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The Archive

Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.

 

Beaten but unbowed

The team were still a letdown, but England had more winning ways off the pitch, to the relief of Philip Cornwall

Six years ago, at Euro 2000, I was on the point of giving up on England. I had the masochistic streak needed to cope with events on the pitch, but not what came with it for much longer: the sullen contempt for anything and anyone who wasn’t English that radiated from so many of the team’s followers even if they weren’t expressing it in word, song, action. Some of these people seethed in their sleep.

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Whistle stop

A campaign against 'dangerous play' is ruining the game, believes Mike Ticher

As usual, the refs took the blame. And, as usual, they were only obeying orders. Of course there were blunders, but most of the grumbling about overuse of cards and fussy interpretations should have been directed not at the officials, but at FIFA – especially when it came from Sepp Blatter.

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Cap that fits

Steve Menary reports that the main recommendations from a review of European football will not sit well with England's top clubs

Chelsea at the bottom of the Premiership is an unlikely scenario that would surely only ever happen if Roman Abramovich quit west London, but could a salary cap reduce the champions to also-rans? Wigan, for example, were rugby league’s dominant club until a few years ago but this season face relegation from Super League and a salary cap has contributed to their demise.

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Fifth amendment

It's 20 years since automatic promotion blurred the distinction between the League and Conference. Roger Titford charts the acceptance of what at the time was a revolutionary step

Twenty years ago Torquay and Preston finished in the bottom two places in the Football League. Both were re-elected, along with Exeter and Cambridge. Then the re-election process itself was voted out and replaced by automatic relegation to the Conference, ending almost a century of tradition. Election and re-election had always been fundamental to the League. The clubs had always chosen their fellow-members rather than admitted them through any public demand or involuntary mechanism. Yet the possibility of new member clubs existed from the very first season, 1888-89, when the bottom four, in a League of only 12, had to reapply. All were successful, as so often would later be the case, including Notts County who this season finished perilously close to the relegation line.

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Italy 07/06

The rising tide of scandal engulfing Serie A in general and Juventus in particular has shoacked a nation. But amid the ruins there is hope, as Paul Virgo reports

You know things are bad when you have to take morality lessons from Sepp Blatter. But former Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi seems to have taken soccer skulduggery to a new frontier – as Paddy Agnew of the Irish Times noted, it’s not a question of match-fixing any more, it’s “season-fixing”. Blatter described the affair as the worst scandal in the game’s history, adding that he would have expected it from an African nation, but not Italy. Franz Beckenbauer predicted Italy will pay the consequences at the World Cup. The international press have had fun getting sanctimonious about sleazy Serie A, too. 

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