Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
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.
John Chapman recounts the year Wigan Athletic won promotion via the ballot box
The long-term significance
Before 2004-05, this was the last time Wigan Athletic finished second in their league. Like last season they went up, but on this occasion the champions didn’t. Despite winning their fourth title in six years, Boston United’s ground was failed by the Football League inspectors, just four years after it had hosted Derby County and 11,000 spectators. So Wigan, 12 months after their worst ever season but on the back of a good FA Cup run, got put forward for election to the League. After tying 26 votes all with Southport in the first ballot, they won the second 29-20. They were to be the last side promoted to the league in this way.
The Dinamo Moscow striker was so eager to come to England after early success for Russia that his career has all but ground to a halt, writes Dan Brennan
From England’s north-west to its south coast, the considerable frame and increasingly weary visage of Dmitri Bulykin were familiar sights at training grounds in January. In fact, one in five top-flight clubs have had the pleasure of his company – a decent record if ground-hopping is your game, but not if you’re a Premiership wannabe with a dislike of hotel rooms.
David Ogilvie’s only regrets about Stirling Albion’s finest hour are that he wasn’t there and that he has never seen the 20th goal. And yes, you read that right
In a year when Liverpool won the European Cup and Scotland’s rugby team won the Grand Slam, and in the month that Bob Geldof went from being a pop singer to the man behind Band Aid, an unremarkable football club also made headlines nationwide.
Ugly commercialism aside, Paul Joyce hails the pleasing diet of positive football at the Confederations Cup as well as tentative signs of revival in the German national side
As a dry run for next year’s World Cup finals, the 2005 Confederations Cup had many positive aspects. Not among them, however, was the rampant commercialism that included the sponsoring not only of the 22 player escorts who accompanied the teams onto the pitch, but also of the child carrying the referee’s tossing coin. All vestiges of local cuisine had been removed from the five stadiums. Gone too was FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s original intention of dedicating the tournament to Cameroon’s Marc-Vivien Foé who died of a heart attack at the 2003 Confed-Cup in France.