The Archive

Simon Edwards looks at Lincoln City

What were your best and worst moments as a Lincoln fan?
The very worst moments occurred last summer. We genuinely believed we would not have a club. Des­pite all the hard work of supporters (not just from Lincoln either I might add), the board, club staff and administrator, the executive decision still lay in the hands of a High Court judge. Luckily he was a sympathetic man. Best moment was kicking off this season clear of administration, just glad to be able to go to Kidderminster again.

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Should international friendlies be cast on to the football scrapheap?

The new England shirts, launched at the end of March, have “anatomically eng­ineered moisture management pan­elling”, which is another way of saying lots of small holes, ideal no doubt for play­ing in hot weather. Whether England will need to use them in a certain international tournament next summer is, of course, far from certain. However, a qual­i­fication failure by England wouldn’t dis­please the clubs employing three of the four players, Michael Owen, David Beck­ham and Rio Ferdinand, who mod­elled the new strip.

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Ian Plenderleith looks at the wobble of football websites

There was more worrying financial news for Football League clubs in March when its internet partner Premium TV (PTV) announced another wave of redundancies and sent its CEO home on “gardening leave”. Yet the com­pany claims that it is not on the verge of collapsing, despite the lay-offs, the huge debts at its parent company, NTL, and the fact that it has already once had to renegotiate its contract with the FL.

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Phil Town explores the stadiums being built in Portugal for Euro 2004

Benfiquistas said a fond farewell in March to their Catedral. The last ever game at Benfica’s once magnificent Luz Stadium was a damp squib of a 1-0 win over modest Santa Clara of the Azores, and that with a penalty. For months, though, the Luz had also been a sorry sight, a quarter of it removed to make way for the mag­nificent new Luz nudging its way in from next door where it is currently undergoing con­struction.

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Racing Santander’s forthright new president-cum-manager has been derided by critics but, says Phil Ball, he might just be on the right track

Dimitri Piterman is no ordinary chap. Shortly after buying a 24 per cent majority shareholding in Ra­cing Santander in January, the new millionaire president of the ailing Spanish top-flight club was stopped outside the entrance to the El Sardinero stadium by a TV journalist and asked if he thought that his stated intention of personally running all aspects of the club – right down to team management – was perhaps a tad over-ambitious, even ar­rogant? Espec­ially when he was not qual­ified to do so? Piterman leaned into the beam of the cameras and eyeballed the journalist with a withering stare: “There’s a dork running the most powerful country in the world without a qualification to his name. And you ask me for a diploma to run a football team? Give me a break.” And so began one of the lengthiest me­dia circuses witnessed in Spain over the past couple of decades, with the result that the 39-year-old Piterman has be­come at least as famous as Jesus Gil.

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