Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
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?”
Ian Plenderleith reports on what the United States' mixed fortunes and performances mean for the future of the game in America
For USA fans, this was a story of serially thwarted joy. At the opening game against the Czechs, the war-lust words of The Star Spangled Banner were still hanging in the muggy evening air when they found themselves 1-0 down. After fighting back against Italy to equalise, they then had to absorb the impact of the red-card rush and were, within minutes, one man fewer instead. And hardly had they ceased screaming to celebrate Clint Dempsey’s levelling strike against Ghana, than host referee Dr Markus Merk awarded a penalty against Oguchi Onyewu for an offence as yet unrecognised by the rule book (“A remarkable call at this level,” coach Bruce Arena said diplomatically).
Marseille were first crowned League champions, then European Champions. They were stripped of the former though, reports Aaron Donaghy
The long-term significance
The best-supported and richest club in French football, Olympique de Marseille, beat AC Milan to win the first-ever Champions League on May 26, 1993. Twenty-four hours later, news broke that Marseille’s vital league match against Valenciennes just six days earlier had been fixed. It emerged that three Valenciennes players had been paid to “go easy” on Marseille, who were chasing a record fifth consecutive league title. Valenciennes defender Jacques Glassmann claimed that he and two of his colleagues were offered £30,000 to throw the match. Marseille were thus barred from the 1993‑94 Champions League by UEFA and stripped of their league title by the French FA, while three players and a Marseille director were banned from football. A year later they were further punished with enforced relegation, bankruptcy and the imprisonment of club president and millionaire entrepreneur Bernard Tapie. The whistle-blower Glassmann claimed to have been shunned by French clubs subsequently and wound down his career playing on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion.
With the commencement of the World Cup imminent it remains to be seen whether Germany 2006 will show us something that we haven't experienced before
It feels as though the World Cup started several months ago. The hype that surrounds every tournament seems to have been that bit more insistent and frenetic this time. Partly that can be put down to the mounting media anxiety over Wayne Rooney’s “fight for fitness” and the possibility that one of England’s very few undeniably world-class players may not take part. More generally, though, the immense outpouring of guff and stuff about Germany 2006 – the proliferation of dire songs, documentaries of wildly varying quality and St George cross products choking supermarket aisles – just shows that football has become an easily exploitable cultural product.
Cameron Carter explains that although we all know and love the FA Cup, John Motson can always be on hand to remind us of this
Spring is a time when wet-nosed lambs and weak young sitcoms stumble into the world. Yet May began and ended with the spectacle of grey-faced middle-aged footballers in sluggish pursuit of the charity pound. On May 1, the Marina Dalglish charity match on Sky One featured most of the Liverpool and Everton teams who contested the 1986 FA Cup final. Now, most charity events involve the entertainment operating at about 30 per cent below par, but these people were really trying. They just couldn’t do it any more. An injured Gary Lineker turned up briefly to kick off, like a vicar at a fete with another parish to get to, after which the 90 minutes crawled by in a pageant of zonal marking, square balls and limping, quickly regretted runs off the ball. Fortunately, a goal was scored just before the end – at least a yard offside, but hotly undisputed as its annulment would have meant extra time and, presumably, a slowing of the pace.