Dear WSC
In his article Mind the Gap (WSC 209), which celebrated a rise in attendances in what used to be Division Two, Ed Parkinson did confess that as a fan of promoted Hartlepool he might be viewing the league with rose-tinted spectacles. Having read the article, I feel he must have gone the whole hog and had a full rose-tinted laser eye operation. Having witnessed many games in this division last season and having seen all the teams play at least once, I can honestly say that the standard of football never exceeded mediocre. Plymouth were the only good footballing side and they didn’t look anywhere near as good once Paul Sturrock swapped addresses on the south coast. As well as attributing the rise in attendances to what he considered to be “fine football”, Ed also noted that the struggles of “a few self-styled big clubs” such as Sheffield Wednesday provided pleasure for many. However, average attendances in Division Two were only up 6.5 per cent on the previous year and, with an average home attendance of 22,000 (almost twice that of any other team in the Division and four times more than Hartlepool), is it not more likely that it was the presence of “self-styled big club” Sheffield Wednesday that caused the upsurge in attendances rather than the alleged quality of the football?
Stuart Thorpe, via email
The Archive
Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
A relaunched domestic league has done little to divert the attention of a jaded Chinese public from Europe, writes Gary Bowerman, but sights are set high for the future
Footballing frustration hangs heavily over China. With a population of 1.3 billion, an economy fast outgrowing all others and an ingrained passion for football, the Chinese constantly berate their national team for their lowly 64th place in FIFA’s rankings. To compound the fans’ frustration, China’s recent tour of Europe yielded a scoreless draw with Andorra, a 1-0 win over Algeria and a thumping 6-0 defeat by Barcelona, while the Under-23 team failed to qualify for the Athens Olympics.
However unjust their elimination from Euro 2004 might have seemed at the time, the truth is that England will never go further than the last eight in a major tournament until there is a major rehaul of the Premiership
England’s elimination at Euro 2004 felt like a compilation of all their previous tournament crises. The team tend to rely on survival through attrition, of desperate defending with their “tin hats on”. But that never pays off, so other reasons for failure are found, often involving making a scapegoat of a referee (Urs Meier this year, Kim Milton Nielsen in 1998). This means uncomfortable questions don’t have to be posed, such as whether it’s right to place faith in star names when they are playing as badly as David Beckham, or indeed whether the best English players are in fact especially good in the first place.
Which would you choose, Brighton or Moscow? As Julian Daniels reports, the former Manchester United winger opted for the latter and he will probably be regretting it now
When Andrei Kanchelskis signed a one-year-deal with Dinamo Moscow in January, he was instantly named club captain. It seemed like his nine-month exile from the game had ended in style. However, within weeks it had turned into a nightmare.
Ori Lewis reports on the day that an Arab-Israeli side from a town of less than 22,000 people won the national cup and qualified for Europe, thus making a bold statement about uniting Arabs and Jews in Israel along the way
The night of May 18, 2004 will be marked in Israeli history books as a milestone for the country’s Arab minority, a sector that has long complained of institutional discrimination and that over the years had never been repaid fully for agreeing to become loyal citizens of the Jewish state.