Saturday 1 Leeds are bottom of the Premiership after a 4-1 home defeat by Arsenal. Mark Viduka is left out of the squad after missing a players’ meeting and arriving late for training. “If I started looking over my shoulder with all this speculation, I wouldn’t be able to look forward,” quips Peter Reid. Chelsea beat Everton 1-0 at Goodison Park, but defeat fails to stop Wayne Rooney dressing up as Oliver Hardy for his 18th birthday party, where guests include Atomic Kitten, Robbie Williams and “more than 200 friends”. Man Utd beat Portsmouth 3-0 at Old Trafford, Cristiano Ronaldo pausing long enough between performances of the hokey-cokey to score his first goal for the club, while at White Hart Lane Jay-Jay Okocha inspires Bolton to a 1-0 win over Spurs. Manchester City beat Southampton 2-0 at St Mary’s amid rumours that Nicolas Anelka’s absence from the City side is a consequence of his failure to attend a clay pigeon-shooting trip. “Mills is just a fucking idiot,” observes the usually unflappable Paul Ince after Danny Mills’s altercation with Lee Naylor creates confusion from which Gaizka Mendieta scores Boro’s first goal in a 2-0 victory over Wolves – a surly afternoon ends with police quelling a full-time mêlée in the tunnel. First Division leaders Wigan beat Crystal Palace 5-0, Andy Liddell’s two goals making him the club’s all-time highest goalscorer. Wimbledon win their first game at Milton Keynes, 2-1 against Bradford, but stay bottom. West Brom’s Darren Williams faces a police investigation for kicking a spare ball off the pitch and injuring a woman in the crowd during the goalless draw with Sunderland. QPR are the only club in the top nine of the Second Division to win, beating Stockport 2-1 at Edgeley Park and moving up to third place. Leaders Plymouth draw 2-2 with Oldham, while Brighton also draw 2-2 against Peterborough in Mark McGhee’s first match in charge. In Division Three, leaders Hull are held 2-2 at home by Macclesfield, allowing Doncaster and Oxford to edge closer as both win.
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The Archive
Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
We boast about the Premier League being 'the best league in the world', but the domestic superiority of England's elite clubs is not reflected in their European form
At least once a year there are rumours of a breakaway “Atlantic League” or some such, a competition for the dominant clubs in smaller football countries where the domestic title is only ever contested by at most three teams. The next time it’s floated expect to hear that Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea have been approached about joining, on the grounds that they, too, would get stronger competition from, say, Porto, Anderlecht and Ajax than from any of the other 17 clubs in the Premiership.
The Miracle of Bern was a massive commercial success in Germany, and its London viewing was a sell-out. Errol Lawrence, who despises many other samples of sport on the big screen, believes it could be the best film ever of its kind
Soenke Wortmann’s The Miracle of Bern stopped over in London at the end of November to open the annual German Film Festival. The film has become a huge commercial success in Germany and won praise across Europe and such is its reputation that the film’s single screening in London was a sell-out, attracting a polyglot audience of native Germans, students, film buffs and even the odd football fan.
Ian Plenderleith has happy memories prompted by a shrine to Aberdeen's European heroes and toasts some hard-drinking yet non-fighting Vikings, but is distinctly unimpressed by the efforts of the G-14
Certain teams capture a boy’s imagination no matter their colours or home town. I’d never been to Aberdeen by the early 1980s, but the last Scottish team to win a European trophy (the 1983 Cup-Winners Cup) boasted one of those long-lost line-ups – crammed with talented native names that never seemed to change – and rarely seemed to lose.
Dear WSC
After “sick as a parrot” and “early doors”, it seem we must now brace ourselves as another football cliche takes root. Apparently, no one in the game can now refer to the patently obvious without reach- ing for a little spurious gravitas by des- cribing it as “well documented”. In case it is not yet well documented just how irritating this affectation has become, I thought I’d get the ball rolling.
Jeffrey Prest, via email