The Archive

  The joy felt in Togo and Angola at World Cup qualification risks turning to fear of humiliation after a poor continental championship. Ghana also have little to cheer about and, as Chris Taylor reports, only Ivory Coast of Africa’s five teams in Germany did really well in Egypt 

It was an exciting African Nations Cup tournament and when the champions were crowned in Cairo’s International Stadium they approached their debut in the forthcoming World Cup on German soil with high hopes. Little did they realise that disaster awaited them.

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A Sheffield derby matches two sides with eyes on other divisions, one team playing in hope of a reawakening and the other living in fear of a continued slumber. Pete Green reports

 They populate the middle divisions of English professional football. They draw four or five times more supporters – who invariably believe themselves to be the longest- and hardest-suffering of any in the world – than most of the teams who beat them. They average one managerial sacking per year. Their snores roar through the midlands and reverberate round the hills of Sheffield. They are the sleeping giants. 

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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.)

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For 16 years, Scottish fans could read a football publication that didn’t begin and end in Glasgow. Archie MacGregor explains the rise and demise of his fanzine and the changes in the game in its lifetime 

From December 1986 to September 2002, The Absolute Game (TAG) jinked its way through 60 issues about Scottish football in general and everything but the Old Firm in particular.

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There are fewer printed fanzines now, but some of the best are still going strong two decades on. Mike Harrison reports

City Gent launched in October 1984 but had been discussed for at least 18 months. What gave it the final push was the fact that the founding editor, Brian Fox, was unemployed, so able to commit time, and sought a career in journalism. 

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