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”.
It was political arrogance nd clumsiness, not hooliganism, that cost England the chance to stage the 2006 World Cup, says Alan Tomlinson
Brussels is an engaging mix of the old and the new. At one end of Boulevard Adolphe Max, itself littered with seedy sex shops and chambres privées, lies Place de la Bourse, one of the gathering points in the city, and a focus for the riot police when fans were getting out of hand. At the other end is a concrete wasteland of ugly buildings, among which lies the Sheraton, a shrine to the glamour and opulence of postwar reconstruction.
Once the real tournament started, luck played a bigger part than the so-called great players. That's how Cris Freddi saw it anyway
The main theme of Euro 2000, if there was one, changed from round to round. Early on we were talking about the northern European countries going home. The straight lines they played in, how static they were when they received the ball. Meanwhile, the sophisticated southerners controlled the ball in an instant and could play in any position.