The Archive

Referees get official help. Steve Menary reports

The idea of clubs even at semi-professional level – let alone in the Premier League – having to find their own referee for a home game is hard to imagine. At parks level, however, many clubs do that every week, often prompting disputes about the officials’ impartiality. The reason that referees are in such short supply is because hundreds have drifted out of the game due to the poor behaviour of players and spectators. That is why the Football Association launched its initiative to improve respect for referees, which begins in earnest in January 2008.

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Why rugby is reckoned to be better than football

“I am probably attracted to rugby because it is a man’s game.” So the Sun reported “the shock conversion” this month of Jimmy Greaves from football to rugby. “Football has been part of my life… but I no longer regard it as a passion,” Jimmy confided in the paper’s news section, writing of his admiration for “the fighting sprit, which is missing in football”. This has been a common theme. As it did with the last Rugby World Cup in Australia, the oval‑ball code’s four‑yearly hijacking of front and back pages provoked a particularly vehement reaction against any and all things associated with football.

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Swiss police catch a controversial owner, reports Graham Dunbar

A celebrated players’ agent and club owner currently sits in a prison cell awaiting trial on charges including fraudulent bankruptcy and abuse of trust. For added comedy value, he is a dead ringer for David Brent, one of his victims was the former president of Real Madrid, and his farcical extradition saga entertained even non-football fans throughout the summer. Of course, there is inevitable tragedy at the heart of the life and times of Marc Roger and that is the near-destruction of a proud club, Servette, 17 times the champions of Switzerland.

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Steve McClaren’s job is up for grabs

This month the sports pages have been embroiled in a cagey kind of guessing game: something speculative and possibly a little unfair, but which has, as ever, proved irresistible. So much so that discussion of who the next England coach will be has advanced so quickly that you’d be forgiven for forgetting the only real obstacle to getting someone in tomorrow is the fact that the position is already filled.

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December 2007 ~ England’s failings and Sepp Blatter’s plans could combine to produce a lengthy wailing about how it’s all the fault of foreign players. But before the inquest begins, Barney Ronay points out the flaws in this view

Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly who you are supposed to blame. With England’s hopes of qualifying for Euro 2008 all but extinguished by the complex series of injustices and frustrations visited by the defeat to Russia in Moscow, the building blocks are already being shouldered into place for a major inquest. And what an inquest it looks like being. Should the final cut be administered this month, English football is already geared up for a masterpiece of introspection, an epic of self-reproach born aloft on the twin pillars of the too-many-foreign-players and let’s-revamp-the-under-sevens lobbies.

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