Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Captain Magpie tells us about Notts County well tanned chairman and the stand he modestly named after himself
Distinguishing features Always well tanned, accompanied by (considerably younger) blonde wife. Looks for all the world like a veteran Hollywood actor – Paul Newman, maybe, or Clint Eastwood – when dealing with bolshie agents or managers.
Updates from clubs in trouble including Chester City and Oxford United
Among the plausible candidates for this season’s spectacular calamity club are Chester City, where Kevin Ratcliffe’s resignation as manager after the first three games of the season has severely dented any optimism generated when Terry Smith, the former coach of the Great Britain gridiron team, took control of the club in July. Understandably, given the mess left by the previous administration, City fans have so far been prepared to give Smith the benefit of the doubt, despite his “colourful” past on the UK ice hockey and gridiron scene.
A brief guide to football in New York, told by Jack Bell
1626 Dutchman Peter Minuit plunks down $24 in trinkets and baubles and backs his group of settlers against a disorganised band of local Reckagawawanc Indians for the island of Manna-Hatta. It is a precursor to Holland’s Total Football, known locally as Total Rip-off.
Twenty years after the start of the Alliance Premier League, or Conference, Simon Bell asks if it was all a good idea
Good idea at the time: in a certain light it still does. When the “cream” of the English non-League game were brought together 20 years ago as the Alliance Premier League, the agenda was clear enough and the will firm. The annual farce of election and re-election had to end, giving way to meritocratic promotion from a single, national, non-League division comprising the best and best-run clubs outside the full-time game. At the same time the lower rungs of the non-League game set about a grand overhaul to form a “pyramid” with the Alliance (subsequently the Gola League and then the Conference) at its pinnacle. It was the way forward.
Mike Ticher talks to Graham Kelly about the formation of the Premier League, England's World Cup bid and the possibility of a future breakaway
When the Premier League began, you maintained it would benefit football as a whole. How successful has it been?
I think in two respects it’s been very successful. Firstly, commercially. The Premier League wasn’t set up in exactly the way that I envisaged at the start. We didn’t set up the Premier League within the structure of the FA, it was set up as an autonomous company, with its own board of directors and, not unnaturally, it was jealous of its own commercial properties. So to that extent the pattern isn’t as we envisaged. But nonetheless, helped by other factors, such as the Taylor Report and the emergence of satellite television, commercially the FA Premier League, standing alone, has been spectacularly successful. The second respect is the impetus it gave to the development of players. We argued for a number of years about getting the best young players more time with the best coaches, without a great deal of success. The Football League tended to operate at the pace of the slowest club rather than the fastest. Setting up the Premier League has led indirectly to the formation of the academies, and in time, hopefully, we will see more good English players coming through.