The Archive

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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Want to buy a stake in your club? Need to check whether it's worth what you're paying, or 14,975 times less? Or just keen to know if they're going out of business? Ian Plenderleith takes stock of online football finance

Proving that the internet may still be the last refuge of scam merchants, WSC was re­cently sent a link to a website called Framed Share that allows fans to buy smartly framed single share certificates in football clubs. “In the past only the richest football fans could afford to be a shareholder in various football clubs and have their say in how the club is run,” says the blurb, as if we had just emerged from an era when only the wealthy had the nous to pick up a phone and talk to a stockbroker.

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Monday 1 On transfer deadline day, Chelsea finally snap up Claude Makelele from Real Madrid for, ooh, £80 million or so. Everton fans might be pleased by the arrival of James McFadden from Motherwell, but possibly less excited by that of Kevin Kilbane and the return on loan of Franny Jeffers. Among other loan deals, Marcus Bent leaves impoverished Ipswich for Leicester and Portsmouth take Jason Roberts from West Brom.

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Dear WSC
At the time of writing it is Thurs­day, September 11, 2003. Last night I along with 8,815 others ventured to Windsor Park, safe in the knowledge we could finally put to rest the 11-game goal drought. After all, we only lost 1-0 away to Armenia and we hit the post and crossbar and we mis­sed a few chances. Two hours later we had lost 1-0 again and we hit the crossbar and hit the post and missed a few chances. The media has generally chuckled at our plight, and who could blame them. BBC Northern Ireland is running a phone poll on whether or not we should scrap the Northern Ireland football team in favour of an All-Ireland -Team. This in itself is a quite ludicrous, deliberately contentious and politically loaded question from a supposedly public service broadcaster. I don’t recall a similar poll in favour of a British and Irish Lions team poll when the Irish rugby team lost to Argentina in a World Cup game. A plus point about the goal drought is that for the first time in years what little publicity we have received hasn’t been about problems with sectarianism and the national team. To an outsider it probably seems that Northern Ireland home games are a seething cauldron of bigotry and hatred.In fact, anyone attending a game without preconceived ideas would be surprised at how good the atmosphere is given the terrible ground, poorly performing team and crowd size. We are now just known as being useless, not useless bigots. I hope one day soon to look back and laugh about when we couldn’t score as Andy Smith nods another past a hapless Barthez on our way to automatic qualification for the World Cup in Germany…
Jim Lockhart, Banbridge, Co Down

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Paul Pomonis examines the bribery allegations that have tainted football in Greece

On September 7, Greece beat Armenia 1-0 in Yerevan in a Euro 2004 qualifier. A few hours later, Suren Baghdassarian, press officer with the Football Federation of Armenia, alleged that the Hellenic Football Federation (HFF) had unsuccessfully attemp­ted to buy the game. According to Baghdassarian, in the days leading up to the game, former Armenia international Yervard Sukassyan had repeatedly phoned the national man­ager and the chairman of the federation, offering $1 million (£600,000) on behalf of the HFF chairman Vassilis Gagatsis in order to secure victory. The Armenian officials had taped the incriminating phone calls and, prior to the match, notified UEFA’s match delegate, who decided to give the match the go-ahead and look at the case afterwards. Based on the evidence col­lected since, UEFA have appointed a disciplinary in­spector, Austrian Gerhard Kapl, who is ex­pected to report back ahead of the final series of qualifying matches on October 11.

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