Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Tom Davies describes the financial predicaments of Dundee, Mansfield Town and Kidderminster HarriersA glimmer of light is flickering at the end of a dark tunnel at Dundee, whose supporters’ trust, Dee4Life, has co-ordinated a Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA) to pull the Scottish First Division club out of administration – though a 25-point penalty still threatens their footballing status.
Away from the staged celebrations, Sasha Goryunov assesses the social and political consequences for the 2018 World Cup hosts As Russian football’s domestic season trundled towards its conclusion at the end of November, a collective feeling of ennui enveloped commentators and supporters across the country. St Petersburg, where Zenit fans celebrated the club’s second post-Soviet title, was perhaps the only exception. In Europe, as expected, Russia’s clubs gravitated towards the knockout stages of the Europa League. However, the decision taken in Zürich on December 2 gave Russia and its football a new sense of purpose. Or so it seems.
Alan Tomlinson looks at the avoidable mistakes, inherent problems and myriad challenges faced by the FA and its incoming chairman“The highest parliament in English football… the mother of football parliaments,” football writer and former Cambridge Blue Geoffrey Green called the FA in 1959. And despite the power on the field of South American national sides and the legendary Real Madrid team, Green could also laud the FA as “an authority in every land”.
Qatar’s World Cup win was a surprise to many, but Steve Wilson argues that maybe it shouldn’t have come as such a shockWhen pictures of public gatherings in Doha and London were beamed across rolling news channels on the evening of December 2, it wasn’t just the palm trees in the background, or lack of them, that helped the viewer with their geography.
For five surreal seasons in the 1970s, the FA Cup had an extra round. Owen Amos looks back at the games no one remembersOf all the FA’s daft ideas – and there have been a few – the FA Cup third-place play-off must be among the worst. If, as the saying goes, no one remembers the runners-up, then who cares who came third? The answer, as it turned out, was no one at all. These were, and are, the forgotten FA Cup ties. The first play-off was in 1970, between that season’s beaten semi-finalists, Manchester United and Watford. The game was played on a Friday night at Highbury, the day before the Cup final. United won 2-0; 15,105 people watched. And were they impressed?