Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
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.
It was time for a new kind of reference work on the game. One that celebrated the culture of British football and did not just record the facts and figures. And, to celebrate the launch of our Half Decent Football Book, what better to serve as a taster than a look at food? And meet John Gregory, art critic
Pre-match meal
Food has always been a controversial subject in football. The pre-match meal was once the only occasion during the season that a footballer’s dietary habits would come under any great scrutiny. Steak and chips, egg and chips and roast beef have all been favoured at various stages in the game’s development. Bill Shankly is reported to have abandoned his players’ strict pre-match steak diet in the early 1960s, after which meat was absolutely prohibited at lunchtime on a match day; this even extended into Shankly sending “spies” along on train journeys to away games to monitor whether players were loading up on ham rolls from the buffet trolley.
Dear WSC
Harry Pearson’s review of Farewell But Not Goodbye (WSC 224) is to be applauded for refraining from trotting out the usual platitudes when the words “Sir Bobby Robson”, “beloved” and “Newcastle United” appear anywhere near each other. While there is no doubt Robson is, and always has been, a Newcastle fan, unlike others who jump on and off the black ’n’ white bandwagon, the fact is that he turned down the chance to manage Newcastle at least five times. Indeed, he even refused to come to Newcastle when his Barcelona job title was the equivalent of dogsbody. What might have been achieved had he jumped at his “dream job” when first offered is a matter of great debate on Tyneside. There is absolutely no argument that he pulled Newcastle back from the brink and for a while established us as a major European force. However, it should not be forgotten that Sir Bobby was given the chance to work at Newcastle despite his reluctance to do so several times earlier.
Alistair WS Murray, Newcastle Upon Tyne
After another incident-packed transfer window, is there any shred of club loyalty left?
If Chelsea were going to make Lyon an offer for Michael Essien they couldn’t refuse, you would think they could have hurried up about it a bit. Far too much newsprint was expended on a depressingly inevitable saga. Lyon’s point of view – that if they were going to lose their best player to a team with a bottomless pit of cash then they would take every rouble they could get – was understandable. Essien, too, cannot be blamed for wanting more money than he could dream of
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but Simon Tyers isn't too impressed with the coverage copycats
As usual, it’s Sky’s fault. Not for everything, of course, but as soon as they come up with a new way of approaching football coverage it gets copied by the terrestrial channels using a heavily smudged blueprint. They bring us Andy Gray and his computers, eventually we get the Tactics Truck. They invent the top-corner screen display, Five run with one that seems at times to take up a quarter of the screen.