Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Yuriko Saeki became only the second woman to manage a Western European men's professional team. Luke Gosset talks to the Japenese coach – briefly manager – of Spanish lower division side Puerta Bonita
FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s comments linking the popularity of women’s football to a lady’s willingness to wear tighter shorts left Japanese coach Yuriko Saeki decidedly unimpressed.
Nowhere is the women’s game more buoyant than in Germany. Margot Dunne reports on the homecoming for the World Cup winners and the hopes for a full-time league
Six months ago, all the average German male knew about women’s football could be written on the back of a beer mat with a blunt bockwurst. But all that was before October 12 last year when Nia Künzer’s golden goal in the final against Sweden shot her country to World Cup glory. The team returned from America and were overwhelmed by the kind of frenzied reception to which their male counterparts grew accustomed in recent decades. The trophy was paraded in front of thousands of screaming fans in Frankfurt; there were chat show appearances for coaches Tina Theune-Meyer and Sylvia Neid; and endless magazine covers featured the new world champions in all their fresh-faced wholesomeness. Journalists voted them “Team of the year” at Germany’s Sports Personality Awards – a title bestowed the previous year on Rudi Völler’s men.
Somehow football and rap have rarely hit it off, in spite of some peciliar parallels in the fashion stakes. Al Needham works hard to find what references there are to the game
First, a word of reassurance: just because footballers seem to be getting into hip-hop a good 15 years after everyone else did does not compromise in any way the well loved cliche about footballers having bland and rubbishy musical taste. Ever since hip-hop overtook country and rock to become the most lucrative genre of music in America, it has been successfully defanged of its subversive elements, until what Chuck D of Public Enemy called “the Black CNN” is now some bloke prattling on about what he bought the other day, who he’d like to shoot and generally how ace he is. Again. For 50 Cent, Eminem and Jay-Z, read “George Benson, Shakatak and Steak and Chips”.
Ian Plenderleith finds artists from Norway and Switzerland exploring the meaning and limits of the game (and the language), while Englishmen past and present have captured the game’s historic vistas
The history of football and art is littered with badly proportioned pencil drawings, misty-edged portraits and, on the pitch, mostly miscued overhead kicks that end up leaving their artists flat on the canvas. Once in a while, though, those overhead shots hit the target and we celebrate the beauty, just as the occasional non-playing artist captures something of the game’s elusive but undeniable aesthetic side.
The internet has its critics, but after using it to spend his money on football games to make up for his deprived childhood, Harry Pearson certainly isn’t one of them
My childhood contact with football board games was confined to gazing wistfully at the adverts in Jimmy Hill’s Football Weekly. They promised so much delight. Wembley was based on “The English Football Association Challenge Cup Competition” and boasted “the most gripping features and exciting uncertainties” recreated “with vivid and amazing fidelity”. Soccerama, meanwhile was thrillingly endorsed by England World Cup star Alan Ball.