The Archive

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

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Dear WSC
While it was an otherwise fairly accurate piece culminating in stating what many of us believe (WSC 232), which is that Neil Warnock is an “offensive gobshite”, Pete Green lets himself down by recycling that old rubbish about Warnock spending his career “picking up ailing clubs off the floor and setting them back on their feet”. Not quite true. In the late Nineties, Stan Ternent guided Bury Football Club from the then Division Three to Division One with successive promotions, and kept us up in Division One while luminaries such as Manchester City were relegated from it (oh how we laughed when we beat them at Maine Road in the process), before buggering off to Burnley and leaving us to the mercy of the “Red Adair” of lower-league football. Warnock’s tenure at Gigg Lane started off in patronising fashion, referring to us as “a smashing little club”. He flooded the team with under-performers he had dragged with him from his previous clubs, turned up at Gigg Lane wearing a Sheffield United club tie while we were paying his wages, got us relegated to Division Two, then skulked off to Bramall Lane, taking some of our better players with him and paying peanuts for them into the bargain. Bury were then relegated to the bottom division, went into administration and nearly out of business. So please spare us the revisionist history about Warnock. If the truth be known, Stan was the Man who turned the Shakers around – Warnock destroyed his work. And yes, I will be looking for Sheffield United to be humiliated in every match they play next season
Howard Cover, Liverpool

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With candidate after candidate ruling themselves out of the race, who will take up the poisoned chalice that is the England job?

“What a mess this is,” said Graham Taylor of the latest developments in the selection of the new England coach. And there’s a man who knows about mess. It’s hard to disagree with him as we write, a few days after Luiz Felipe Scolari said no and on the eve of an expected announcement that Steve McClaren will shuffle up the bench to occupy the seat Sven-Göran Eriksson is to vacate. Time, obviously, to dispense with the men responsible for this debacle.

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Simon Tyers reports that on European nights Gabby Logan shows her increasing propensity to wear yet more dark eye make up

The biennial search for the least thought-through cash-in on a major football tournament may have been settled right at the outset by the Budweiser Academy. Not only does the humour derive from the basic principle that Americans don’t know the first thing about soccer, a big comment to make when their national side are above England’s in FIFA’s rankings, but it appears whoever storyboarded the advert doesn’t even understand American sport. Bad enough that a real basketball coach, Kevin Cadle, is shown coaching gridiron footballers. Worse that we see a player collecting a punt from the goalkeeper and making off the other way with the ball in his hands, when, if he was aware of American football rules, he should be returning it towards the keeper’s end.

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Manchester United's new deal with AIG is set to net them £14.1m a year. Steve Menary reports on the big business that is shirt sponsorship

That sponsorship is taking over football is a routine gripe from fans, but clubs are unlikely to agree. The total value of shirt sponsorship across the top flights of England, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain is £238 million this season, according to consultant Sports+Markt. That figure is 40 per cent up on 2000-01; no wonder Manchester United squeezed every pip out of their latest deal.

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