The Archive

Never mind the Champions League, here’s the Hellenic: the television claims that it’s showing live football – but 125 people in west Berkshire know better as Roger Titford witnesses

It is a dark, wet Tuesday. The leaves are coming down and the league tables are shaping up. It’s a big night at all levels. Manchester United and Arsenal are on ITV in the Champions League. My boys, Reading, are away in the Championship (on local radio) while the LDV parks itself into view. But my eye is caught again by the crude, A4, home-crafted poster on the town noticeboards; no hype or promises, just pure facts – Hungerford v Didcot, Hellenic League, KO 7.45pm.

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Is Russian football corrupt, internationally and domestically? That’s what Latvia’s captain was reported to have said and some clubs agree, as Dan Brennan reports

Ever since Stalin got together with Hitler to annex the Baltic states in 1940 as part of a secret carve-up, relations between Latvia and Russia have remained strained, something that 14 years of independence has done little to patch over. A Russian newspaper recently called for all good Russians to boycott Latvian tinned sprats – a culinary favourite since Soviet times – in protest at discrimination against Latvia’s Russian community. And August’s World Cup qualifier between the two countries in Riga threatened to spark a new international incident.

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There’s nothing wrong with living in the past: the oldest clubs in England, Scotland and Wales are justly proud of their heritage. But, writes Ian Plenderleith, they can’t agree on who invented the crossbar

Fancy boasting that you’re in the same club as Sepp Blatter and Sven-Göran Eriksson? No, it’s not GOAL (the Grand Order of Ageing Lotharios), but the world’s oldest football club, Sheffield FC, founded in 1857 and still very much proud of the fact. And for £2.50 a month you can boast not just an enamel badge and four free tickets to a North Counties East Football League game of your choice, but fellow membership alongside the game’s balding but well tanned elder statesmen.

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With the launch of the new A-League and a looming World Cup play-off, the game could be on the verge of a major breakthrough – or perhaps not. Mike Ticher reports

September is the biggest month for football in Australia, though not usually the round-ball version. So it took a certain amount of chutzpah for the promoters of the new A-League to launch it just as the climax of the Australian rules and rugby league seasons were dominating the sports pages. On the other hand, it had been 17 months since the last gasp of the old National Soccer League, so perhaps there was little to be gained by waiting any longer. After the first few weeks of the eight-team league there is some cause for optimism, but still plenty of doubts.

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Roger Titford takes us back to a time before the days of Sky, the offside rule and the prawn sandwich brigade, to the inaugural League season, when Preston North End reigned supreme

The long-term significance
On April 17, 1888, the Football League was founded as the first professional league in the world. So obviously a powerful idea, its first imitator, the Combination, was launched only 10 days later. The League set the template for such structures all around the world for a century or more.

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