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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.

 

Hollow victories

While the battle for an Olympic legacy was a fierce one, there don’t seem to have been any real winners. Ian King explains

The decision to grant the post-2012 use of the Olympic Stadium in Stratford to West Ham United gave us, presumably unintentionally, the opportunity to pause for a moment and consider the priorities of English sport at the start of the new century. Over the last few weeks of the bidding process, we saw an unseemly attempt at a land grab between two large sporting institutions, both of whom seemed to cherish one thing above all else, a site in east London with outstanding transport links that was available on the cheap. Money, as ever, trumped all other concerns.

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Oxford United 2 Rotherham United 1

An important game at the top of League Two, watched by Piers Pennington, sees the homeless side from South Yorkshire lose a fifth consecutive away game, while forward-thinking hosts keep their play-off hopes alive

A few days before the game a familiar name which I couldn’t quite place for the moment popped up in my email inbox; an old friend who hadn’t been in touch for a while I assumed. Ah yes, old Harry Worley, what’s he up to these days I wondered for a second or two before the penny dropped.

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Culture wars

Taylor Parkes despairs at how laddism became the major representation of football fans in the media

Through the wonders of modern technology, I’ve been watching 15-year-old episodes of David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s Fantasy Football League (why I’ve been doing this, when hairshirts are so cheap, is a matter I’ve placed in the hands of my therapist). These days, as you might expect, this once-hip horror looks dreadfully dated and often painfully unfunny, a very obvious ancestor of Lovejoy and 
Corden’s boorish bollocks.

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The publishing boom

Producing a fanzine in 1986 was engaging in solidarity with a subculture. But, as Tom Davies argues, while the landscape has changed the issues remain the same

Hey, has anyone noticed that some footballers have funny haircuts? Aren’t there are a lot of ugly players in Liverpool’s team? And have you tasted the pies in some away ends? Anyone heard anyone behind them at the match say something particularly stupid or funny lately?

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Having a say

Adam Brown looks at how the political interaction of fan culture has developed since the disenfranchisement of the mid-1980s

The year 1985 was a nadir for English football in a decade of great change for football supporters in Britain. And May was the pit of the trough. Supporters were caged in decrepit stadiums and 56 of them died in a fire at Bradford City’s ground on May 11. Violence was rife at home and abroad, policing was brutal and on the same day a 14-year-old was killed during fighting between Leeds and Birmingham fans and police at St Andrew’s. Just over two weeks later, these two factors came together killing 39 and injuring 600 at Heysel.

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