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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After a prospective investor failed the Football League's "Fit and Proper Persons Test", Ipswich fans are lefting thinking what might have been. Gavin Barber reports

When is a test not a test? It might sound like a Graham Taylor quote, but it’s a question that Ipswich supporters were asking themselves last month.

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The Conference could claim both sides, but the fans of these supporter-owned clubs will not give up easily, no matter how many points the players throw away. Taylor Parkes reports

It has never been fun being bottom of the heap. The Conference spreads its jaws, so you can smell its breath. It smells of damp, failure and loss, empty stands and uncertainty. When you’re low, you think you might never stop falling. The last thing you need is to hear that someone somewhere might consider you “unsustainable”.

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