The Archive

The official pizza's hot, the toilets are clean, the playing legends are ready: it's the first Champions League group game at a stadium built for European competition – or possibly a trip to outer space. By Barney Ronay

 You know how it is when you go round to someone’s new house. It’s all very nice, of course; but somehow it’s never quite right. Those floral curtains. That full-circle panorama of 150 glass executive boxes dwarfed by two matching 100ft plasma screens. Well, we certainly wouldn’t have done it like that. Maybe you really have to be a fan to get excited about the Emirates Stadium. Either way, Arsenal’s first Champions League game here is a hugely significant occasion for everyone concerned with the erection of this cavernous upturned-spaceship of a stadium. This is, after all, what it’s here for. This a club remodelling – and re­mortgaging – itself along pan-European lines, with a 60,000-capacity stadium designed not with Reading and Sheffield United in mind, but Real Madrid and Bayern Munich; or even just the club’s first ever meeting with Porto, on a mild Tuesday night.

Read more…

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.

Read more…

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.

Read more…

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.

Read more…

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.

Read more…