Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
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.
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.
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
Cameron Carter takes a look at the Joey Barton story, while discovering how the game has changed since 1957
Gabby Logan has a great listening face, possibly one of the best on television. Her gleaming eyes and soulful nodding, even when filmed after the interview, lead her subject and viewer alike to believe that this is a woman who not only cares, she might also remember some of the things her interviewee said 20 minutes later. The expression is one of distilled empathy, her listen a strong, steady listen – rather like the diligent way you attend someone who’s telling you his life story while buying you drinks all night. This bedside manner was seen at its best on Inside Sport (December 3, BBC1) as she asked Joey Barton to explain himself to the nation.
A season in which northern clubs made a revival saw Aston Villa move into the third tier, by Keith Wilson
The long-term significance
The promotion of Blackpool and Huddersfield represented a brief revival for traditional northern clubs – against a prevailing trend. At the start of the 1960s Blackpool had been one of five Lancashire town teams in the First Division. By the end of that decade, with the abolition of the maximum wage badly affecting many smaller clubs, only Burnley were left – and they were to be relegated with Blackpool in 1970-71 (to return briefly in the mid‑1970s). Huddersfield, who had spent several seasons more at the top level than their west Yorkshire rivals Leeds, returned to Division Two after two seasons. Like Blackpool, they have spent much of the past 38 years in the bottom two divisions.