The Archive

Two sides that met in the Premiership in 2001 are in the Championship’s bottom half and selling key players isn’t the way to get back to the play-offs writes Al Needham. Cue protests…

X On the face of it, laughing openly at the home team’s protest against their board while sitting in their end isn’t the prudent thing to do. “PLEASE HOLD THIS BANNER UP AS THE PLAYERS GO INTO THE HUDDLE BEFORE THE GAME, AND THEN AFTER THE FINAL WHISTLE,” it says. In actual fact, it is a sheet of A4 that looks as if it has been run through an office photocopier and I spend a good ten minutes arguing the toss with it.

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Few players have made more impressive starts at a club than scoring 30 goals in half a season; few have then done less to earn their wages, writes Gordon Cairns

Marco Negri’s four years at Glasgow Rangers is one of the strangest episodes in the club’s history. Signed from Perugia for £3.5 million, the Italian striker scored 30 goals before Christmas in 1997-98, then barely made another appearance as he saw out the remainder of his four-year, £18,000-a-week contract.

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The world’s largest continent wants a World Cup and to end European football’s colonialism. Matthew Hall reports from the latest FIFA congress on Asia’s big plans

“Thank you and enjoy your dessert,” said Youssou N’Dour, the Senegalese music star as he ended his performance at FIFA’s 55th congress in Marrakech in September. N’Dour was the musical entertainment during the “gala dinner”, an opportunity to hit the trough with 600 people from every country on Earth (except Yemen, suspended, and Libya, who got lost on the way, apparently).

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If you’ve been wondering whatever happened to Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais, then Taylor Parkes has the unpleasant answer: in Goal! they have created a football film so bad that David Beckham is not the worst actor on display

A brief synopsis; you’ll get the idea. Santiago Muñez is a young Mexican midfielder whose name sounds like it was auto-generated by Championship Manager, incapable of running four inches without flipping the ball over his head and balancing it on his nose. Rather than getting his pretty face kicked in, this attracts the attention of a wily Scots ex-pro who spots him playing amateur football in Los Angeles (the Muñez family are illegal immigrants to California, as we learn from a pre-credits border-dash sequence that adds nothing to the film but crowbarred-in American locations, like some Seventies Italian zombie flick – a pointless expense considering the chances of Goal! making a nickel in the States).

He’s given the outrageously irresponsible assurance that if he saves up and flies to Newcastle (“They’re a huge club!” “Yes, a massive club”) he will get a trial with the Toon. “What, like Looney Toons?” says the adorable hot-shot. “Bugs Bunny?” Against the wishes of his misery-guts dad, he does just that, and I’m pretty sure I’m not spoiling the film by telling you it ends with him scoring the last-minute goal that ensures Newcastle’s Champions League qualification. The only real surprise is that he doesn’t do it with a penalty, like Sean Bean did for Sheffield United.

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It may be no surprise that you can get great English coverage of football in Ireland, but Ian Plenderleith tracks down individual sites that cover Poland, Slovakia and even the whole of South America

Sometimes a Google search of your club’s name can take you to interesting places. Sligo, for example. If I hadn’t been looking for an obscure fact about Lincoln City, I would likely have discovered too late that the Imps were scheduled to play Sligo Rovers in a pre-season tournament in July. As it was, I was able to cancel my summer holiday in Tuscany and reschedule for the Emerald Isle instead (some parts of this paragraph are a lie).

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