Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Spread-betting and exchanges gave David Bendelow a staggering range of gambling enticements over the last month. So many he even backed Pauleta for the Golden Boot
It wasn’t that long ago that my betting on a major championship would consist of a tenner on the outright winner and a few quid on the first scorer when England played. These would be placed after a leisurely stroll to the William Hill shop in Headingley.
In three weeks Greek football went from purgatory to paradise, but Paul Pomonis is not sure whether the euphoria will survive Colin Moynihan being called in for advice
“Greeks always exaggerate, whether in sorrow or in joy,” was Otto Rehhagel’s rather unkind remark when, minutes after the Euro 2004 final, a Greek TV reporter asked him to comment on the explosion of mass euphoria that greeted his team’s astonishing crowning as European champions. Anxious to preserve his seasoned pro image, King Otto had for once got it wrong. If anything, even in jubilation both players’ and fans’ reactions to the “fairytale of Portugal” were characterised by stunned incredulity and down to earth realism. “How on earth did you pull such a stunt?” a reporter asked striker Demis Nikolaides a few hours after the final. “I have no idea,” came the honest reply, while scorer Angelos Charisteas urged the fans back home to party on as “they would most probably never experience anything remotely similar in their lifetimes”.
Another tournament, another predictable failure. Phil Ball looks at what went wrong for the Spanish this time and wonders whether they will ever find a winning formula
Spain rest in peace, in memoriam. ¡Lo de siempre! (The same as always!) screamed the sports tabloid Marca after the defeat to Portugal condemned them to another early exit. The squad usually packs its bags after the quarter-finals of a major tournament and, being slightly less accustomed to such early exits, the press – reasonably tolerant towards the affable Iñaki Saez for the preparatory weeks – finally showed their true feelings towards the manager the day after the defeat. Spain’s national paranoia traditionally centres on its team’s nervous collapse when the going gets tougher, so no one had really expected them to fail at the first hurdle, particularly in such a comfortable-looking group.
Ed Parkinson is delighted Hartlepool's stars are no longer thought worth a transfer to Chelsea as Stamford Bridge seems worlds apart from Victoria Park
As a follower of a newly promoted club who just achieved their highest league placing in 94 years of grim struggle, it’s tempting to view the Second Division through heavily rose-tinted specs. To me it seems a delightful, cheerful and friendly division which all clubs should visit regularly. A survey of the changes in the division since Hartlepool’s last visit in 1991 shows that rigorous asset-stripping of promoted teams seems to have fallen out of fashion. In 1991 the winners of the old Fourth Division were gleefully dismantled by middle-aged men in sheepskin coats – any promoted side would lose three or four key players to big clubs (defined as anyone who was in the First Division, had ever won a major trophy, or just had a big ground). This year all three upwardly mobile arrivals retained nine or ten of their first-choice promotion team.
Premiership crowds slipped a bit this season but, as John Morgan explains, it's boom time in Divisions One, Two, Three and beyond after yet another year of bumper attendances that put the rest of Europe to shame
The last thing you expect to find at a Dr Martens League Eastern Division game is a crowd. But when King’s Lynn played Histon in a top-of-the-table clash on Easter Monday there definitely was one: 1,617 people gathered together of their own free will in the same place. Empty seats in Lynn’s cavernous old wooden main stand were hard to find. The attendance might not seem much at first sight, but when you consider that the DML Eastern is on the seventh tier of English football, it becomes quite astonishing. It proved to be the highest gate of the season at that level, just one example of the attendance boom currently being experienced in England.