The Archive

Online coverage of matches can amount to little more than the bare statistics or, worse, a sub-tabloid set of cliches. But  Ian Plenderleith finds some fan sites that still offer an original alternative to the press

While reading a match report that involves your own team, you might tolerate the lowest standards of writing just to find out the basic details of who scored when. Most web­sites realise this and skimp on all attempts at style, structure and originality in favour of short, bland, factual write-ups. The occasional more gifted writers, however, will engage the neutral and keep them reading to the end, no matter which sides are playing.

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Challenging for the title is the exclusive prerogative of a privileged few in most of Europe's leagues. But no one has told AZ Alkmaar, writes Derek Brookman

Out of the 32 million or so eyebrows in the Netherlands, the number raised when AZ Alkmaar vis­ited PSV Eindhoven two games into the Dutch season and lost 5-1 probably didn’t exceed single figures. After all, this was the natural order: big eating small, famous club and previous European Cup winner putting team from cheese-market town with an 8,390 capacity stadium in their place.

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Dynamo Kiev were blue, rivals Shakhtar Donetsk orange – simple enough, until recent political upheavals gave colours new meaning, as Dan Brennan explains

Sporting one’s colours is politically loaded business in Ukraine these days. Orange – the traditional colour of Shakhtar Donetsk – is also the colour of Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-Western presidential can­didate, who defied a dodgy first ballot and an alleged attempt to poison him to gain power in December at the second time of asking. Meanwhile, his opponent, current prime minister Viktor Yanukovich – the man endorsed by Moscow and outgoing president Leonid Kuchma – opted for blue, the colour of Dynamo Kiev.

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Dear WSC
Is anyone else irritated by the increasing tendency of radio and TV commentators to refer to a shot hitting “the frame of the goal” or, even worse, “the frame of the goals”? How many sets of goals do they think the attacker is shooting at? Com­mentators should drop these expressions ad return to using post, bar or, where appropriate, the nicely precise “angle of post and bar”.
John Perry, Chelmsford

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Mike Ticher recalls Arsenal's first championship – the same season that saw Manchester Utd relegated

The long-term significance
Arsenal’s first League title (and the first by any southern club) set them on their way to their domination of the 1930s. The previous year’s FA Cup final victory over manager Herbert Chapman’s old club, Huddersfield, was neatly symbolic, but the championship cemented the north Londoners’ arrival. It had taken Chapman six years to win it, but then the floodgates opened, with three in a row from 1933-35, another in 1938 and a second Cup win in 1936 – though he didn’t live to see most of the silverware, having died in 1934.

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