Wednesday 1 Holders Spurs slink out of the Worthington Cup at Fulham, their 3-1 defeat described by George Graham as "by far our worst performance since I became manager". A crowd of 17,000 sees Aston Villa trounce Southampton 4-0. "The crowds have been crap because we've played crap until tonight," says the forthright John Gregory. In the Scottish equivalent Rangers' mini-crisis continues with an extra-time defeat at Aberdeen (yes, Aberdeen). Huddersfield threaten legal action against the Football League for referee Jeff Winter's failure to award a penalty during their Worthington match against Wimbledon. That'll work. Darlington are the lucky losers drawn to play at Villa in the third round of the FA Cup. "I have a direct line to the big man upstairs," says their safe-cracking chairman. The government rejects plans for the new Wembley, on the grounds that it would not be able to stage major athletics tournaments as well as football matches.
The Archive
Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Two top-ten teams in their group and trips to war-torn countries and earthquake-affected Turkey made the Republic of Ireland's qualifying campaign tricky, but Piers Edwards tells us how they came so close to success
“For us it is a football match, for them it is a matter of life and death.” Ireland’s manager Mick McCarthy was actually talking about the earthquake in Turkey, but he may as well have been discussing the football. For the Irish, it was another unbelievable episode in a campaign full of them. For Turkey, the earthquake meant the nation desperately craved the opportunity for celebration that the play-off promised.
Having been once billed as the 'Dream Team', Davy Millar explains how Lawrie McMenemy and his backroom team's reign with Northern Ireland turned into a nightmare
And so another one bites the dust. Lawrie McMenemy is no longer the boss of Northern Ireland and his back-up team have gone with him. Joe Jordan, Pat Jennings and Under-21 manager Chris Nicholl are all looking for new jobs.
With Bobby Gould having resigned, Nigel Harris tells us why the Welsh nation is optimistic about the future with Mark Hughes
While England and Scotland endured the media spew that was the “Battle of Britain” and the Republic battled in vain with Turkey, Welsh football’s television delight was Wrexham v Conwy in a BBC sponsored trophy (Wrexham won 1-0, in case you wondered).
Cris Freddi takes us through the seasons he'd rather forget
We’re talking mainly postwar here, if only because there were fewer competitions before it. England had a bad season in 1928-29, beaten by a last-minute goal direct from a corner at Hampden and 4-3 in Madrid, their first defeat by a foreign country – and 1901-02 was a bad one for everybody, especially the 25 who died in the first Ibrox disaster. But examples came thicker and faster after 1945.