The Archive

James Eastham takes up the story of a club with big backing but a low profile, currently making a big splash in Ligue 2

Data emerged a couple of years ago revealing that the French eat just under a billion tonnes of yoghurt a year. If some of those consumers are buying Danone, the nation is unwittingly contributing to the success of one of France’s newest football clubs. Evian Thonon Gaillard made headlines in August when they won their opening three league games to briefly head the Ligue 2 table. Their start was all the more impressive because it came just a few short months after the club had taken its place in the second tier by winning last season’s National (third division) title.

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There's a very large reputation to live up to in Buenos Aires. Sam Kelly reports on the candidates to follow a national hero

How do you find a replacement for God? It’s a question Argentines have been pondering since July 27, when it was confirmed by the Argentine Football Association (AFA) that Diego Maradona wouldn’t be offered a new contract as national team manager to replace the one that had expired four weeks earlier. The main candidates to step into the limelight were former Sheffield Utd and Leeds midfielder Alejandro Sabella, Diego Simeone and youth team coach Sergio Batista.

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Bratislavia’s oldest club don’t seem to be missing their brief period of domestic success and European glory. James Baxter explains

Anyone who has registered MSK Žilina‘s progress to the group stages of this season’s Champions League may also recall that the last team from Slovakia to get this far was Artmedia Bratislava, in 2005-06. But, while Žilina fans have been in bitter dispute with their club over ticket prices for home games in the competition, FC Petržalka 1898, as Artmedia are now known, are experiencing life outside Slovakia’s top division and, so far, seem to be enjoying it.

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We asked you for your views on a variety of issues in our post-World Cup issue. Roger Titford analyses the responses

On Sky TV, Andy Gray has several times passed his firm verdict on the 2010 World Cup – “disappointing”. Well, it wasn’t on Sky, of course. The WSC readership’s view, asked for in three words or fewer in our post-tournament survey, was slightly more nuanced, as you would hope, “strangely unfulfilling”, “dramatic but mediocre”, “curate’s egg – almost”. There was a general feeling of being slightly underwhelmed. “Meh” wrote several but our favourites were “team-work trumps celebrity” and “tippy-tappy tedium”.

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Only minutes from the London 2012 site lies a very different sort of sporting venue. Ian Aitch visits the Old Spotted Dog

As any true football fan knows, even the sight of five ten-year-old kids playing three-and-in is enough to make you watch back over your shoulder as you walk across the park. So, as you can imagine, moving so close to a real football ground that an errant shot of Geoff Thomas proportions could end up in your back garden is the kind of thing that makes you divert the walk to the corner shop, just so you can admire the floodlights peeking up from behind the fence.

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