The Archive

The high number of drug-test failures in Italy compared to England is mainly the result of the seriousness with which the issue is treated there, believes  Gabriele Marcotti

The funny thing about nandrolone is that it has been around for a long time. A team-mate on my university rugby team took it for three years. No, he wasn’t a drugs cheat: as a child, he was frail and underdeveloped, so his doctor put him on a nandrolone course. Whether or not he knew (or cared) at the time that it could reduce his libido, increase his risk of developing tumours and potentially lead to “testicular atrophy” is unclear. Either way, in the 1980s, before serious drug-testing, its use was widespread in a variety of sports, including football. Its benefits – increased concentration, increased aggression, increased lean muscle mass – were seen by some as worth the risk of a couple of shrunken balls.

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Qatar is no longer an explanation for someone gobbing on the pitch: the Premiership has a rival as a home for retiring players, as Daniel Anderson-Ford reports

“Our football league features some of the world’s greatest players, many of them working with some of Europe’s finest coaches, and we hope to com­pete with the best at club and national level.”

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Nigeria's dance of the seven veils with new national coach Bryan Robson should come as no surprise to students of the west African country's football, such as Alan Duncan

Listen to any Nigerian footballer talk for any length of time and you will notice how his every football-ing fantasy peters out with a “God willing”, or an “inshallah”. While it is tempting to read into this no more than a case of fatalism, this idiosyncrasy says much of a lifetime’s experience spent learning not to take anything for granted.

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Matt Nation celebrates an unkempt concrete corner of Hamburg where watching the game was far less entertaining than pushing your neighbours into the nettles – unless a visitor lost his rag

For some ears, Adolf-Jäger-Kampfbahn sounds resolutely and undeniably Teu­tonic, evoking images of combat drills, marching and Oliver Kahn-lookalikes with their faces set in neutral jumping over vaulting horses. However, in the mid-Nineties, the touchline terrace at Altona 93’s games was more playground than parade ground. People used to go there simply to muck about.

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They are simple in theory but increasingly contentious in practice, believes Philip Cornwall, because so much more can be at stake when a spot-kick is awarded today

That you have never seen everything the game has to offer was underlined once more in Istanbul on Oct­ober 11. Something as simple, in theory, as a penalty produced a variation that was new to me.

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