Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Avram Grant analysed
Avram Grant’s arrival at Chelsea has been confusing on several levels. Questions posed have included: do the players like him? How long is he going to hang around? And, crucially for journalists, what words do we use to describe him? Grant is undeniably exotic. A Jew, an Israeli and a pal of the owner: a first in every sense.
Paul Joyce reports on Austrian clubs selling their indentities
If your average attendance is only 800, it might seem unwise to hint to supporters that there are better ways of spending their free time. Yet this is what happened in March, when Austrian second-division side SC Schwanenstadt changed their name to SCS bet-at-home.com. It could have been worse. “It was important for us to maintain the club’s identity,” enthused Klaus Gruber, marketing manager of the online betting company behind the rebranding. “That’s why we kept their initials at the front.”
Apart from pubs and the stands themselves, internet message boards are the best place to debate your club’s fortunes and praise or criticise in the company of fellow fans. But, as Ian Plenderleith reports, this freedom of expression is increasingly under threat as clubs use lawyers to clamp down on dissent
Many people compare the football message board to their local pub. You can meet your mates there to relax, say anything you like, and the next day no one will remember a word. There’s the odd idiot who gets out of hand and maybe a fight breaks out, but after a while everyone calms down. Sometimes it’s quiet because there’s no one around, so you leave again. And strangers are treated with suspicion until they show they didn’t just come in to cause trouble, but rather gain acceptance by expressing the sort of opinion that’s greeted with knowing nods (the online equivalent of getting your round in unprompted).
He was a defensive liability in League One but seemingly comfortable at international level. Chris Lynham reflects on Kent’s very own World Cup star
When Neale Cooper was installed as boss of freshly relegated Gillingham in 2005, he decided to use his knowledge of the Scottish market to rebuild the flagging squad. In among the deranged goalkeepers and tanked-up forwards he acquired on the cheap was Trinidad & Tobago defender Brent Sancho, signed on a free from Dundee. With the Medway towns possibly being the only conurbation on earth that could make Dundee look like an oasis of bohemian chic, it was hardly a glamour move for Sancho. But for Gills fans it was an exciting acquisition – an established international who was intent on sealing his ticket to the World Cup in Germany.
Simon Tyers watches entertainment presenters fawn over Mourinho, and the Masters at work
While I haven’t quite lost all faith in the ability of the wider broadcasting world to discuss modern football in a rational, unaffected way, the events of Wednesday September 20 on BBC1’s The One Show brought me close. It involved a discussion between football presenter and writer Adrian Chiles and football journalist Alyson Rudd about professional football manager José Mourinho interrupted by co‑presenter Christine Bleakley exclaiming “I know you two will talk about football, but…”