The Archive

Respect reaction

On March 18, the FA launched a new strategy entitled “Respect”, designed in part to address bad behaviour at all levels of football. Within 24 hours, Ashley Cole was given only a yellow card for a dangerous tackle in the Spurs v Chelsea match, a punishment strongly disputed by his team‑mates. It had scarcely been mentioned in the immediate aftermath of the game, but Cole’s disrespectful reaction to referee Mike Riley soon assumed prime importance. By the time of Grand Slam Sunday three days later, the new FA chairman Lord Triesman was making personal appeals to Alex Ferguson to “show some respect” towards referees.

Read more…

Simon Tyers takes a look at Setanta Sports News, Sky's unthreatening rival

Watching Setanta Sports News, you are reminded of the scene in I’m Alan Partridge where, on being told by the BBC director of programming that the glut of regional police shows he has listed suggests there’s too many, Partridge suggests “that’s one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is, people like them, let’s make some more of them.” Sky Sports News is delivered by a combination of an authoritative father figure/elder brother type and a power-dressed blonde while information scrolls around them. Setanta has decided that the only way to improve on this is to have a go at it itself and hope nobody makes the connection.

Read more…

Poor organisation has turned the battle for tickets for the FA Cup semi-finals into a luck-of-the-draw contest, writes Tom Whitworth

The four participating clubs in this season’s FA Cup semi-finals had the responsibility of fairly distributing their 33,000 Wembley tickets. They have each failed in various ways. The FA had reduced the original pricing structure of £55-£95 to £25-£55 in an attempt to ensure demand was sufficient to fill every seat. But all four clubs compelled fans to purchase tickets for games that followed their quarter-finals rather than rewarding past loyalty.

Read more…

Clubs ruined by debt are finding themselves in a continuous cycle of money problems, writes Tom Davies

One of the more depressing features of recent years’ club crises is just how recurrent they are: a threat is averted temporarily, only to resurface a couple of years later, with underlying problems unsolved. At few places is this more evident than at Rotherham United, who last month entered administration for the second time in less than two years, as a three-year decline, which has seen ownership of the club change hands twice and the ground once, has again pushed the Millers to the brink. The League Two club owe what is thought to be “several hundred thousand pounds” to the tax authorities and, needing funds to pay players and rent their ground from octogenarian former chairman Ken Booth, are in another fight for survival.

Read more…

Unless something is done to improve grassroots facilities, we will never be able to improve standards of play, writes Gavin Willacy

I’m all for selling off playing fields. The majority of our pitches are good for nothing but walking a dog or building houses on. That suggestion may be considered heresy by callers to phone-ins and fellow feature-writers, but selling them off could be the answer to one of English football’s biggest barriers to progress.

Read more…