The Archive

After 17 years of separation, James Baxter assesses future plans for a possible footballing reunification in central Europe

Nostalgia for Czechoslovakia, the federation that broke up in 1993’s “Velvet Divorce”, is fashionable in the modern-day Czech and Slovak Republics. Politically, the divorce, though amicable, is absolute. Sport might be another matter, however. There has been frequent talk over the years about merging the countries’ ice hockey leagues. Now there is a similar idea for football. Representatives of the Czech and Slovak football associations recently met to discuss a possible return to a joint top division.

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Berlin has just lost its only top-flight club, but reaction to Hertha's relegation has been fairly muted. Paul Joyce explains

In March 2009, Hertha BSC were top of the Bundesliga and went on to finish fourth. The Berlin club were relegated a year later, however, having been bottom of the table since September. For the first time since 1997, Germany’s capital will be without top-flight football next season.

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Thirty years ago this month Mossley AFC went to Wembley. Drew Whitworth remembers the club's greatest day and the story of a once-formidable Northern Premier League side on a very personal level

Between Oldham and Stockport, where the huge Greater Manchester conurbation breaks against the rocks and moors of the Pennines, there lies Tameside. This metropolitan borough has no historical centre, being a collection of old mill towns of which few people have ever heard. In football terms it is a backwater, without representation above the Conference North.

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Events at the interval have chnaged greatly since the days of the police dog-handling display. Matthew Gooding highlights the tedious, the surreal and those for a good cause

You expect to see certain things at football matches – grumpy old men, over-excited children, pies containing meat of dubious origin. But in all my years watching football I never expected to see Timmy Mallett taking penalties against a moose, using a pair of giant testicles, while a Sven-Göran Eriksson lookalike watched on. As anyone who was at the recent Blue Square Premier match between Cambridge Utd and Oxford Utd will tell you, it really happened, and it was glorious.

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Simon Tyers finds himself frustrated and bored by the level of punditry offered during live football matches

There’s an argument that we don’t need pundits on live football any more. Ultimately it’s all their own fault. Alan Hansen and Andy Gray laid the groundwork with their arrows and circles on replays over a decade ago. Since then the tactics industry has boomed in newspaper columns and books to the extent that there’s no longer any reason to have players’ attributes pointed out to us. Allied to that, at some point in the 1990s the people called upon to act as pundits changed from managers, coaches and wily old captaincy material to any old ageing pro who’s available.

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