Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Mathias Kowoll leads us round the grounds that the home nations may or may not be visiting four summers from now
Does anyone remember Sir Bert Millichip’s alleged promise to the DFB (German FA) that England would not bid for the 2006 World Cup because Germany had supported England for Euro 96? Well, Bert himself didn’t. But Franz Böhmert, the president of Werder Bremen, must have recalled it when he found out that the Weserstadion would not be one of the 12 stadiums selected for 2006.
Ken Gall gives a resounding cheer for the exasperated Scottish Premier League chairmen who finally stuck two fingers up at Rangers and Celtic
To anyone who says that there are no surprises left in Scottish football, the events of April 16 will have been the cause of some bemusement. In what might seem at first glance to be the equivalent of the Christians expelling Jesus from Christianity, all the Scottish Premier League clubs, with the exception of Celtic and Rangers, gave notice of their intention to resign en masse from the league in two seasons’ time, leaving Glasgow’s much-loved double act, not for the first time, in a world of their own.
There's a World Cup coming up, apparently, so we invited three well-travelled journalists to make some rash predictions about what will happen. As a Swede based in London Marcus Christenson has ties to two of the countries in Group F. Gabriele Marcotti has lived in Japan and how tries to explain English football to Italians and vice-versa. Alan Duncan reports regularly on Nigeria and Cameroon, who face England and Ireland respectively, as well as the three other African qualifiers
Are playing styles and tactics are becoming more homogeneous throughout the world, because most of the top players are playing in the same leagues? If so, does that make the World Cup less interesting?
Gabriele Marcotti There’s a greater uniformity. Not just in the way teams play, but also in how they train. If you look at the size of the Italian or Spanish players, they are now as big as the northern Europeans are expected to be. Everybody’s an athlete. Some of the English players still get drunk and irresponsible but the impression I get with players like Beckham and Owen is that they train seriously and take care of their diet. In some ways it has become more uniform, but in a positive way – the level of fitness has definitely increased everywhere.
As Matthew Le Tissier calls it a day, Cris Freddi looks back on some of the other players who have been almost great, but not quite, in his tricky position
So goodbye then, Le Tiss. Thanks for the sequence of great individual goals that season. If you’d got yourself injured there and then, we’d have called it a really big loss, someone who had the makings of a great player. Instead, they’re saying you didn’t have enough ambition to leave an unfashionable club. I think that’s bollocks personally, but we all agree that something went AWOL in the last few years.
Ian Plenderleith burrows through the heaving mass of World Cup sites to discover the debut official song and the meaning of Korea's "intangible cultural assets"
Predictably enough, there has been a huge amount of cyberspace set aside for online coverage of the coming World Cup. The following is an attempt to help you focus on the least drivel-ridden websites.