The Archive

Setanta’s Conference coverage has been surprisingly refreshing – more so than the station’s attempts to reinvent the wheel when it comes to sports news and the Premier League, believes Josh Widdicombe

If ITV Digital taught us one thing, it is that lower-league football is less popular with television audiences than a knitted monkey. So, like a team about to sign Nigel Quashie, you might think that someone should have warned Setanta of the mistakes of the past before they splashed out on 79 games from the Blue Square Premier (aka the Conference) to supplement their Premier League coverage.

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In the wake of the dawn raids at Harry Redknapp's house, the sports pages rush to his defence

Harry Redknapp’s arrest raised uncomfortable questions for those who write about football. Is it corrupt? Is the game no more than a tissue of deception with a putrid core? And most pressing of all – what can we do to help out? Redknapp is, of course, uniquely popular with journalists, the most ready of any manager to hand out his mobile number and offer up a tasty quote. So what to do about it? Rob Shepherd summed up the mood in his News of the World column (December 2): “Over 25 years he’s been one of the best managers and blokes I’ve come across in football.”

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Many people would struggle to place the home city of CFR Cluj on a map, but the club could be hosting Champions League matches next season. Andy Hockley reports on an unlikely stirring in Transylvania

As Romania’s league enjoys its two-month winter break, an unfamiliar name occupies top spot in the table. The club are 100 years old, but their recent rise has been nothing short of dramatic.

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Around the turn of the century, individual club webzines started to sign up to broader networks that in theory offered support, money and more users. But the results have not always been pretty and since Sky took over the Rivals group disaffection has grown. Ian Plenderleith analyses a splintered market

To the indifference of a cruel and doubtless unsuspecting world, a conflict has been brewing in the hard-boiled realm of the webzine, and things are about to get dirty. No fewer than six umbrella networks are now striving to claim the mantle of that timeworn marketing tool, “the voice of the fans”, and are fighting it out for a limited share of the readership and the revenue.

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Dear WSC
Vaughan Roberts asks (Letters, WSC 251) if any of the schoolboys who took part in ITV’s Penalty Prize competition went on to become pros after their appearance in the shootout before the 1974 FA Cup final. Well, at least one did. Stuart Beavon was already on Spurs’ books at the time he put five out of six spot-kicks past Gordon Banks, no less. He made only three first-team appearances for Spurs but became a fixture in Reading’s midfield, playing almost 500 games during the Eighties. His penalty-taking prowess remained intact and in March 1988 he returned to Wembley to put Reading into the lead from the spot as they beat Luton 4-1 in the Simod Cup final. However, Stuart’s most famous penalty was a deliberate miss. Before the FA launch a belated match-fixing inquiry, Stuart’s failure came in Channel 4’s football drama The Manageress. Gabriella Benson/Cherie Lunghi’s team were based at Elm Park and had to win their last game of their season to win promotion and, 1-0 up with a minute to go, conceded a penalty. The script, of course, required the actor keeper to save the spot-kick and Stuart was asked to take the penalty. Apparently, it took ten kicks before the director was satisfied. In Reading’s next game Beavon took a real penalty, which he missed, blaming his failure on becoming accustomed to missing through his TV appearance. That miss cost Reading a win and, nine days later, it also cost manager Ian Branfoot his job, surely the only manager to be sacked because of a TV series.
Alan Sedunary, via email

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