The Archive

Paul Casella of fanzine The Lion Roars believes that Millwall fans are used to false accusations being made against the club, but a recent article in the Sun took the level of misrepresentation to new levels

As the nearest club to Wapping, a disproportionate amount of senior newspaper journalists visit The Den on a regular basis. It is not rare for the press box to see stars of stage and screen; or at least, stars of Jimmy Hill’s Sunday Supplement. Indeed, judging by the amount of media coverage, Millwall are by far and away the “biggest” club that has 10,000 fans in the country.

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Ron Atkinson may be apologetic his infamous faux pas, but as David Stubbs writes, he isn't exactly convincing

“Whatever happened to forgiveness?” asked Ron Atkinson in plaintive response to a verbal pounding from Darcus Howe on Adrian Chiles’s documentary What Ron Said (BBC1, December 13). Howe was lambasting Atkinson for his infamous off-microphone outburst regarding Marcel Desailly, whom he dubbed “a fucking thick lazy nigger.” Howe suggested that Atkinson should be made to clean Rio Ferdinand’s boots for ten weeks, which Atkinson protested was “out of order”.

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Four years ago this month, Sunderland were second in the Premiership – and as Harry Pearson writes, some fans are still struggling to come to terms with the spectacular collapse since

It’s probably the fact that it is 70 or so years since one of the region’s teams could justifiably lay claim to being the best in the country that leads football fans in the north-east of England to spend their lives permanently teetering on the brink of exasperation. It doesn’t take much to tip them over the edge. Santa hats may predominate at the Sunderland Stadium of Light, but the mood is as much restive as festive. When yet another pass is pinged out of midfield and across the touchline a bloke sitting in the row behind me in the East Stand groans loudly: “I’ve paid £23 for a bucket of shite,” he says. The big scoreboard above the North Stand shows that six minutes and 28 seconds have been played.

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Armed gratefully with your votes, Ian Plenderleith picks out some of the very best sites, many of which have featured in this column over the past five years, though they appear in no particular order

Stadiums
Pyramid Passion Sister site to the excellent Nomad Online (covering Sussex non-League football), both run by David Bauckham, PP boasts great pictures and text about English non-League stadiums, plus galleries of dug-outs, floodlights, ground signs and even “rollers and mowers”.

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Arsenal’s move for Emmanuel Eboué of Beveren is just the latest example of a strange import-export trade in African footballers, as John Chapman explains

The thermometer is stuck on 4°C. There’s a cold wind blowing around Antwerp’s Bosuil stadium. Around 6,000 fans have braved the elements to see the locals, languishing in Belgium’s second div­ision, take on mighty Beveren, who qualified for this season’s UEFA Cup through being runners-up in the 2004 Belgian Cup. In theory, it’s a Flemish derby. In practice, it’s a visible sign of globalisation’s impact on football.

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