The Archive

Part -time TV soap star look alike, part-time adventure explorer – Craig Gurney looks at Swindon Town's chariman

Distinguishing Features He used to look a bit like Coronation Street’s Les Battersby in a sharp suit. But not even Tricky Rikki can cheat the ageing process and he is now starting to look like the middle-aged businessman he surely is; more bloke down the golf club than bloke down the pub. The Battersby motif still has some mileage though. Les, you may recall, has made a fool of himself over professional blonde scouser, Margi Clarke. Hunt has a love of all things scouse; himself for a start. He stood by another blond (if receding) scouser, Steve McMahon, much longer than he should have. Even now, Hunt will not hear a bad word spoken against the manager who brought us two years of disastrous mid-season slumps. 

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A tale of football, betrayal and a kangaroo. Sam Beckwith reports on the peculiar case of Bohemians Prague

British fans looking for a second home in Prague could do much worse than visit Bohemians’ D’olnicka stadium. The stadium – Bohemians’ home since 1932 – fits your image of a classic football ground – the crowd is squeezed right up against the pitch, creating a good atmosphere even if the attendance doesn’t often top 4,000. There’s a large grandstand to one side, and vociferous support from the terrace behind the goal. But the chance to see a game there could already be gone, as Bohemians fans face some unattractive, but familiar, aspects of the modern game – cold-blooded redevelopers, and an enforced move from their home.

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Call us negative if you must (no, go on), but we feel obliged to record the worst football feats of the century before it’s over. Cris Freddi opens the series with an assessment of its most heinous fouls

No shortage of material in this category. We've all got our nominations and it becomes a question of which to leave out. One that gets in without much argument was perpetrated in Manchester United’s Champions League match against Feyenoord in 1997, when Paul Bosvelt crashed his studs into Denis Irwin’s calf, a really dangerous foul. Sándor Puhl, who didn’t even show a yellow card, was dropped from the rest of the competition as well as France 98, missing the chance of becoming the first referee to take charge of two World Cup Finals.

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John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson trace the toots of England's international impotence and the shambles at the FA

December’s crisis within the FA, when chairman Keith Wiseman and chief executive Graham Kelly faced a vote of no confidence from the FA Council, can only be properly understood in relation to English football’s recent lack of standing in Europe and in FIFA politics. In the run-up to the 1998 World Cup and critical UEFA and FIFA congresses, Kelly was asked whether the British associations lacked inf­luence in UEFA.

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Phil Tanner grinds his teeth over the Welsh FA's hypocrisy and says they may have jeopardised the national team's status

Declaring interests has not been a central theme of Lancaster Gate-gate (or Westgate-gate as it might be termed on the other side of the Severn Bridge), but what the hell. I support a Welsh non-League club which in 1995 had to go to court to establish its right under restraint of trade law not to be forced into the League of Wales. The pillar of the Welsh FA’s defence was that national associations outside the UK were stepping up pressure over the so-called home nations’ independent status and that even minor anomalies such as three clubs, each with a few hundred supporters, playing on both sides of the border might ultimately threaten the existence of the Welsh national side. (For some reason the fact that three much larger clubs did likewise was discounted, but we’ll skip that.)

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