The Archive

Organised football in deprived parts of London and other cities is giving refugees and recent immigrants a chance to build a sense of community, explains Steve Wilson

Skipping past a second challenge just inside the op­position’s half, Gazza looks up and sees the keeper marginally off his line. He lets fly from all of 35 yards and peels off in wild celebration. After shipping three cheap goals, this effort, added to his free-kick from a similar range, has pulled his team back into the game and the final ten minutes now promise to be tense.

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A side rooted in London’s Bangladeshi community will be playing four rungs short of the Conference this season. Matthew Brown traces the rise of Sporting Bengal

As footballing milestones go it probably won’t rank up there with the first FA Cup final or England’s World Cup win, but the acceptance of an east London amateur team into the ranks of the Go Travel Kent League marks a breakthrough of no little significance for one section of the footballing fraternity.

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From Bolton’s bright spark to Tranmere reject and retirement aged 30, Helen Duff charts the downward spiral of a footballer who wanted to make love not war

Hope and disappointment were the competing themes of Sasa Curcic’s football career, but in the end the latter won decisively. By the time the Yugoslavia midfielder opted for early retirement two years ago, he had convinced football fans across a broad span of the planet that he was one part virtuoso to two parts woeful lummox. Remembered with fondness for his lud­icrous comments, he’s still reviled by those supporters who once saw him as a saviour and remains, in at least two English boroughs, the man least likely to be invited back to switch on the Christmas lights.

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Dear WSC
Re Ged Naughton’s query (Letters, WSC 197) as to why the grass was always darker green during the cup final on ITV, the answer is simple: the grass is always greener on the other side.
Andy Hargreaves, Southampton

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Blair Liddell on moving to Cumbernauld and rowing with UEFA

How did the move to Cumbernauld affect Clyde’s gates?
Initially, 30,000 fans rolled up in our first ten games at Broadwood, mainly curious Cumbernauldians plus lapsed supporters crawling out of the wood-work. But league reconstruction put paid to any chances of us building on that and our new support dwind­led fast. The season we narrowly avoided relegation to the third, our average home gate was 600. We still have a hard-core support from the wilderness years and not all are holed up in the south-east of Glasgow as is commonly supposed. The biggest disappointment is despite our good form over the last three to four seasons, average crowds have stalled at around the 1,200 mark.

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