Dear WSC
On January 13, Paul Alcock officiated at the Northampton Town v Bury match. During the obligatory photo just prior to kick-off, home mascot Clarence the Dragon made as if to push Alcock à la Di Canio but actually made no contact. Alcock’s reaction was to spit out: “Oh very fucking funny! I haven’t heard that one for at least ten fucking minutes.” This in front of the two young mascots who immediately told their parents as they came off that the referee had sworn at Clarence. Unbelievably, Alcock actually reported the “incident” to the FA with the result that the club has been fined and Clarence handed a severe reprimand and cautioned as to his future conduct. Just what planet does this prissy little pipsqueak come from? Talk about double standards.
Peter Smith, Northampton
The Archive
Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Players in the "old days" knew how to behave, unlike the overpaid prima-donnas of today. Not at all, says Steve Field
Think of an example of boisterous, drunken or oafish behaviour on the part of a highly-paid football personality. It might be Peter Beagrie’s Great Escape re-enactment in a hotel foyer, Brian Law’s hijack of a West Midlands Travel single-decker, Stan Collymore doing just about anything. The alleged misdemeanour could be sexual (Pleat, Shilton), financial (Macari, Venables), addiction-related or violent (too many to mention). Whatever, you can be sure of one thing. Within hours of the story breaking, pundits will be queuing up to proclaim that such a thing would never have happened in The Old Days.
Do England really need a new national stadium? And more specifically, does it have to be London?
The past month has seen two games which gave a tantalising hint of how things might have been if football had not got into such a mind-boggling mess over the reconstruction of Wembley.
Barry Kilby is a majority shareholder of Burnley FC and has revitalised the club. Jeremy Wilson endeavours to find out who is the man behind all the success
Distinguishing Features Tall, with a crop of red hair, Barry stands out in a crowd. In the early days of his reign he could be easily spotted from afar ensconced in a full-length 100 per cent llama hair coat. However, following merciless piss-taking of said garment on a supporters’ group website (Barry is known to check out a variety of sites on a regular basis) it failed to make another appearance on the Turf.
Access problems at the new venue for showpiece finals make for a disaster waiting to happen, says Richard Browne
The first Worthington Cup final at the Millennium Stadium was a shambles. Cardiff was just not prepared for a huge influx of people on a Sunday morning. The most frustrating feature of the whole chaotic day was the refusal to delay the kick-off by any more than ten minutes. With only one Sunday service on the trains, most people had no choice but to arrive by road. There were 65,000 in the ground at kick-off, with some 8,500 still struggling to get in. There were stories of fans arriving in Cardiff after a six-hour journey in time to watch the second half in a pub near where their coach parked, miles from the stadium. I was among the lucky ones who only missed the first 15 minutes, to be greeted on arrival by the slogan “It’s a fan thing”, and the discovery that there was no food or drink and no programmes.