The Archive

Asian players are still thin on the ground in English football. There are some good prospects but, believes Gavin Willacy, the round-ball game should look at the success of rugby league in this area

Two years ago WSC 225 focused on the Asians Can Play Football campaign. Of the four British Asians playing professionally then, Michael Chopra, the mixed-race son of an Indian grocer, is trying to prove he is a Premier League-quality striker with Sunderland, and QPR midfielder Zesh Rehman has clocked up nearly 100 appearances in the Championship. They are making a career – and a lot of money – from football. Adnan Ahmed is on the fringes at Tranmere and Harpal Singh – who got into Leeds’ squad but didn’t play a first-team game there – is coming to the end of an injury-ravaged season in Ireland, sitting on the bench for Bohemians. Coming into the League this season has been former West Ham trainee Anwar Uddin, after captaining Dagenham & Redbridge to the Conference title.

Read more…

Blackburn Rovers have had little success in attracting non-white fans. But the recent Kick It Out anti-racism week was used to try to appeal to the town’s Asian community, as Bruce Wilkinson reports

There was a time when it was extremely rare to see any black or Asian faces around Ewood Park, but thankfully this has slowly begun to change. The club are running a strong anti-racism campaign under the banner of Not Under Our Roof and have put together a number of events to coincide with the Kick It Out week. Youngsters attending Rovers’ education department created anti-racism posters prominently displayed in the programme for the game against Reading. Pupils from local schools paraded before the match waving Kick It Out banners, while a number of high-profile players, including Tugay and Jason Roberts, supported the week of action.

Read more…

Passion should go out of fashion 

A genial old man called Stanley Green used to parade up and down Oxford Street wearing a sandwich board, now preserved in the Museum of London, that warned of the dangers of “passion”, which he believed could be brought on by consuming too much protein. The small pamphlets he handed out to passers-by didn’t make any reference to football being afflicted with this dangerous tendency, but the game would have provided him with enough material for a book, possibly even an encyclopaedia.

Read more…

While Lilian Thuram has made some notable left-wing gestures, one of his black predecessors in the France defence has made a sudden switch to the right. Andy Brassell reports

Basile Boli’s appointment as national secretary for ­co‑development with President Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party has been on the cards for a while. It may seem surreal to those who remember the robust defender scoring the winner in Marseille’s 1993 Champions League final win over Milan, getting away with headbutting Stuart Pearce during Euro 92, or indeed helping his mate Chris Waddle reprise his recording career post-Diamond Lights (with the Anglo-French duet We’ve Got A ­Feeling). Yet though Boli’s career since playing retirement – which came in 1997, at the tender age of 30 – has included media work for the TV channel France 3, it has otherwise been quite atypical for an ex-pro.

Read more…

Johan Cruyff’s title-winning final season, putting one over Ajax. By Ernst Bouwes

The long-term significance
This was Johan Cruyff’s final season as a player. Ajax, whom he rejoined in 1981 after eight years in Spain and the United States, declined to extend his contract for another year because they doubted his crowd-pulling abilities at the age of 36. So, out of spite, Cruyff went to bitterest rivals Feyenoord. Incredibly he was to take them to their only title between 1974 and 1993, but their fans never really knew what to make of the move – Cruyff grabbed all the headlines and it seemed more his title than Feyenoord’s. Most of their away games were sold out, but home attendances went up by only a couple of thousand per match.

Read more…