The Archive

Michael Richardson thought it was all over in 1966. Haydn Parry reveals the man on the Wembley pitch.

English football, Ken Wolstenholme and Geoff Hurst in particular, owe Michael Rich­ardson a peculiar debt. For, as Wolstenholme stared down incredulously from his gantry at the impromptu pitch invasion prior to the fourth goal and final whistle in 1966, it was a young Mr Richardson who was doing his stuff, upstaging the main event in the top left hand corner of the nation’s TV screens. Mich­ael’s 15 seconds of fame came at the age of 18, although these days he still has a public pro­file, of sorts, as the drummer in Elkie Brooks’s band (ask your parents).

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Alan Crockford's handy guide to the Exeter chairman

Distinguishing features Grey hair. Awful grey suits. Grey shoes so cheap and nasty looking that he might as well wear flip-flops.

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David Stubbs reviews a musical… about football. Oh dear

Must admit, the prospect of an Andrew Lloyd-Webber-Ben Elton musical set in Troubles-ridden Northern Ireland about a local football team didn’t brace me. This is going to be bad, I thought. Groan-out-loud bad. Tear your pro­gramme into sweaty shreds and assume the foetal position bad.

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An unaccustomed and unsettling sense of well-being seems to be settling over some of the League’s recently troubled clubs. At Southend United, the unlikely partnership of George Soros and David Webb is in place and prom­ising to take the Shrimpers out of debt and on to higher things. How much the renowned international financier knows about the Third Division may be questioned, but for the time being the property company Delancey Estates, which he controls, is shaping the destiny of the club that once discarded this month’s England manager.

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Brazil are in turmoil, Peru are in despair, and Chile are in the pool with a load of Colombian women. It's never dull in South America, as Leopoldo Iturra discovers

Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 for his use of magic realism, a style which deliberately exaggerates Latin American folk­lore and which allows anything to happen – from the appearance of Romanies who invent snow to immortal incestuous families.

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