Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
A season ruined by a controversial points deduction. David Wangerin writes
A club unable to balance their books is nothing new to football; start with Chelsea and work your way down. In the case of Scarborough, though, there has been no Russian tycoon to underwrite their bid for glory and overspending problems have left the club languishing in administration for the past several years. This was converted into a Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA) last May, just before the Conference’s AGM.
Gabby settles in at the Beeb. Cameron Carter watches
Of the many shocking defections of the last two centuries, Gabby Logan’s appearance on BBC1’s FA Cup coverage ranks right up there with Rudolf Nureyev’s defection to the West, Burgess and Maclean’s to the East and Des Lynam’s moves, first to ITV and then all the way to the bank.
In the dying days of George Graham’s Arsenal reign, the Scot signed a player as far from his own image as imaginable. Jon Spurling remembers a Dutch enigma
As fortysomethings waxed lyrical about Geordie Armstrong’s “magnificent engine” and Brian Marwood was voted the club’s greatest ever short-term acquisition, debate raged among Arsenal fans on a website over who was the club’s greatest recent wide player. Anders Limpar – rather harshly – was described as a “poor man’s Robert Pires”. So what, I wondered, did that make Glenn Helder. A destitute’s Marc Overmars, perhaps?
Soheb Panja reports on the evolution of sponsorship
At the time of its announcement, Vodafone’s termination of a £9 million-a-year sponsorship deal with Manchester United was viewed as a symbolic moment in the club’s fortunes. In hindsight, it wasn’t the moment the United empire crumbled, rather a turning point for sponsorship in football and sport generally, one reflected in Emirates’ deal with Arsenal and that may see Liverpool’s new home also named after a company rather than a place.
The murder of a Sicilian policeman at a game led to new measures to combat Italy’s ultra culture. But, as Vanda Wilcox explains, everyone from the government down sees politics as the cause of the violence
On February 2, Inspector Filippo Raciti was killed by a blow to the stomach, during a deliberate ambush of the police planned and carried out by CC Catania ultras at their Sicilian derby by Palermo. The fatal weapon was a piece of sink wrenched from the wall of a stadium toilet. The police were attacked with rocks, metal bars, baseball bats, flares and – last but not least – home-made bombs, one of which stuck the dying inspector, causing further injuries. Before the match, Catania ultras had collected a huge arsenal of weapons in a stadium storeroom.