Dear WSC
So Adam Powley thinks Chelsea have “obscene ticket prices” (WSC 151). He’s right, obviously, but having paid £29 to watch Tottenham play Chelsea from a seat situated behind the police control room at White Hart Lane last season, I hardly think Spurs fans are in a position to take the moral high ground. As for Chelsea’s “contrived glamour image”, I can only wonder at how he sees the image of his own club. “Real” glamour perhaps?
Colin Maitland, Ascot
The Archive
Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Brian Clough amongst others used to call them cheats. Nick Varley remembers them for a bit more than that
Let’s play a quick game of word association. Liverpool? Bill Shankly and the boot room. Keegan and Toshack. Barnes and Beardsley. Dominance in the late 1970s and 1980s. Manchester United? Sir Matt Busby’s Babes and Sir Alex Ferguson’s Fledglings. Charlton and Best. Beckham and Giggs. Utter dominance in the late 1990s. And Leeds? The cynical and mean Don Revie. Jack “Little Black Book” Charlton and Norman “Bites Yer Legs” Hunter. And David Batty, the modern reincarnation of the aggression of Billy Bremner. Oh, and the odd trophy in the late 1960s and early 1970s too.
Tony Morris gives us a brief history of Tranmere Rovers
1885 Belmont FC change their name to Tranmere Rovers. Fielding players from a Methodist chapel, the righteous Rovers win their first home game 10-0 against Liverpool North End.
Will the home triumph at the 1999 women's World Cup be a real breakthrough for football in the USA, or just a one-off? Ethan Zindler weighs up the evidence
With no goals scored, the women’s World Cup final at the Pasadena Rose Bowl had delivered as ignominious a conclusion as the men’s final at the same venue in 1994. Yet none of the ecstatic 90,000 red, white, and blue supporters seemed troubled by the injustices of penalties. The tournament was over. But America’s love affair with its soccer divas was just getting started.
Cris Freddi's series on the poorest moments in football history continues with a look at the players who missed when it looked easier to score
Right, same formula as the rest of this series. Quick mention of famous televised misses, to make it look as if I’ve seen them all, then on to missed chances that mattered, because that’s all I know about.