The Archive

Saturday 1 Berlin’s stadium announcer is replaced after urging the crowd to cheer Germany during their quarter-final. Glenn Hoddle resigns at Wolves. “My expectations and the club’s have drifted too far apart,” he says. Paul Ince is tipped to step in.

Sunday 2 David Beckham quits as England captain, although he wants to keep playing. He tearfully mentions Steve McClaren and Peter Taylor twice, with a solitary nod towards “Sven”. “Maybe we’re a victim of our own honesty and Wayne more than most,” reasons John Terry as the campaign against “Sly Senor” Ronaldo gathers momentum. Honest Wayne is quoted as telling team-mates over breakfast that he wants to “smack him on the head and split him in two”, though he may have been referring to his boiled egg.X

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The current Middle East crisis has plunged Lebanon back towards chaos and badly damaged a football culture that had been a symbol of renewal after decades of strife. Hassanin Mubarak reports

On July 3, the Lebanon squad played a warm-up game at the Amin Abdel Nour International Stadium in Bhamdoun, a popular tourist area in the mountains east of the capital, Beirut. Their opponents were Iraqi club side Kirkuk, from a volatile city in the north of Iraq ravaged by sectarian violence. The Iraqi club’s officials had hoped to use the training camp as preparation for the new 2006-07 Iraq league season, while the Lebanese were gearing up to host the fourth edition of the West Asian Football Federation (WAFF) Championship, a tournament featuring part of the “Axis of Evil”, Syria and Iran, as well as former member Iraq. A few days after this match, won 2-0 by Lebanon, planes and missiles ranged over the country, killing more than 600 civilians and wounding thousands, with more than a million displaced from their homes.

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Female football fans in Iran have been denied their kicks by the religious authorities, inspiring, as Simon Creasey explains, a film by a director acclaimed elsewhere but whose work is unseen at home

In March this year security forces stopped 50 women attempting to enter Tehran’s Azadi (“Freedom”) stadium to watch a football match between Iran and Costa Rica. Some of the women were beaten – one had her leg broken – and they were eventually ferried away in a bus escorted by the military.

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José Mourinho can count himself lucky that he doesn't answer to Real Madrid's president. Phil Ball reports

Can’t somebody just ban Real Madrid, for ever? Their behaviour since the resignation of president Florentino Pérez in February has defied all codes of both sporting and business practice – an assault on basic decency so serious that it is only surpassed in surrealism by the fact that no one saw fit to do anything about it. Arrogance and a certain disrespect for others have always been the hallmark of Real Madrid CF, traditionally a curious mixture of market-led imperialism and the worst type of insularity. But the recent goings-on have stretched the club’s credibility to limits beyond the known galaxy, from where many of their players were originally rumoured to have come.

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Football still isn't the number-one sport in Australia but, believes Mike Ticher, Guus Hiddink's team showed plenty of others how the game should be played

When the world seems to have changed utterly, it takes only one moment to shatter the illusion. Mine came after Craig Moore’s equalising penalty against Croatia in Stuttgart, when the animated bloke in the Socceroos shirt next to me said: “So, what happens if it’s a draw?”

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