The Archive

The lovable chaps at the G-14 have a new, familiar face in charge. Steve Menary wonders whether David Dein will preside over a winning team or is resigned to fighting a rearguard action.

Anyone confident of winning a court case would not start publicly discussing a settlement a year before they were due in court. Yet that is what David Dein began doing on taking over as president of the G-14 group of clubs in late October. G-14 are backing Charleroi’s case against FIFA for €615,000 (£413,000) compensation for an injury Abdelmajid Oulmers suffered while playing for Morocco in 2004. He took eight months to return to action for the Belgian club. G-14 also threw their weight behind an action by one of their own members, Lyon, for €1 million in compensation from FIFA over an injury to France defender Eric Abidal in a friendly last year.

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Southend have been on the up under Steve Tilson and hope to abandon their Roots in search of more success. But the visitors for this pseudo-derby also have a manager anxious to make an impression, Csaba Abrahall reports

In The Football Grounds of Great Britain, Simon Inglis paints a romantic picture of the rebirth of Roots Hall as a football stadium in the 1950s. With funding provided by the supporters’ club and labour by the players and manager, it rose out of the rubbish dump that sat on the site previously used by the club before the First World War. Fifty years on, it is not without its shortcomings. Parking’s a bugger and it has a shabby, disjointed exterior, but it’s easy to overlook these inadequacies in the light of such an uncommon history.

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Being dismissed by Brian Clough did as much harm to Harlow Town as it had done to Jan Tomaszewski. Jon Spurling recalls the Essex club's FA Cup heyday – and decline

With its modish housing estates, flourishing light industries, new-fangled dry‑ski slope, award-winning Henry Moore sculpture on the walk into the town centre and upwardly mobile football club, a 1980 government white paper cited Harlow as “one of the main successes of the New Town programme”. Twenty-three years on, the “chronically underfunded” town with its “shabby” housing estates was in serious trouble. Local youths had removed the head from one of the figures in the Moore sculpture and the ski slope was dismantled. Harlow Town FC had also fallen into serious decline; their Sportcentre ground was ramshackle and decent players were prised away by rival clubs. Rarely had the fortunes of a town and its football club been so tightly entwined.

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Errol Lawrence follows closely the movements of Zizou for 90 minutes, with the aid of 17 cameras

In 1970, a German film-maker named Hellmuth Costard pointed six 16mm cameras at George Best as he played for Manchester United against Coventry City. Footage was edited and framed so that other players and the crowd were ignored and, at most, incidental. Fussball wie noch nie (Football as never before) is not a film for the fan. Watching Best in less than splendid isolation is quite disturbing and, with the benefit of hindsight, the fascination and value of the film lies in its idiosyncratic study of what might be charitably described as an eccentric performance by football’s supreme individualist at the beginning of that long, sad decline.

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Back in issue 234 we asked you for your views on the World Cup and more than 600 readers took part. Roger Titford shares the results and compares them to the answers you gave us after the 1998 finals

While England may have had a Grip on the bench, WSC readers were less gripped by the 2006 World Cup, our summer survey reveals. Despite – or perhaps because of – the high hopes for England, there was a rather grumpy response to the tournament compared with the answers we had to similar questions in our 1998 France World Cup survey.

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