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”.
In four years the previous european champions have turned into a laughing stock. Peter Schimkat investigates the German malaise
Germany were neither the worst team at Euro 2000 (Denmark) nor the most boring one (Norway), though it has to be admitted that we ran both of them pretty close. What’s more, it was clear to everyone that this was not an isolated failure. Following the defeat by England, nobody gave a damn about that match. Everyone was far more interested in discussing what had gone so horribly wrong in the last couple of years.
Criticism of Italy's tactics is not likely to change the way they play, says Roberto Gotta
Car horns stayed silent on Sunday night, July 2. How ironic it has been to see one of the dullest, most defensive national teams of all time come within a minute of winning a tournament they had entered without much hope. Whenever Italy enter a tournament with low expectations, they fare much better than when they are expected to do well. It happened in Argentina 78 and, memorably, in Spain 82, when the Italy camp was torn by controversies and the team was barely seen as capable of progressing to the second round (which they did, just), then went on to win it.