Wednesday 1 England beat Uruguay 2‑1 at Anfield in their final friendly before the World Cup squad is picked. Darren Bent makes his debut, Peter Crouch and Joe Cole score. Scotland lose 3‑1 to Switzerland, extending their ten‑year run without a friendly win at Hampden. Northern Ireland beat Estonia 1‑0, Ivan Sproule scoring after 78 seconds. England’s World Cup group opponents Sweden lose 3‑0 to Ireland, while Paraguay draw 0-0 with Wales, Derby’s 17-year-old Lewin Nyatanga becoming the youngest ever Welsh international. Former Chelsea and England striker Peter Osgood dies aged 59.
The Archive
Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Steve Menary sees that teams on the continent could learn a great deal from the systems of fans' trusts we now have in the UK
The fans’ trust movement has so far been just a British phenomenon, but may not be so for long, if an investigation by the European Union into how football is run concludes that the continent can learn from the UK model.
Eighteen years after the last tournament in Germany was hit by hooliganism, the hope is that if it happens again it won’t involve the English. Mark Perryman reports
Assistant Chief Constable Stephen Thomas is not a happy policeman. Recently appointed as the officer in overall charge of policing England fans, in March he held his first press briefing in this role. Thomas rattles off the statistics he had provided the media with: “Five English arrests at England’s last nine games, just one at a match involving England at Euro 2004.” But the reporters weren’t interested. Instead they ran stories focusing on the disorder in Marseille at France 98, Charleroi at Euro 2000, respectively of eight and six years’ vintage, to preface their speculation for more of the same in Germany.
It says a lot about Germany that they managed to reach the 2002 World Cup final in the middle of a prolonged slump but, as Paul Joyce explains, the expectations for this summer’s hosts and poor recent results leave their long-distance coach under pressure
After a 4-1 mauling by Italy in February left Germany without a victory over a top-ranked nation since defeating England at Wembley in October 2000, CDU politician Norbert Barthle demanded that manager Jürgen Klinsmann be hauled before the national sports committee “to explain what his concept is and how Germany can win the World Cup”. With a mere three per cent of the populace believing that a side ranked three places below Iran could now win the tournament, Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel herself felt obliged to give the under-fire Klinsmann the dreaded vote of confidence: she was convinced that he and his team were “on the right path”.
WSC was first published in March 1986 and soon found itself part of a publishing boom. Al Needham casts his mind back to the heyday of football fanzines and what his own favourite, Nottingham Forest’s ‘The Almighty Brian’, meant to him
Like many writers, I got my start in fanzines. In the mid-Eighties, I had an idea that was so obviously brilliant, I used to lie in bed wondering why no one had thought of it yet. So I bought a typewriter from an old woman on the next estate, emptied the local WH Smith of every bit of Letraset they had, monopolised the Banda machine at college and produced the first ever, erm, American football fanzine. (Five hundred back issues of Third and Long are still available in my Dad’s loft, if anyone’s interested. No? Fair enough.)