The Archive

Arsène Wenger and David O'Leary have a moan

As we know, David O’Leary and Arsène Wenger are as fiercely competitive as their players. Just now they are locked in competition to prove that their club is the most unpopular, and therefore the most put upon, in the Premier League. David O’Leary seems to have been stopping every passing reporter in recent weeks to tell them of his despair at Leeds’s declining reputation. “From the being the second favourite club of most neutral supporters,” he says, “we seem to have become the most hated club in the country,” a development he ascri­bes partly to the Bowyer-Woodgate trial and its aftermath, since which “nobody misses the chance to criticise and condemn us”.

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England fans are forced to ticket touts for World Cup 2002 tickets as allocations fail to meet expectations, Mark Perryman reports

“Avez-vous des billets?” It was the one French phrase all who followed England to the 1998 World Cup learnt. The market for touted tick­ets in Ja­pan and Korea this summer will of course be much smaller, with few if any fans turning up just on the off chance of a spare going cheap. But those applying through englandfans, the Official England Supporters Club administered by the FA, have nevertheless been sur­prised at the barriers in the way of those who do want to get tickets.

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Ian Plenderleith explores the murkier corners of the footballing web to discover Lincolnshire murder mysteries, Highland League replica kits and some straight shooting advice for referees

It’s midday at Sincil Bank on the opening day of the 1955-56 season. Lincoln City are away at Blackburn, so the ground is deserted. Ex­cept, that is, for a dead body lying in the middle of the pitch.

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Japanese journalists have made more of a mark here than their players. In the first of two articles on Asia, Justin McCurry explains what they are writing about

Japanese footballers, or so the punditry zeitgeist goes, are a talentless bunch, courted by the likes of Bolton and Portsmouth only to generate income – buy one, and get planeloads of spendthrift groupies free. In Japan, most of the salivating is being done not in boardrooms, but in tabloid newsrooms, where the ad­ventures of Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi, Junichi Inamoto et al generate acres of copy – some of it funny, much of it banal, but all of it gratefully received by the football-loving public.

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Ian Plenderleith looks into the legal jusitfication for the Premier League and Football League's copyrighting of their fixtures

Remember the outcry when the Football Lea­gue and the Premier League began charging websites for publishing their fixture lists? How could the leagues possibly hold the copy­right over an item of public information such as a football fixture, many wondered. Al­though the furore has subsided, the ques­tion has never been satisfactorily answered. Mean­while, the leagues, under their joint venture Football Dataco, have been making money for nothing.

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