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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.

 

Loan stars in a state

Duncan Young recalls how Mick Ferguson did his job, thereby relegating himself, and questions new rules that could make the dilema Ferguson faced a common one

Imagine it’s the last game of the season. You’re a striker. You’ve only got the keeper to beat to score the goal that keeps your team in the top division. There’s just one problem. You’re on loan from another club and if you score they’re the ones going down. What would you do?

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Madeira

The Atlantic islad has two thriving teams in Portugal's top flight but, as Jon Spurling explains, some want to wreck that by recreating the Faroe Islands, only with sunshine

On the face of it, football on Madeira, 500 miles south-west of Portugal, is enjoying a boom. In late September, Maritimo, the island’s only fully professional side, were joint top of the Portuguese league. Nacional, the island’s second team and not yet full time, were in mid-table. But if certain political groups get their way, the golden era may be brief.

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Berwick Rangers

Doug Stenhouse sheds some light on the colourful history of Berwick Rangers

How would you assess the playing standard in Scottish Division Two?
The standard is certainly better in Division One, with some full-time squads. However, clubs such as Clyde have done well with part-timers. It’s possible most Second Division boards are happy to stay where they are, knowing all too well that higher standards mean higher salaries they can ill afford.

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Up the orient

Al Needham used to doubt that football could take Asia by storm. But then he saw the film Shaolin Soccer and his reservations were sent flying by surprsingly violent monks

Like most people, I fretted about the 2002 World Cup and FIFA’s latest attempt to foist football upon south-east Asia. I knew about the trials and tribulations of the J-League. I remembered the wave of apathy across America in 1994. I worried about the faddy na­ture of the area towards western trends. I was a patronising, know-nothing get, as it turned out, but had I seen one of the biggest films to come out of Hong Kong in 2001, I would have realised that well in advance.

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Picture postings

Peter Robinson has photographed football across five decades, as his new book records. But in spite of his unparalleled career, the Premier League want him to start again

My first involvement with football came through meeting someone I knew in the street who told me that the Football League Review was looking for a regular photographer. This was the League’s official magazine, produced on a shoestring initially. It was included as an optional insert with club programmes. Most of the lower division clubs took it be­cause they needed something to pad out their prog­rammes, most of which were only the size of the Re­view itself. Some of the wealthier clubs with bigger programmes didn’t want it, though, and that affected their level of co-operation with me when it came to taking pictures. The League wanted a range of clubs to feature, though you couldn’t hope to cover all 92 in a season even when the Review went weekly.

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