quality.

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The title race was over by Christmas, but in the end it wasn't that bad a season in League Two, writes Ron Hamilton

Over recent seasons it has become an increasingly popular pastime for League Two aficionados to point and sneer at the lopsided and avaricious Premier League, scoffing at the hype and hoopla in comparison to the somewhat earthier charms of football’s basement division. Yet while much of this scorn is predicated on the assumption that the lower leagues represent the last vestiges of football’s soul, the 2007-08 season has seen the fourth division’s occupation of the moral high ground somewhat ­undermined.

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Dear WSC
Nice to see Tranmere physio Les Parry get some recognition in WSC 255 (Shot!), although he is no stranger to fame. Not only did he win a competition to find the fastest physio in the country a few years ago (with the final being held before the League Cup final), he is probably the only physio in the country – nay, the world – who has his own chant. The verses are seldom sung these days, as they refer to players such as Andy Thorn who have long retired (a further sign of his longevity), but the chorus, to the tune of I am the Music Man, of “Physi, physi, physio. Physio Les Parry” still rings out when he sprints on to the pitch to repair yet another Tranmere player clattered to the ground by some carthorse of a third-division defender.
John Rooney, Bristol

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Thaksin needs to learn that only stability will bring long-term success

With the news as we went to press that Sven-Göran Eriksson was set to be sacked after his new club’s best top-flight season since 1992, Thaksin Shinawatra appears to have confirmed his ambition of turning Manchester City into the English equivalent of Hearts. That story started quite well, too, back in 2005. The club’s new Lithuanian owner, Vladimir Romanov, loudly proclaimed his determination to challenge Rangers and Celtic, and the team led the SPL for just over three months. But even with the team topping the table, manager George Burley was manoeuvred out. Half a dozen less successful men, whose names even Hearts fans would struggle to keep track of, have followed.

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