Dear WSC
Your Blackpool “expert” in the pre-season preview (WSC 199) doesn’t have much chance of getting this season correct if he can’t work out what happened last season. Blackpool didn’t lose home and away to Cardiff – we won 1-0 at Bloomfield Road. And my experiences of Cardiff fans’ hospitality were somewhat different from your expert’s. After the home game we passed a load of Cardiff fans who applauded us on our fine display and victory. As for the away game, a Cardiff supporting friend drove me all the way from our midlands office and back and plied me with drinks before and after the match in a friendly atmosphere at the local rugby club. I know hospitality may have been different if I’d been a fan from some other club with more of a reputation for confrontation, but don’t always believe the stereotyping.
Chris Lowry, Solihull
The Archive
Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Friday 1 Manchester United are fined £1.6 million by the Office of Fair Trading for price-fixing replica shirts. One of the other ten businesses to be charged are… the FA who will have to pay £158,000 for selling overpriced England shirts on the internet in 2000-01. Tangled web-weaver John Fashanu says he has resigned as chairman of Barry Town, though there is some doubt whether he ever really held such a position. Jody Craddock leaves Sunderland for Wolves, who are also to sign Senegalese striker Henri Camara and Spurs’ Steffen Iversen.
Who knows what lies in store for Chelsea as fun time with Roman beckons
By now we will all be agreed that any newspaper which describes to the occupants of Stamford Bridge as “Chelski” should be referred to the Press Complaints Commission and sternly censured with, at least, a swingeing fine. Short custodial sentences and history lessons, meanwhile, ought to be the norm for anyone using the term “Red Roman” for a man described on his takeover of the club as “the real financial genius of Russia’s bandit-capitalism epoch” – Ken Bates is more leftwing.
Jon Matthias on the Shrews
Kevin Ratcliffe carried the can for last season’s relegation – was this unfair?
No. It was his team, his tactics and his persistence with players who were blatantly unfit and were not getting any fitter that saw us relegated. Our defence, his apparent field of expertise, was appalling. I think the board and many fans were afraid of being too negative so nothing was said until it was too late. In March, chief executive Keith Sayfritz commented that this season was “not as bad” as the Great Escape season of 2000. That sort of misplaced optimism is why it ended up so much worse.
Dianne Millen explores the most suitable means of preventing incursions on to the pitch by fans
When is a pitch invasion not a pitch invasion? When there’s only one person involved, of course, as happened twice in the second weekend of the new Scottish Premier League campaign. Amid the debate among the condemnatory, permatanned pundits about whether a single fan constituted an “invasion”, however, were serious safety questions.