Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Jamie Redknapp and Tim Sherwood attempt to please PFA members with a vanity publication, Harry Pearson reports
Many years ago a school friend of mine had trials at Middlesbrough. Chris was at Ayresome Park for a week, training alongside Craig Johnston and Bozo Jankovic. He was offered terms and, incredibly, turned the chance down. “To be honest, I don’t think I could spend every day with people like that,” he said. “I just couldn’t find anything to talk to them about."
When countries had only one European Cup entrant, the UEFA Cup commanded attention. All that seemed to change. But, asks Luke Chapman, is the junior competition now the less predictable one?
Two years ago, after a defensive display in Turin earned Liverpool a place in the semi-finals of the Champions League, a radio reporter light-heartedly asked a Reds fan what was more important: winning the European Cup or ensuring qualification for the competition next year. “Hmm,” pondered the supporter, apparently in all seriousness, “that’s a tough one."
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.
If clubs need hand-outs from the FA, then they're not going to ask too many questions of the man in charge – even when he lines up his son as his eventual successor, as Rodrigo Orihuela explains
The transfers of Carlos Tévez and Javier Mascherano opened Argentine eyes to Russian corporate involvement in football, but the background to the September 3 friendly between Argentina and Brazil in London was still a surprise to the average local fan. The game was the first arranged through a contract, signed in April, between the Argentine FA and Renova, a Russian corporation that calls itself “the leading Russian asset management company”. Viktor Vekselberg, Russia’s third richest man, is chairman of Renova.
Palestine are in with a good chance of reaching the Asian Cup finals but, as a new film shows, it’s amazing they play at all, given the difficulties a simple training camp poses. Gavin Willacy reports
While the world’s media focus on flaring conflict in the Middle East, the Asian Cup qualifying rounds are quietly progressing, despite featuring what could be described as the ultimate Group of Death: Palestine, a perpetual powder keg; Singapore (they of the world’s highest per capita execution rate); apocalyptic Iraq; and China, number one on Amnesty International’s death-penalty chart, with around 90 per cent of the world’s annual total.