The Archive

The season is not half-done yet relegation is assured, despite the arrival of a new manager. But amid the retail outlets and call centres, there’s no anger – it’s not so much Pride Park as Resigned Park. By David Stubbs

It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve made the trip up north by rail. It matters not that you were actually brought up in the north. No matter, either, that you have resolved not to fall into the usual trap of the condescending London-based writer venturing into the provinces and remarking on the frightfulness of it all, the supreme example of which was a piece written by the Guardian’s Katherine Whitehorn in the 1960s, entitled “You Can’t Take Aubergines For Granted Outside London”. Step off the train at Derby, step outside and the scene that greets you, dominated by a browned-off looking Midlands Hotel, makes you deeply conscious not just that you have stepped outside your home town, but stepped outside your own decade.

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The Hearts man has moved back and forth between city rivals, rowed with managers and fans, and frequently seen red. Gordon Cairns looks at the one–time Manchester United prodigy

The surprise move of last summer in Scotland was Michael Stewart joining Hearts on a free transfer. This was not because he wasn’t born in Lithuania, where most of his team’s recruits now come from, but because he was returning to the club he left in 2005, from city rivals Hibernian. While it is not unusual for a player to appear for both of the Edinburgh clubs, it is rare to yo-yo between them, with Stewart being the only player to do so since the Second World War.

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Journalists make it personal, turning up the heat on Steve McClaren to create words and to protect their own interests

Newspaper coverage of Steve McClaren’s final month as England manager was both relentless and remorseless. Even in the usually more even-handed broadsheet press the tone rarely rose above the standard “Sack This Fool Now” template. “This is a black and white issue,” wrote Martin Samuel in the Times on November 12, in a column headlined Fail and McClaren has to go. For the football press there was simply no alternative.

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The Bristol City manager is left red faced after giving Liam Fontaine the perfect motivation to score a peachy goal

By now Gary Johnson should have exposed his naked backside in a shop window in Bristol. Johnson promised to do so if Liam Fontaine scored this season, which Fontaine duly did against Wolves. However, despite talking about it in the press, as well as devoting a section of his post-match press conferences to discussing it, at the time of writing we still can’t be sure that Johnson has actually gone ahead and done so.

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A week of hopes and fears for Scotland and England led to double failure but contrasting reactions online, as Ian Plenderleith found out with the help of a folk singer and various dead writers

England’s and Scotland’s failure to qualify for Euro 2008 not only proved there is no longer a British team in the continent’s top ranks. The contrast in home reactions to that failure also showed us that, although the end result may be the same, an underdog country’s sporting patriots generally maintain a healthy perspective, while a Bulldog Nation’s repeat anticipation of glory only perpetuates its misery and ill-humour.

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