The Archive

New film Green Street is the latest to attempt to tap into the apparently growing US market for English hooligan-chic. Barney Ronay emerges battered and baffled

West Ham United aren’t particularly happy about Lexi Alexander’s new film about English football hooligans, part of which was shot in and around the Boleyn Ground. They’re not the only ones. Having sat through the entire two hours, I’m not very happy about it either. Also distressed, presumably, will be a trailer full of casting agents, stylists, location managers and accent coaches, who between them have managed to recruit and train a platoon of football faces that veers from the Irish-Cockney-Dick-Van-Dyke turn of Pete, head of the GSE West Ham crew, and star name Elijah Wood’s pale and frankly laughable imitation of a hardened street-fighter. “It just doesn’t make any sense. What are you even doing here?” Wood’s character is asked by his sister Shannon half an hour into the film. Wood has just turned up on her doorstep in South Kensington. Moments earlier he was being expelled from Yale over some vague business to do with his preppy room-mate selling drugs. Shannon, you feel, might have a point.

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A North v South all-Irish encounter offers a rare and welcome point of Champions League intrigue in Belfast writes Robbie Meredith, but the slicker, more professional visitors win the day

Nestled alongside the Belfast docks and airport, the Oval, home of Northern Irish champions Glentoran, immediately transports the visitor back into history. The antiquated Main Stand is 50 years old and seems to have changed little over the years, while both ends of the ground are bracketed by crumbling semi-circular concrete terraces, where supporters are hemmed in by high steel fencing. Sitting in the Main Stand, I’m confronted by the sight of Sampson and Goliath, two huge and distinctive shipyard cranes which offer a glimpse into Belfast’s fading maritime past. When UEFA and the G14 dreamt up the Champions League to bring even more cash and glamour to Europe’s elite clubs, part of their rationale was to ensure that grounds like the Oval, and teams like Glentoran, were weeded out of the competition long before the armchair millions tuned in to see Milan or Manchester United.

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The Homeless World Cup, held this year in the streets of Edinburgh, plays a valuable social role for its participants, as Dianne Millen reports

“Scotland To Face Italy in Semi-finals!” Not the most plausible of footballing headlines, you might think. But Scotland’s national team of homeless players did indeed reach the last four of the recent 3rd Homeless World Cup although they ultimately failed to overcome the eventual tournament winners.

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Robert Shaw tells us how in Brazil, increasing numbers of the country's star players are ploughing some of their riches back into community projects

Alongside top of the range sports cars and (something) every leading Brazilian footballer these days wants to have a pet social project. Jorginho, the right back in Brazil’s 1994 World Cup winning team, was already thinking of setting up an education schheme as he extended a playing career that had included spells with Flamengo, Bayern Leverkusen and Kashima Antlers. It eventually came to fruition when Bola pra Frente (Move the Ball Forward) was launched on June 29, 200 in his birthplace of Guadalupe in Rio de Janeiro’s sprawling northern suburbia, overlooked by the spartan block of flats where he grew up. “When we brought the site where Bola pra Frente is today it was an area overgrown with bushes, with horses and pigs running around, he says. “What makes me happy is to look at the same place now and see a very different picture: children playing sport, learning about citizenship and building a better future.”

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In our third piece on anti-poverty initiatives in football, Paul Virgo reports on the unlikley circumstances that have brought together the corporate giants of Internazionale and the anti-capitalist rebels of the Zapistas in southern Mexico

Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos and Internazionale owner Massimo Moratti make an odd couple. The first spends his time fighting for the rights of indigenous people in the Chiapas region of Mexico, while the other spends his oil bucks on expensive footballers who don’t win many trophies.

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