Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Manchester City need all the help they can get. In recent matches the referees have not come to their aid. Steve Parish muses on the inconsistencies of referees – and of the TV watchdogs
Alan Wilkie’s penalty award in the Manchester FA Cup derby, and Martin Bodenham’s failure to spot Asprilla’s elbow at work when Newcastle met City at Maine Road the week after, were both well examined by Match of the Day.
Neil McCarthy explains why French football fans may be tempted to stay at home on matchdays from the start of next season
As from September, every single French First Division match will be shown live on television. A new interactive satellite channel will allow viewers to choose from one of nine matches played simultaneously – there is even the possibility of watching them one after the other, or all at once.
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.