Thursday 1 “I think I have arrived here at the perfect time,” says Andriy Shevchenko on joining Chelsea for £30 million. Arsenal are to be questioned over a loan payment made to their Belgian nursery club Beveren, which may have breached FIFA regulations. Ronnie Moore steps down as Oldham manager, to be replaced by John Sheridan.
The Archive
Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Having beaten England, Portugal found themselves within a game of the World Cup final. Phil Town captures the mood in Portugal
Speaking some time back at a conference on motivation, Luiz Felipe Scolari told the story of his first days with the Selecção in 2002. He got the players together and asked them to imagine the team as a truck and to consider what part of the truck each of them thought they represented. He found that what he had inherited from António Oliveira was a truck with four drivers and a wheel missing. Six months later, the same experiment came up with just two drivers and all the wheels in place.
Wednesday 3 Hearts’ win over Aberdeen means they will take Scotland’s second place in the Champions League. Sam Allardyce seems to have conceded defeat in his bid for the England coach’s job after Bolton’s 1‑1 draw with Middlesbrough: “It just does not look as though I am the favourite at the moment.”
Thirty years ago a west London club very nearly won the title – and it would have been a popular success, too. Graham Dunbar recalls QPR's finest 42 games
It is April 17, 2006, Easter Monday, and Queens Park Rangers lose 3-2 at Norwich in the definitive meaningless and mediocre end-of-season game. Two teams playing second-rate, second-tier football in what could be the worst five-goal affair anyone has seen; a match with no significance beyond reminding both clubs that the Premiership is a distant dream.
Following last month's guide to official and corporate media World Cup websites, Ian Plenderleith looks at the best of the blogs and fan sites covering every competing country at Germany 2006
World Champion Website – Planet World Cup
It’s hard to find a World Cup webpage that tells you something you didn’t already know, so I was pleased when I came across the following in an A-Z sub-section of this site: “Brothers have been part of the same World Cup squad several times. But Victor and Vyacheslav Chanov are unique. They were in the 1982 Soviet Union squad, both as goalkeepers. Neither of them played a match though, as the great Rinat Dassayev was first choice.” The whole site is a footballing treasure in a desert of almost unending blog banality and sloppy stats. There are comprehensive analyses of each squad, written by Peter Goldstein, whose lively style is apparent in sentences such as this one on the US line-up: “The first words of George Washington after he took office were OK, so who the heck plays left-back? It’s still a problem.” Qualifying games and recent friendlies for all teams are a click away. The stats are complete, including line-ups and scorers for every World Cup game ever played, together with rosters and appearances of all the participating sides. The mascots are there, the posters, the legends and a multi-level quiz. I’d recommend you only take the latter after you’ve thoroughly read the site. 10/10