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The Archive

Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.

 

Brentford, Palace, Oldham

Ron Noades continued influence over Crystal Palace and stadium trouble at Oldham Athletic and Swansea City

There are league rules that prevent one person owning two clubs (although as the Peter Johnson case shows, they do not mean much) but there is nothing to stop someone in control of one club from owning another club’s ground. This is the case at Crystal Palace, where the extraordinary terms of their lease with former owner Ron Noades have left him with a significant presence.

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Dan McCauley

Dan McCauley is not the most popular man in Devon, as David Pay explains

Distinguishing features Slobodan Milosevic lookalike from north Devon. Has also been chairman of Tiverton Town and on the board of Exeter City. According to the Times list of wealthy people, he has a fortune larger than the chairmen of Arsenal, Aston Villa and Chelsea. He is Fat Dan, aka the Fat Controller.

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October 1999

Friday 1 Dennis Wise, Frank Lampard, Steve Guppy and Trevor Sinclair are the new names in Little Kev's squad to play Belgium. Paul Ince is recalled in place of David Batty, making sure the squad contains no less than the mandatory three players who have been sent off for England in the past 18 months. Newcastle sign Kevin Gallacher from Blackburn for £700,000. A consortium of Icelandic businessmen has made a bid of £6 million to buy Stoke City, hoping to install the national team coach Gudjon Thordarsson as manager in place of the luckless Gary Megson.

Saturday 2 Strugglers' Saturday sees Steve Staunton scandalously sent off in Villa's dismal 0-0 with Liverpool, a game mystifyingly described as "just balloons on sticks" by John Gregory. Bottom club Sheff Wed go goal-crazy against Wimbledon, winning 5-1 in front of a suitably Wimbledon-sized crowd, 18,077. Sunderland are second after pasting Bradford 4-0 at Valley Parade. Everton are reportedly the target of a £50 million bid from Chris Evans and Terry Venables – possibly both in the top two on any fans' list of undesirable owners. India's Baichung Bhutia makes his debut as a sub for Bury, and gets booked after two minutes. "We will probably get more fans than if we'd signed Ronaldo," Bury manager Neil Warnock had predicted. They get 3,603.

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Port for all

Their was shock when Portugal won the rights to stage Euro 2004, but as Phil Town explains, it won't be an easy ride

Portuguese emotions have been on a veritable roller-coaster ride of late. The plight of its ex-colony East Timor cut the national psyche deep, then the is­land’s resistance leaders visited and the streets of Lis­bon were paved with petals. Spirits plunged again with three days of mourning for the singer and nat­ional institution Amelia Rodrigues, but straight away foot­ball dragged the nation back up by its bootlaces.

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From Dell to debt

Day ten of the WSC advent calendar and, having had Jesus on the eighth, it’s only fair we focus on his mother Mary today. In 1999 Southampton were desperate to relocate from The Dell into a new, bigger stadium. Tim Springett discussed the problems surrounding the proposed move in issue 154, and considered the option of moving to a gasworks called St Mary’s

The saga of Southampton’s efforts to move to a new ground has now moved into injury time with the ann­oun­cement that building work on a new 32,000 seater stadium to replace The Dell is set to begin in the spring. However, as every Saints fan knows only too well, a lot of things can go wrong in injury time.

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