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The Archive

Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.

 

Start talking sense

Everyone has a novel inside them, the cliche says, while failing to point out that most of them would be unreadable. A similar principle appears to apply to football podcasts and, as they are easier to produce than books, there are a lot of awful ones out there, though Ian Plenderleith does find a few worth a listen

 Are podcasts an important part of the brave New Media era, or just blogs with sound? I’m not that good with new stuff. I abandoned vinyl as late as was decently possible, and took a while to catch on to the idea of downloading music and having songs on your hard drive instead of on your shelf. Until a couple of years ago, I didn’t see what broadband could do for me that wasn’t already available through my dial-up connection. And neither had I listened to a single podcast, even though the concept had been nagging me unpleasantly for a while. As in: “I suppose I ought to listen to one some time.”

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Cuba

Fidel Castro has resigned and his island republic is opening up more and more to the world – and that includes embracing football, formerly a failure in a sea of sporting success, writes Matt Norman

When Fidel Castro officially stepped down as president of Cuba on February 18, the debate over his legacy began instantly, with detractors and supporters in equal numbers queuing up to declare his half-century reign as one of either tyranny or triumph.

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Flasback in time

Cameron Carter revisits The Big Match

Nostalgia is such a beautiful, furry thing that even the mundane and irksome, when viewed from the impossible distance of the future, can bring forth the smile of regret. Many years after the first sacking of Rome, and some time before the final collapse, there were probably some older citizens who became wistful about how one didn’t hear much about Visigoths these days. That is how it is with The Big Match Revisited (Thursdays, 4pm, ITV4), hidden away in the netherworld of daytime digital TV.

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Letters, WSC 254

Dear WSC
As a supporter of a smaller club myself, I sympathise with Luton’s current plight, but Eva Tenner’s letter in WSC 253 has brought out the devil’s advocate in me. To her list of those not responsible for Luton’s woes, she should also have added Liverpool FC’s board. Liverpool gave Luton quite a bit of help anyway by playing badly enough in the first tie to allow Luton a replay at Anfield. If you add the attendances at the 32 third-round ties and 12 replays together, only three pairings had a greater audience than Luton v Liverpool, so Luton arguably did as well as they could financially out of this season’s FA Cup. If Luton had been drawn away to my team, Tranmere, for example (average attendance around 7,000), would there have been a similar call for Luton to have all the gate money? I think not. Or what if Luton had faced another smaller team and lost in 90 minutes? Would a replay have been ordered to try to boost the Hatters’ coffers that way? No. I genuinely hope Luton find their way out of their current difficulties, but the fact is that meeting one of the Big Four should be seen as a helpful stroke of luck for them, rather than a reason for their fans to moan about Liverpool’s supposed meanness.
Tristan Browning, Reading

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Grounds for discontent

Andy Brassell looks at the fallout in Portugal four years after they hosted the European Championship

Fans may complain that the Swiss and Austrian stadiums to be used in Euro 2008 may be a little on the small side, with only those in Basel and Vienna having room for significantly more than 30,000 spectators. And you can imagine by how much those dissenting voices would have been amplified had England, or indeed any of the home nations, managed to qualify for the finals. However, there is at least little doubt over the sustainability of the grounds post-tournament.

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