Dear WSC
I think it was William Shakespeare who once said “Don’t believe everything you read in newspapers. Or fanzines.” At any rate, unless someone corrects a few of the fallacies in Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger’s article about German football (WSC No 110), WSC readers will be suffering from some pretty serious misconceptions. How on earth can Ulrich claim “Matthäus, Klinsmann, Völler – they all come from the Ruhr”? Oh yeah, and Kenny Dalglish is a Cockney, I suppose? According to my copy of the 1996 edition of ‘The Sad Person’s Guide to the Date and Place of Birth of Every Famous German Footballer’, Rudi Völler was born in Hanau near Frankfurt and began his career with local team Offenbach Kickers. Lothar Matthäus comes from Herzogenaurach, a little place near Nuremberg whose other claim to fame is that it is the home of the Adidas empire. Jürgen Klinsmann is proud to be a Swabian and played for both major Stuttgart clubs before experiencing such huge success with Inter Cardiff and Scarborough. His career was resurrected by David Dein of Arsenal, but he later returned to Germany to play for Borussia 1898 Dudeldorf. Surely everyone ought to check his facts carefully before submitting anything to you for publication?
Derek Megginson, Scarborough
(birthplace of Bobby Charlton, Savo Milosevic and Pelé)
The Archive
Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
As part of WSC's tenth anniversary, Richard Newson rummaged through the connections between football and music
As a Sounds writer in the ’80s I met lots of rock artists. Many of them, like me, had been born in the early or mid 1960s. Very often, after a long hard interview, we’d end up talking football. Again and again these musicians told me how, for them, the game became less important when punk arrived in 1976-77 and made pop exciting again.
Marcelle van Hoof's international top ten of awful football songs include examples of the crooning footballer, the hideous cover version by a team, the good cause song and the (unintentionally) funny interview
1. JOHAN CRUYFF: Oei Oei Oei (Dat Was Me Weer Een Loei) (1969, Polydor) When recording this single, Cruyff’s singing voice turned out to be even more out of tune than the studio personnel had expected. They didn’t know what to do. A friend who accompanied Cruyff to the studio suggested they give him a drink. Cruyff, who never drinks, accepted. After a while, when the atmosphere was more ‘relaxed’, they put Cruyff in front of the microphone again and his tipsy singing proved good enough to use. However, a couple of days later he was invited to sing his song (which roughly translates as ‘oh, oh, oh, yet another blow’ and is not about football, but about a friend of Cruyff being beaten up at a boxing match, then during a visit to a pub and then by his wife…) live on national television. Unfortunately he was sober again and only shyly mumbled the words he could remember, while staring at the ground. Cruyff has a reputation for being a know-all. No matter what subject (the weather, politics, cooking), he has a strong opinion about it. This must have been the only time in his life that he was lost for words.
Thursday 1 Sighs of relief at Spurs, Wimbledon and Everton: successful appeals give the first two a shot at Europe again and the latter the services of Duncan Ferguson. Joe Kinnear, aged 49, decides he's too young to be the new Ireland boss.
Saturday 3 Eric Cantona returns to Selhurst Park. Once again his feet do the talking, with two goals in Manchester United's 4-2 win over Wimbledon. Newcastle stay nine points ahead, though, with a 2-0 win at home to Sheffield Wednesday. The two most highly-fancied strike forces in the Premiership meet at Anfield – so neither Spurs nor Liverpool can manage a goal. Derby draw at Grimsby, to make sure that Division One keeps that seasonal congested look. Swindon have a clear lead now in Division Two. Nine-man Gillingham close the gap on themselves in Division Three, contriving a 0-0 draw with Cambridge.
Monday 5 Bryan Robson announces that he doesn't want the England job. Glenn Hoddle's criticism of Chelsea fans is taken as evidence that he might; Mick McCarthy, aged 35, definitely wants the Ireland job, and he's got it. "It's a daunting prospect following Jack," he says, "But I'm not going to attempt to copy his ways." Jack himself says:"I know he always felt we could have got the ball down and played a bit more. We argued about that." Could be bad news for Niall and Tony.
Rob Chapman looks back to a time when admitting to being a keen football fan was just about the most uncool thing you could do
Much has been made of the fact that during the Rolling Stones’ Wembley concert of July 1990, many fans appeared to be paying more attention to the England v Germany World Cup semi- final commentary on the radio than they were to Mick and Keef’s rock and roll posturing.