Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
This part of east Africa has a deep love of football, both in domestic and international terms. Andy Ryan reports
It’s a title decider. Red Sea FC, the traditional giants of the Eritrean game, will be champions if they beat struggling Tesfa. A whisper in my right ear says: “Watch Red Sea’s number eight, he has much talent.” Less than 20 seconds later, number eight dispossesses a defender, rounds the keeper and gives Red Sea the lead. The baseball cap-wearing Nostradamus smiles.
Joel Richards reports on the continuing difficulties in controlling Argentinian groups, both inside and outside the country
“I paid up,” shrugged Oscar Ruggeri. “I paid up loads of times,” admitted the World Cup winner on national television. As other guests on set were dismayed at his honesty, Ruggeri calmly replied. “What do you want me to do, lie? I had to pay up, but I didn’t give any money in 1986. I had just moved from Boca to River and they burnt my house down. What else could they do to me?”
Once upon a time English football fans generally enjoyed seeing other clubs from their league be successful in Europe. The dominance of the Big Four has changed that in recent years
“England are out of Europe,” wailed Peter Drury when Manchester United were eliminated from the Champions League on away goals to Bayern Munich, a day after Arsenal had be thrashed by Barcelona. Like many others, Drury was overlooking the Europa League where Fulham and Champions League flops Liverpool have reached the semi finals. Nonetheless, his dismay will have accurately summed up the outlook of all those who work at ITV Sport for whom those successive nights at the Nou Camp and Old Trafford must have felt like Armageddon.
No other World Cup hosts have been knocked out in such extreme circumstances as Switzerland in 1954. Paul Joyce looks back at the tournament's highest-scoring match
The 1954 World Cup is mainly remembered for West Germany’s 3-2 victory over favourites Hungary in the final. But the quarter-final between Switzerland and Austria, the so-called Hitzeschlacht von Lausanne (Heat Battle of Lausanne), is if anything even more noteworthy. Not only was it played in intolerable weather conditions but it remains the highest-scoring game in World Cup finals history.
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.