Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Why are French club owners smiling so much? That'd be the massive cash windfall they're getting from Canal Plus, says Ben Lyttleton
Lyon president Jean-Michel Aulas made a good point during the protracted negotiations with Chelsea over the transfer of Michael Essien. Not only did his club not want to sell their best player to a Champions League rival, he said, but they did not need to.
Is a British Olympic football team really feasible? Neil Forsyth isn't convinced
“GB Bid needs Olympic team” screamed the BBC website headline, followed by an urgent appeal for the formation of a British football team for the 2012 London Olympic Games. The date? August, 2003. “Can you imagine”, suggested a bamboozled Craig Reedie, British Olympic Association (BOA) chairman, “running an Olympic Games in Britain without a British football team?”
An MTV series spotlights the lifestyles of football’s super-rich but, to Helen Duff's dismay, they just don’t know how to squander their wealth properly
Dream Team. Gary Lineker’s crisp adverts. Ron Atkinson’s cultured analysis. Television and sport may have engaged in mutual degradation in the past – but never on the jaw-dropping scale of MTV’s Footballers’ Cribs, a look at the home design choices of professional players. Crass, banal and ill-advised, it is consequently thoroughly wonderful.
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.
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.