The Archive

Religion and football remain a potent and unpleasant mix. Robbie Meredith examines the problems on both sides of the border in Ireland

In 1998, in a routine attempt at male bonding, I took my son to his first international at Windsor Park to see Northern Ireland play Moldova. Our players wore green, but numerous fans sported Rangers scarves of red, white and blue or the purple and orange colours of the Orange Order. Many bellowed “No Surrender!” in the midst of the national anthem, while The Sash, the Protestant marching song, was sung regularly.

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It’s 14 years since Napoli were Italian champions led by Diego but, as Roberto Gotta explains, while he has grown ever larger the club and crowds have shrunk alarmingly

Diego Maradona has not come back to Naples for a while. He’s visited Italy a number of times, accepting fees of up to £10,000 for appearances on local television stations, ski slopes (he stood in the snow in shorts), carnival parades and – although this was for free – children’s hospitals, the latter probably having made nurses and parents happier than the kids, who ob­viously had no idea that the chubby figure was once one of the world’s greatest footballers.

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While today graffiti is a public method of making coded statements, in the 1970s it was about football and plain speaking, if not always great spelling, as  Jim Heath recalls

Apart from Arsenal fans spraying their hair red in honour of Freddie Ljungberg, it’s been a long time since spray paint played an active part in the football supporters’ repertoire. Football graffiti had its heyday in the early 1970s when it gave crumbling stadiums that extra, almost indefinable character, the worn brick and corrugated iron surrounds of the terraces being a per­fect canvas for budding artists. It wasn’t just re­stricted to the grounds themselves, with daubings on all points from the city centres and railway stations. Given its intimidatory presence which heightened the fear that you were going to get your head kicked in, it’s ironic that the graffiti trend was inspired mainly by the 1960s peace movement, who used it to protest against the Vietnam war and express support for Castro’s Cuba (“LBJ get out of Vietnam” was still visible on a wall opposite the Craven Cottage turnstiles into the 1980s).

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The graffiti at Middlesbrough’s Ayresome Park was so extensive and in unexpected places that they opted to knock it down rather than clean it, as Harry Pearson explains

When Ayresome Park was finally eradicated the demolition men took with them a lot of bricks and a small slice of folk-art history. True, there was nothing that left its mark on the conscience of a generation like north London’s splendidly indelible “M Khan Is Bent”. Nor was there anything quite as archaic as the north-east’s oldest surviving product of bore­dom and testosterone, the carving on Hadrian’s Wall that depicts a giant penis hopping about on chicken’s legs (had a Roman Legionary had some ghastly premonition of Kieron Dyer?). But there was enough for us oldsters to get wistful over in much the same way our coevals in Leicester do when they recall the evil threats on the back wall of the away end at Filbert Street.

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After failing to play his way out of Scottish Division Two, the midfielder looked set for the scrap heap in 2002. But as Neil Forsyth writes, he found an unlikely second wind

Generally speaking, football careers tend to arc in achievement. For some the peak comes achingly early: think Norman Whiteside, Lee Sharpe or Peter Marinello. More fortunate are those who delay the dip until late in their career, leaving earlier achievement undiluted. Kenny Dalglish, Alan Shearer and the  1997-98 Arsenal back four ease into this category.

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