Saturday 3 Man Utd don’t manage a shot on target at home to Everton but still win with a deflected goal. Robbie Fowler’s revival continues with two in a 3-0 win over West Ham to take Liverpool up to third behind Arsenal, who win 1-0 at Coventry. Derby’s surprise 1-0 win over Sunderland takes them four points clear of the relegation zone, though they have three players booked in five minutes for disputing offside calls. Man City’s improved form continues with a 1-1 draw at the Riverside, though Joe Royle is furious that a Danny Tiatto goal is disallowed for offside: “The TV replay should embarrass the ref for the rest of his career.” Spurs’ goalless draw with Charlton is their fourth in a row: “We’ll just have to keep grinding our results until we get our strikers fit,” says George Graham with something approaching relish. In the First, Sheff Wed get another turn at the bottom after losing to Watford. “We have it all to do,” predicts Paul Jewell. Joe Kinnear moves one place up the Second Division table by becoming an “adviser” to second-bottom Luton.
The Archive
Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
The hounding of Neil Lennon brought the issue of sectarianism back into the spotlight. As Davy Millar writes, recent initiatives to revive the Irish League will fail unless this underlying problem is addressed.
Its not been a bad season for the Irish League so far. Our clubs still suffer from a shortage of fans, a lack of money, administrative cock-ups and an all-pervading sense of despair but we’re used to all that sort of thing by now. The good news is that everybody agrees we’re in a mess and they’ve all promised to think really hard about how to get out of it. Out of the mess, that is; Glentoran’s Rory Hamill misunderstood that bit and promptly failed his UEFA Cup drug test.
The production of footballers, like everything else in the Republic, is taking off. Dave Hannigan reports
When the Republic of Ireland began their World Cup qualifying campaign last autumn with highly creditable draws away to Holland and Portugal, their efforts were bulwarked by the then out of favour Internazionale striker Robbie Keane, the then Everton substitute centre-half Richard Dunne and Blackburn Rovers winger Damien Duff. Despite all three battling difficult periods in their nascent club careers, they had no problems turning it on at a higher level. From three veterans of international youth football, the Irish fans would have expected nothing less.
Cris Freddi recalls a narrow escape against Austria in 1932, when the 'man of paper' exposed the shakiness of England's supposed dominance over the Continental teams
The last time England had played a foreign country, almost exactly a year earlier, they’d thrashed Spain 7-1. Now the selectors decided it was no more Mr Nice Guy. Putting it another way, they were bricking it. With just cause, too. While Spain were a perfectly respectable side (the great Ricardo Zamora simply had a shocker in goal), Austria were something else. In a run of 13 unbeaten games, they’d hammered Scotland 5-0, Germany 6-0 and 5-0, Switzerland 8-1 and Hungary 8-2.
Ian Plenderleith shows us websites from the top of the football hierachy, to the bottom.
There is no end of general football sites saturated from the top down with Premier this and that, but one website with the courage to eschew the tedium of big boy coverage is League Matters, which describes itself as the independent and dedicated guide to league football. And by that it means the Football League.