The Archive

Cameron Carter examines the dramatic effects of a draw away to Blackburn and more reshuffling on the Match of the Day sofa

It is one thing for the tabloids to whip up a bit of national tension – the diagrams of tarsals and metatarsals were being searched out again as soon as Wayne Rooney hit the ground against Bayern Munich – but when the BBC start creating drama from the raw material of Nothing Much it edges beyond a joke. When Chelsea drew at Blackburn on March 21, journalists and football pundits took this as a cue for a Chelsea-disintegrate-under-pressure story. On Easter Saturday’s Match of the Day, as Chelsea scored their second against Man Utd, Jonathan Pearce piped: “It looked like their title hopes had disappeared two weeks ago at Blackburn… but now!…”

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Mark Segal on the rise of Twitter as the place for fans to keep up with events at their club

In the early part of the last decade when I was running the football service on Teletext we struck a deal with a national sports agency to provide us with news tip-offs from the training grounds of Premier League clubs. We weren’t looking for the big stories which would be splashed across the next morning’s papers, more nuggets of information which we knew fans would be interested in receiving immediately such as injury updates, weekend team news and reaction to transfer speculation

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Ian Plenderleith examines a philosophical approach to the game which could make watching international football more bearable for England fans

As we approach the World Cup and lose all sense of proportion about football’s importance, it’s worth asking just why we follow the game at all. A column by Andrew Guest at pitchinvasion.net asked a pertinent hypothetical question: If England win the World Cup, will their fans be any happier one year from now than if they had been knocked out in the second round by a goal that Carlos Tevez surreptitiously bundled in with his fist?

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David Stubbs runs the rule over this summer's musical offerings and finds a distinct lack of national pride swelling in his chest. Quite the opposite

 Time was when it was possible for the relevant authorities to frogmarch the England team en masse to the studio to record the official England song, in which they would assure us, back home, that this time they were going to get it right, their stilted choral tones betraying an appropriate lack of conviction that they wouldn’t come up short around the quarter-final mark.

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Taylor Parkes watches a new film about Italia 90, a tournament that has assumed huge nostalgic significance for the English game

First published in 1991, Pete Davies’s All Played Out is still an astonishing read. An account of the author’s travels through Italy in a blazing World Cup summer, intercut with fly-on-the-wall stuff from an England camp to which he was granted an insane level of access (the subsequent tightening up is due in part to Davies himself, whose honesty cast the game’s top brass in a less than flattering light).

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