Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
An internatioanlly renowned midfielder who failed to live up to the hype but became a cult hero anyway. Damian Hall tells a heart-warming tale
Reputations, it is said, take ages to build but can be destroyed in an instant. This adage, though probably quite apt generally, is not at all true of John Jensen. He earned a reputation very quickly and lost it in a painfully slow, grinding kind of manner.
The Asian Cup in Qatar highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of football in the region. John Duerden was there
You had to feel a bit sorry for Qatar. Despite having over a decade to prepare for the 2022 World Cup after the events of December 2 in Zürich, the tiny nation in fact had just five weeks before it was put on the spot. On January 7, the 2011 Asian Cup kicked off in Doha giving an international media, one that needed no second invitation to demonstrate the extent of FIFA’s madness, the chance to scrutinise Qatar’s hosting capabilities/football culture/traffic and pretty much everything else.
Football is popular in France’s former colonies but geography and politics provide a number of challenges. Steve Menary explainsFrench Guiana is probably best known as home to the European Space Centre, or the infamous island prison that once housed Henri Charrière – better known as Papillon – but not football. That is hardly surprising, as the country’s footballers face hindrances that few others could imagine.
While the rest of Europe remained quiet, underachieving Premier League clubs Chelsea and Liverpool splashed out during the transfer window
His was a signing that served to demonstrate Liverpool FC’s standing in English football, a player whose contributions to a game would be one of the main topics of any post-match discussion. But, after a torrid few months at Anfield, Paul Konchesky has been shipped out on loan to Nottingham Forest. Meanwhile, the one player Liverpool supporters didn’t want to see leave, Fernando Torres, has departed for Chelsea for £50 million.
Simon Tyers looks at how football coverage on Sky Sports has changed since it was first introduced in 1991
Without fully raking over the Gray-Keys saga, two further points. One is to note the irony in Sky considering Andy Gray’s last straw to be remarks of a sexual nature towards Charlotte Jackson, who promoted the new season on Sky Sports in August by doing a shoot for Loaded magazine. The other is to consider that they were keen to get rid of Gray because pundits are ultimately replaceable – think of Ron Atkinson and remember that Sky did it themselves five years ago with Jeff Stelling’s primary sparring partner Rodney Marsh – while main presenters aren’t.