Dear WSC
Thanks for digging deeper into the faceless consortium that are attempting to transplant Wimbledon FC to MK. Although the “stadium” would be on my doorstep, I naively assumed that the FA would fulfil their responsibility to the sport and dismiss the move out of hand. Having lived in MK most of my life I’ve hardly been deprived of reasonable live football action. As a child, Saturdays were down to Kenilworth Road (at ten,Luton was an exciting day out). Now I take my son to Sixfields, and both Northampton Town and, if we’re really going on safari, Rushden and Diamonds provide good entertainment, and more importantly teams and clubs that we can feel part of and be passionate about. It’s spurious and irrelevant to try to justify the project by stating that we’re the only city in Europe without a major football club. Firstly, MK is not a city and secondly, so what? The primary consideration should be how this move will benefit Wimbledon FC, and then let’s hear some quantifiable benefits for the area. It’s a small point but it looks like the ice-rink in MK will be closing despite being home to a reasonably successful Ice Hockey team, the MK Kings. The result of this commercial decision by the rink’s owners is that the Kings are likely to be playing out of Birmingham next year. So how long might it be before a more affluent club than Wimbledon decides to realise the capital locked up in their current piece of potential prime retail development land and offer the MK stadium landlords a deal for some “temporary” accommodation. This could be the top of a very slippery slope.
James McAuley, Milton Keynes
The Archive
Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Football and the rising sun simply don't mix, says Al Needham. The 2002 World Cup was all well and good, but it should never be allowed to take place at that time of the morning again
Once upon a time, the World Cup was like a dog. A big, fluffy, waggy-tailed dog who would wait for us to come pegging it out of the school gates. It would wait patiently for us. We would make time for it. All our friends loved it, and would talk about it incessantly. It was heartbreaking when the dog went away, but we knew it would be back another day, wagging its tail and licking our faces.
With Japan and Korea all done and dusted, have England lost their element of surprise? We look cautiously back over a very different World Cup
It’s always tempting to read too much into a World Cup, especially in its immediate aftermath. Who would have thought in 1990, for example, that such a turgid tournament, littered with violence on and off the pitch, would be the prelude to a decade of soaring interest and fantastic wealth in English football?
Gabriele Marcotti, who predicted the poor displays of France and Argentina in WSC two months ago, attempts to sort World Cup fact from fiction
For a competition that lasts 31 days – and one in which half the teams play just three matches – it’s quite remarkable that the World Cup is held in such high esteem as a barometer of footballing trends and relative strength. Especially a competition such as this one, where poor refereeing and bizarre episodes saw the World Cup lose a host of juggernauts (or potential juggernauts) before the quarter-finals, as fans of Portugal, Nigeria, Argentina, Italy and France will confirm. Still, this was not a 64-match exercise in futility. Once the hype subsides and the pundits go back to spouting the obvious about players whose names they can actually pronounce, we’ll be left with a neat set of memories we can stow in the back of our consciousness.
This time there was no one else to blame, but that hasn't stopped some people believing England are on the verge of something great. Cris Freddi begs to differ
No need for a blow-by-blow: we all saw the same tournament. When England managed to protect a lead, they had shape and substance. When they didn’t, it wasn’t pretty. Denmark self-destructed and Nigeria didn’t matter, but Argentina was one of the great ones, a spookily complete payback. No coincidence, surely, that it was played under cover, in controlled conditions – and that it bucketed down for Denmark.