The Archive

These are changing times for Match of the Day, with the BBC struggling to hold on to TV rights but launching a new mag for kids with a design so busy you contract motion sickness if you even glance at its cover. Roger Titford compares this and other titles aimed at boys with those of his youth

My eyes hurt. I’ve sustained an industrial injury through reading Shoot, Match! and Match of the Day magazine in less than 90 minutes. It’s the visual equivalent of downing two litres of fizzy blue pop and half a dozen Boost bars. Yes, suddenly and unexpectedly the boys’ football weekly magazine market has burst back into life, with the three titles all competing at the £1.80 mark.

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The BBC so was so keen to snap up the rights for Formula One that it seems to have forgotten about the football, writes Paul Hopwood

The music’s stopped and the latest round of “Pass the Rights” has ground to a halt. So, who has grabbed the chairs – and who’s left looking faintly ridiculous around the edge of the room? Well, we already knew that live Premier League fixtures would be shown, for two more seasons, by a combination of Sky and Setanta, with the BBC left with Saturday’s smug Match of the Day and an altogether more watchable edition on Sunday.

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The Championship has been a strange division, full of surprises yet lacking in quality, reports Tom Green

It’s easy to see why away fans might enjoy visiting The Valley. Tucked away in a quiet south-east London neighbourhood, it’s a proper football ground, modernised and expanded but still on its old site five minutes from the train station. The club “superstore” is more like a corner shop and pre-match catering still tends to mean fish and chips or a kebab. While there are plenty of expensive players’ Range Rovers in the car park, the statue of post-war Addicks goalkeeper Sam Bartram that looms outside the West Stand is an effective reminder of the club’s history.

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They showed the power of money in football but ultimately tripped up by planning poorly for the future, writes Michael Whalley

As football crash-and-burn stories go, it’s hard to beat the implosion of Colne Dynamoes nearly 20 years ago. In the late 1980s, the Dynamoes – bankrolled by millionaire chairman-manager Graham White – charged through the non-League pyramid on a budget to make some Football League clubs jealous. And then, in August 1990, having been denied promotion to the Conference because their ground wasn’t up to standard, they folded overnight.

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Now definitively part of Germany, for a while the Saar’s status was in flux. And, for a fleeting moment in history, the region was also an unlikely centre of footballing attention, explains Paul Joyce

The golden age of football in the Saar – today a region of Germany that borders Luxembourg and France – was a by-product of the tug-of-war over its political status.

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