Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
No need to abandon hope just yet if you missed out in the World Cup ticket lottery, as long as you’re rich enough or gullible enough to buy your passport to Germany online. Ian Plenderleith reports
While millions of fans have faced disappointment in their applications to FIFA for World Cup tickets, there are some organisations that seem to be swimming in excess. If you’ve money to light cigars with, you might just make it to Germany after all.
With the departure of Florentino Pérez, Spanish football says goodbye to one of the great moneymakers
Few recent moments in football have been more magnificent than Ronaldinho’s goal at Stamford Bridge last season. It’s a moment that bears repeating and its use in an advert for Sky is one of the few reasons to be grateful for the hype that the satellite broadcaster invests in the game. Given that Chelsea won that tie, even Blues fans can enjoy it, not least because they can hope that one day Ronaldinho will be playing for them. Petr Cech will know that there was nothing he could do about it. For Barcelona supporters, it is at least a bitter-sweet memory and (we go to press a few days before the second leg of this year’s rematch) one that may have some sort of delayed happy ending. There’s one man we can think of, though, for whom that should qualify as a nightmare moment: Florentino Pérez.
Dear WSC
I was on the Kop for the Liverpool v Manchester United FA Cup game and inadvertently found myself slap in the middle of a News of the World headline. As reported by that paper on the following Sunday, SICK and DISGUSTING fans brought SHAME on Liverpool FC by singing a celebratory lyric regarding John Arne Riise breaking Alan Smith’s leg to the tune of a recent popular record (I can’t remember its name, but it has Ooh-Ahh in the middle and the 11 to 16 age range love it). I would like to make three things clear to the News of the World journalist who reported this incident. First, it was a loud but small minority of fans who belted out the offending song; most ignored it, while others were shaking their heads sadly in disagreement with the sentiment expressed. Of course, shaking your head sadly, even by a group of people, can’t be heard across a football stadium. Second, there was no mention of Smith being applauded off by the Liverpool fans. This was a bit of an oversight, which I would put down to the tabloid practice of not letting detail or nuance interfere with damning judgment. Thirdly, I was only reading News of the World because I was hungover and couldn’t face the small writing in the broadsheets. As a postscript, the bloke who started the song off originally was only one seat to my right, one row behind me. I may already be being hunted down as an agent of SICKNESS and DISGUSTINGNESS by police who have trawled through CCTV footage of the crowd. And I didn’t even boo Gary Neville.
Rob Lawrence, via email
Every World Cup it seems that the pundits BBC and ITV choose are not favoured by the masses. Simon Tyers sees that yet again the likely lads and lasses have hung onto their places
This is the time of the year when the BBC and ITV heads of sport start planning out their World Cup coverage – booking commentary positions, working out who the stunt-casting studio experts will be, testing how many visual cliches they can get away with in location reports. Perhaps mindful of the forthcoming charter renewal, the BBC have moved decisively, casting Peter Reid off to Sky months after changing the locks on Peter Schmeichel’s dressing room, while ITV began their traditional mopping-up of former England personnel with Gareth Southgate’s presence on a Carling Cup night as co-commentator, which was deemed so vital he got a close-up at the start of the game.
This may have been Real Sociedad's first title but, as Phil Ball reports, their victory reflected a change in the country as a whole
The long-term significance
This was the first of only two league titles won by Real Sociedad in their 96-year history. More generally, their last-gasp victory signalled a radical shift in Spanish football that mirrored the changes that had taken place in the country since Franco’s death in 1975. Between the arrival of the enormously influential Alfredo Di Stéfano at Real Madrid in 1953 and Sociedad’s first title, there had been a three-pronged hegemony. During those 28 seasons, Real Madrid won the title on 18 occasions, Atlético Madrid on five, with Barcelona on a mere four. The only other team to have a say were Valencia in 1971. Real Madrid’s imperious strut in this era brought about an upturn not only in their own fortunes but of the country as a whole, thus reviving and consolidating a weakening military dictatorship. Subsequently accused of being the “regime team”, Madrid’s ceding of the title to a Basque side was seen as evidence that a new democratic period was opening up in the footballing arena as well as the political one. Sociedad’s win began a period of four consecutive Basque titles between 1981 and 1984, shared out evenly with Athletic Bilbao. It seemed like a new dawn.