Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Neil Andrews tracks the development of the bench and can't help but feel shortchanged by its most recent incarnation
Change is meant to be a good thing but it can go hideously wrong. Take the humble substitutes' bench. Once the bastion of the 12th man and his manager, it is now an overcrowded, characterless affair packed full of reserves in club tracksuits who look like they're serving double detention after being caught smoking behind the bike sheds.
South America’s beaten semi-finalists were neither of the teams you might have expected. Sam Kelly reports
At around 10.30pm on Monday July 12, the Uruguayan World Cup squad touched down at Carrasco International Airport just outside Montevideo to a country which, when it bade them farewell, could scarcely have imagined the circumstances in which they’d return. World Cup semi-finalists? Uruguay? It’s not meant to happen in the 21st century, surely?
Just four months after facing West Germany in the World Cup final, a fiery defender arrived in Wiltshire. Graham Davidson remembers
Before the Premier League era, what few foreigners there were in England often arrived after a World Cup. Nico Claesen came to Spurs in 1986, while Ricky Villa and Ossie Ardiles more famously arrived on the back of Argentina’s 1978 triumph. Italia 90 was the last tournament before overseas players became commonplace in the English game, and saw the aforementioned Ardiles, by then managing Swindon Town of the old Division Two, pull off a notable transfer coup in the shape of countryman Néstor Lorenzo.
Despite a respectable performance in South Africa some think the US could have achieved more. Ian Plenderleith explains why
When US coach Bob Bradley substituted Ricardo Clark 30 minutes into the team’s final World Cup game against Ghana, he whispered intensively into the player’s ear for several seconds before packing him off to the bench. As Clark’s sole contributions in his half hour had been to lose possession in the lead up to Ghana’s opening goal, and to receive a yellow card for an amateurish late tackle, there was much lively speculation about the words Bradley had directed towards the central midfielder.
Sasha Goryunov looks at how attempts to improve youth development don't always have the desired effect
What attracted Zenit St Petersburg, runaway leaders of the Russian league, to Aleksandr Bukharov? It wasn’t his knee – which has a history of cruciate damage. It may have been his 16 goals in 23 games in 2009 for reigning champions Rubin. But those goals would have been insufficient without something else – Bukharov’s Russian passport.