Dear WSC
I found the article on the relative fortunes of football and rugby league in WSC 162 fascinating, as personally I feel these two codes are the two sports in the UK with most in common – and by the way the performance of Doncaster Dragons is much improved, and they should be the ones feeling prosperous and loved. However, it might have been an idea to illustrate the piece with a photo of an actual rugby league match. It’s not the “Giants” playing at the McAlpine, but a rugby union world cup qualifier between England and the mighty Dutch. There are probably still a few RL fans who would happily lynch you for this!
Stuart Bromwich, Sittingbourne
The Archive
Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Football films tend to be as underachieving as Newcastle United. But Neil Wills has found a few that make the grade
Mention the term “football films” to an infinite number of monkeys and they will turn in unison from their typewriters and bellow, “Escape to Victory – aaaaargh!” They’d be right too, of course. Aside from the fact that it offered a truly surreal mix of Bobby Moore and Sylvester Stallone, it is not easy to forgive a film whose actors could not play football and whose footballers could not act. Pelé actually compounded the crime six years later by appearing in something called Hotshot, whose only virtue lay in successfully making Victory look art-house by comparison.
The very English nature of our expectations creates the illusion of chronic failure
There is a peculiar tendency in Britain (maybe just in England) which insists that nothing but the best is good enough. The government wants the NHS to be “the best in the world”. Our millennium celebrations were supposed to be “the envy of the world”.
Thursday 1 After a week of indecision Martin O’Neill finally takes over at Celtic, saying: “You would be mad to think you could repeat what Jock Stein did, but I am mad.” Steve Walsh is to apply for the Leicester vacancy, with Tony Cottee as his assistant. Somehow you expect them to be turned down. Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink joins Chelsea for, ulp, £15 million and declares: “I am going to give 100 per cent, but will that be enough?” Libya’s gold reserves may be under threat after it is announced that Terry Venables is the preferred choice to succeed Carlos Bilardo as national coach.
It's getting better all the time, but too many England fans till carry unnecessary baggage. Tom Davies saw mixed messages on display at Euro 2000
Anyone stumbling unawares into the neutral section behind one of the goals at the Czech Republic v France game in Bruges might have been forgiven for wondering who was playing. For there, amid the smattering of French blue and Czech red, were five Leyton Orient shirts. Admittedly I was wearing one of them, but this is no parochial club boast – there were also shirts and flags from Wycombe and Colchester and Cambridge and Burnley. Together, they represent English football’s forgotten travelling contingent – the dedicated neutrals – and they were out in force in the Low Countries.