The Archive

Roger Lytollis reckons the fall into semi-pro football is feared more than ever

Hold the back page: the third division wasn’t very good last season. How else could miserably ordinary sides like Hartlepool and Blackpool make the play-offs? For every quality player there were dozens of Gary Brabins and Steve Torpeys. Cheltenham were typical. In only their second League sea­son any romance was long gone. Their rel­iance on negative, strong-arm tac­tics left most op­­­ponents looking like extras from Gladiator by the end of the afternoon’s “entertainment”.

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September 2001 marked the 20th anniversary of John Barnes's debut for Watford. We asked five other black players of the same generation to recall their problems with racism in the early part of their career and reflect on how things have changed since

Alex Williams
Debut for Man City: November 1979
Now: Football Community manager, Man City

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Ernst Bouwes looks at the largely positive expereince of black players in Holland, where the descendants of migrants from Surinam have become a powerful force in the national team

It is a well known fact that Peter Minuit bought Manhattan from the native Americans for the equivalent of about 30 dollars in 1626, but more obscurity surrounds the exchange of the same property for Surinam with the British some 40 years later. Among historians this is widely regarded as the worst real-estate deal of all time. One thing is certain though: not one person from the New York area ever made it into the England squad, while Surinam has produced dozens of talented footballers who have radically changed the look of the Dutch national team in the past 20 years.

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Ian Plenderleith looks at a site celebrating fooball's strange expressions, and has a trawl around Scotland

Kudos is due to the website Danger Here for its documenting of great moments in football language, including nonsensical and little-known quotes from the back catalogues of Kevin Keegan, Glenn Hoddle and the Irish commentator George Hamilton, who merits his own section. His garbled metaphor comparing the Real Madrid defence to a rabbit is too long to reproduce here, but well worth logging on for alone, although my own favourite was: “The midfield are like a chef… trying to prise open a stubborn oyster to get at the fleshy meat inside.”

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When Holland visited Hudderfield in 1946, they met one of England's best ever teams. But, says Cris Freddi, the result also had more to do with the experiences of the two countries during the war

Like England, the Dutch had started their postwar schedule with a glut of goals, winning their first two matches 6-2 – but no one was unduly fooled. Strictly amateur, with no great international pedigree, a football that hadn’t survived the war as well as Eng­land’s – there was nothing false about Holland’s pre-match modesty.

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