The Archive

Monday 1 How long do you go on waiting for results?” asks Wolves chairman Rick Hayward after sacking Dave Jones with the club 19th in the Championship. Bradford’s Dean Windass has the second yellow card shown to him during a 4-0 defeat at Luton rescinded – he had protested at the referee allegedly taunting him about the score.

Tuesday 2 “There is no need to get dramatic because we are still unbeaten in Europe,” says Arsène as the Gunners are held 1-1 at home by Panathinaikos. Pascal Cygan, now firmly established as the new Frank Sinclair, contributes an own goal for the visitors’ equaliser after the Greeks miss a penalty. Chelsea are through to the Champions League knockout stages, though, after a 1-0 win at CSKA Moscow who also squander a spot-kick. Celtic can still avoid elimination after beating Donetsk 1-0. In the Championship, managerless Wolves are only three points above the relegation zone after a 3-1 defeat at Sunderland and West Ham lose to Cardiff for the first time since 1952, 4-1 at Ninian Park. The top two, Wigan and Ipswich, both win, the latter setting a club record by scoring in their 29th consecutive game, a 5-1 victory over Sheffield United.

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Anti-racism initiatives in football should be applauded, but it's only scratching the surface

The press lounge at a Premiership ground one evening a few years ago. Journalists gathered for a midweek game are looking at a TV screen that is replaying goals from the previous weekend. Dwight Yorke scores against a team supported by one of those watching, who walks up to the screen and says loudly, in mock indignation: “Yorke, you black twat!” In the wake of last month’s friendly in Mad­rid, the journalist in question was one of many who set about suggesting various forms of action that might be taken against Spain for the Bernabéu crowd’s racial abuse of black England players. It is fair to assume, then, that he has long since seen the error of his ways.

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Our regular update on clubs in crisis by Tom Davies

Harry Redknapp’s departure from Portsmouth has led to a flurry of speculation that he might be interested in taking over at Bournemouth, his former club. It’s all paper talk at present, but, whatever other baggage Redknapp might bring, his cash would come in handy for a club around £4.5 million in debt. The League One club narrowly avoided a stadium repossession order last month, brought by Bristol & West, who are owed £300,000. The order was only postponed until February, though, and the stringent terms of the B&W deal have been raising plenty of hackles, as the building society’s loan was arranged by Bournemouth president Stanley Cohen, who also happens to be a non-executive director of Bristol & West.

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The investigation took six years, but Juventus’s doctor has just been convicted of doping players. Matt Barker wonders if the 1990s record books will be rewritten

Having cake-walked qualification for the knockout stages of the Champions League and with the side sitting comfortably in pole position in Serie A, this is shaping up to be a vintage season for Juventus, under new coach Fabio Capello. But the findings and verdict of a recent anti-doping inquest threaten to taint the club’s image. The investigation was prompted by the comments of Zdenek Zeman, a former Roma, Lazio and Napoli coach, now at Lecce. In a 1998 magazine interview, the Czech declared it was “time for Italian football to come out of the pharmacy”, pointing the finger at Juve in particular and talking of a process that had “started with [Gianluca] Vialli and has arrived finally with [Alessandro] Del Piero”.

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Robbie Meredith reports on how teams from the Republic and Northern Ireland are warming up for a new cross-border competition with some amicable friendlies

Appropriately, in an island awash with mythology, the most enduring myth in Irish football is about to be exposed to reality. For a number of years an all-Ireland competition has been prescribed as the cure for the moribund state of domestic football in Ireland, north and south. Now, for the first time since the cross-border Blaxnit Cup was abandoned 25 years ago, competitive all-Ireland football is returning.

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