The Archive

Update on clubs in crisis, Tom Davies reports

It has been another fraught summer at Queens Park Rangers, with the club facing a winding-up order, further loan entanglements and worries about ongoing financing. QPR were served with a winding-up order in June over debts of £700,000-£800,000 to HM Revenue and Customs. The club was bailed out with the help of a new ­£1.3 million loan from the mysterious Panama-based ABC corporation, to whom Rangers were already paying back an earlier £10m loan (see WSC 230). Furthermore, the entire loan repayment deadline was brought forward to August next year from the original deadline of 2012.

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Dear WSC
I’m sure I’m not the only Wednesday fan disappointed that the recent takeover was unsuccessful. However, whatever the rights and wrongs, our initial disappointment was lessened when we found out that would-be buyer Paul Gregg was a leisure magnate rather than the purveyor of quality pastries to our high streets. I was quite looking forward to Leon Clarke puffing up and down our newly laid pitch with “Steak Bake” emblazoned across his ample midriff.
Paul Sullivan, Pontefract

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Their country’s victory in the Asian Cup provided a respite from bad news for Iraqis everywhere, but, as Justin McCurry explains, a competition with four host nations left plenty of others unhappy

After Japan’s politically charged victory over China in Beijing three years ago, few expected this year’s Asian Cup to amount to much more than the beginning of a regional power struggle between the Japanese and the confederation’s newcomers, Australia. In the end it amounted to the continent’s answer to total football: decent matches played in searing heat, organisational cock-ups (perhaps unsurprising given that there were four host nations), managerial resignations, and that old friend of FIFA knock-out tournaments, the soporific stalemate otherwise known as the third-place play-off.

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The mob of Premiership clubs off on a Far East beano this summer has received unprecedented coverage in the newspapers. As ever, nobody really knows what to make of this kind of thing. Understandably enough, football hacks pitched into an utterly alien environment can sometimes find themselves a little out of their depth. The tone is usually pitched somewhere between eye-boggling visions of the wealth to be reaped from this parallel universe of crazed, barely coherent football junkies; and sex tourist-lite fascination with the sheer, naked, excitable strangeness of it all.

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Do you have an idea how many key passes Darren Fletcher has had in the Champions League? Would you remember enough about Frank Lampard’s various performances against Barcelona to be able to take a guess at his total yardage? Good luck to you if you do, because we haven’t got a clue. And neither would anyone else 15 years ago. In the century of football that occurred in the pre-Sky age, supporters somehow managed to cope without knowing how much ground a certain player covered or whether he was statistically his team’s fifth-best decision-maker in the final third.

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