Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Paul Whitehouse tells WSC about his love for Spurs, the basis of Ron Manager and the first ever pop record he brought
Who did you want to be when you were a kid in the playground?
George Best, Alan Ball. I did play all the time when I was a kid, I wanted to be a footballer more than anything else. I liked the ad hoc games best, playing on concrete.
Ian Plenderleith remembers the night when it felt like Lincoln could beat anyone
It wasn’t the size of the Sheffield United team that came to Sincil Bank that had the home support worried. It was the number of away fans. You could see them crossing the bridge from the coach park in the gap between the old wooden South Park and St Andrews stands. It was a never-ending stream and, for the only time in all the matches I ever saw at Lincoln, they took over the entire swath of open-top terrace that stretched alongside the ground, leaving the home fans to cram in behind the goal at the Railway End.
The Euro 2000 play-off draw has pitted the two oldest foes in Football against each other, but does anyone outside of Britain care?
“I would not be Kevin Keegan if I did not get excited about this,” said the England manager in a blinding flash of self-awareness on hearing the Euro 2000 play-off draw. Unfortunately, he is Kevin Keegan, and his face was splashed all over the papers after England and Scotland came out of the hat together (or what passes for a hat at UEFA headquarters these days).
Dear WSC
You published a letter from me in WSC 70 (December 1992), suggesting that Newcastle City Council may one day be cajoled into erecting an Arthur Horsfield memorial statue in Eldon Square. For over six years, WSC then callously ignored the career of one who, even in the face of fierce recent competition, must still rank as one of Newcastle United’s least successful signings (seven games in six months before being shipped off back to the lower leagues from whence he came). Imagine my surprise, then, upon reading an article in WSC 150 in which Harry Pearson suggested that the music which Middlesbrough used to run out to was “far too exotic to announce the arrival of Arthur Horsfield”. Having read Mr Pearson’s latest contribution in WSC 153, where he again cites Arthur in his musings on loyalty at Middlesbrough, I am convinced he shares my obsession with this shadowy character from my footballing childhood. Nevertheless, I must object at the vilification of Arthur as a footballing “serial philanderer” given that, apart from his brief stay at Newcastle, history shows that he played between 78 and 139 games for each of the other clubs which he represented (presumably with greater distinction), and indeed held the record of consecutive appearances for Charlton Athletic. Perhaps Mr Pearson would care to provide moral support to my latest plan to lobby Derwentside Council for a statue based on Arthur’s famed pose with arms outstretched, screaming for the ball to be centred? This could be situated inland, midway between Newcastle and Middlesbrough, high up on the rolling moors which dominate those great industrial conurbations. The Arthur of the North?
John Wright, Limours, France
UEFA seem intent on changing the transfer system. Guy Osborn & Steve Greenfield explain how this could affect England and beyond
It seems barely a week goes past these days without a new proposal to regulate the international movement of players. The most recent have involved reintroducing restrictions on foreigners, standardising transfer windows across Europe and effectively abolishing the transfer system. Yet again, it appears that poor old Jean-Marc Bosman is the root cause of most of these ideas.