Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
No, you haven't picked up Roy of the Rovers by mistake. A kid on holiday has really signed for Mallorca after a scout saw him having a kick–about, as Neil White relates
Not since Steve Norman and Martin Kemp moved from Spandau Ballet to Melchester Rovers in the early 1980s has there been as unlikely a transfer as the one that took 18-year-old apprentice mechanic Jimmy Stevenson from Alloa Athletic to Real Mallorca.
Tom Bower's new book looks into the financial irregularities and running of football. Here he tells WSC why these issues will sooner or later shatter the game
The publishers make play of the fact that you are the first non-sports journalist to write on this subject. Do you consider that football journalists are too reliant on clubs as sources for stories to be adequately dispassionate on business matters?
I don’t criticise them for that. I think football journalists write brilliantly. I came to this as an outsider who didn’t read the football pages before. Their problem is they need access to the players and so it’s very difficult for them to do what I’ve done; it just comes with the turf. Where the failure has been is with the business sections of the newspapers. It’s regarded as just sport whereas in fact it’s a huge industry.
Before it's too late, Tom Davies records the relaxed conviviality of chatting in the quietest part of a quietish ground, pausing only for the odd barbed reference to the game in the background
Those who have campaigned for the retention or return of terracing at football have aimed their fire too narrowly. In highlighting the mystique of a terrace as a throbbing, heaving mass of partisan passion, they’ve missed what makes an awful lot of terraces – particularly a lot of those that still exist – special: their quiet, easy-going affability.
Tirol Innsbruck, a familiar name from the Champions League, has vanished from sight. They could be a long time coming back, as Roderick Stewart writes
The dramatic collapse of Tirol Innsbruck last year, from Champions League qualifiers to the third division, was probably the most extreme case yet of a club being punished for financial misdemeanours. Now, in a new guise, the club have started the long haul back.
Dear WSC
How’s this for a delicious sense of irony? Brentford v Colchester United, Tuesday February 18, 2003. 1) On a freezing cold night when almost everyone wishes they’d stayed indoors, the Bees put in a dreadful first-half display and are roundly booed off the pitch. 2) In an effort to placate the home fans, Brentford decide to play the D:Ream hit Things Can Only Get Better over the tannoy. 3) Immediately the song finishes, the club announces the match has been abandoned at half time. If only the Bees’ strike force was as good as their comic timing.
Eddie Hutchinson, Ashford