In a game between fellow Championship strugglers, Simon Hart watches the away side continue their poor travelling form, while a debut for the home manager and a hard-fought win sees optimism bloom in Yorkshire
“Normally you’d get 18 to 19,000 here for a Peterborough game but we’re expecting 24 today – a couple of wins on the bounce, a new manager, there’s a feelgood effect.”
A home game against the reigning champions is often a foregone conclusion. On this occasion things went very differently as Neil Hurden saw the hosts comfortably dominate their out of form visitors
It’s the Saturday before Christmas, it’s uncharitably cold and my mind is disorientated by mixed signals. Only three days before, Fulham performed heroics in the St Jakob stadium in Basel, hanging on to win 3-2 and to secure a last 32 draw against UEFA Cup holders Shakhtar Donetsk in the Europa League, the financially poor but spiritually enriched man’s Champions League.
Scotland's 2010 World Cup qualifying campaign was a painful experience both on and off the pitch. But Neil Forsyth refuses to be downhearted
Onwards Scotland march. Another major tournament without involvement, despite being in arguably the easiest qualifying group, with senior players picking up a sine die ban for an all-night bender, a manager still trying to convince the public of his suitability and an SFA leadership who increasingly resemble the committee of a provincial bowling club.
Nobody expected Walsall to scale the heights that they reached in 1998-99. Tom Lines remembers an amazing season
The winner of the 1999 LMA Manager of the Year award wasn’t a huge surprise. Alex Ferguson (the knighthood would follow a few months later) had just led Manchester United to an unprecedented treble, after all. What was remarkable was that Fergie was given a run for his money in the voting by an unassuming 51-year-old enjoying his first season as a manager. That Ray Graydon’s Walsall side had just finished runners-up in Division Two gave his status as the country’s second-best manager a certain symmetry. But given Fergie’s achievements, the fact that Graydon received any votes at all says much about the incredible job that he and his players did that season.
Tom Davis looks back at the League One season and reflects on how the division is becoming more and more seperated with each passing year
Ostensibly, there’s almost a case to be made that League One is taking on as lopsided and unequal appearance as the Premier League: increasingly a repository for badly run big clubs and smaller members who see a place in the top half as the peak of their ambitions. No other division boasts such a proportional gap between the crowds of its best and worst supported clubs, or such contrasting historical narratives. A decade previously, Hereford, Cheltenham, Leeds and Leicester were four divisions apart – this term they competed as equals.