The Archive

Tom Davies gives us an update on clubs in crisis

Barnet fans hope to use May’s council elections to break three-and-a-half years of deadlock surrounding their attempts to find a new ground. Club and council have been at loggerheads since 2002, when the Conservatives won control and scuppered plans approved by the previous Labour administration for a stadium on land immediately south of their existing, and inadequate, Underhill home. The Tories refused to sanction the sale of the land necessary for the stadium.

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Dear WSC
Speaking of bleeping out certain phrases from football commentary and punditry (WSC 225), my pet peeve is “The shot beat the keeper but went wide”. It only beats the keeper if it goes past him and into the goal (or goes past him and is cleared off the line by a team-mate, or goes past him and sticks in the mud and stops, as in a Danny Baker football video). The keeper is only beaten when the ball goes past him within the area of the goal he is there to defend, otherwise any shot that ends up on the roof of the stand or hits the corner flag could be said to have beaten the keeper. Bah!
Phil Brown, Romford

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"A case of anything goes." Gavin Willacy looks at the laws of yesteryear

There seemed to be little unusual about the game at first. Twenty men of assorted shapes and ages, indulging in a ragged Sunday kick-about on the outer fringes of a south-west London marshland, shooting at goals without crossbars let alone nets, no corner flags or referee, wearing an assortment of knee-length trousers and footwear of varying suitability.

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Communism may have been collapsing around them, but Russian football was healthier than ever writes Saul Pope

The long-term significance
By the time the season ground to a halt in November, football was not the first thing on most people’s minds. During August, President Gorbachev had been held under house arrest for three days as his (and Soviet) power ebbed away. A few weeks after the end of the football season, on Christmas Day, the Soviet hammer and sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time and the USSR was no more. The turmoil that followed spawned a corrupt economic and social system that would soon lead to one former Soviet citizen being able to buy a leading English team and overnight become the richest man in football.

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Where was Ian Wright for the October qualifiers? Simon Tyers begins the search

During the BBC post-mortem on England’s defeat in Northern Ireland, a shot of all the pundits supposedly listening to Alan Hansen’s words of wisdom briefly caught Ian Wright slamming the table with his open palm. This was telling, not only for demonstrating what we already knew about Wright having proper passion for his football but also that it showed in a funny way that a panel of tactically minded experts is no place for what is pejoratively known as a passionate outburst. After all, we can all feel aggrieved at an embarrassment without having someone to do it for us.

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