Search: ' David Lloyd'

With their big-spending years over and Champions League place under threat, Rangers' future looks grim, says Neil Forsyth

Well at least we now know what was behind Rangers’ most recent insistence that they will soon leave the SPL behind, seeking greater riches in England or the ludicrous proposition of an Atlantic League (a strange set-up involving clubs from “second tier” nations such as Portugal and the Netherlands). No sooner had any observers still paying attention wearily worked through statements such as Rangers chief executive Martin Bain’s declaration that Rangers would be out of Scottish football “within ten years”, then the real motivation for this latest attempt to escape to a bigger TV deal became clear.

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Dear WSC
In response to Huw Griffiths’s letter in WSC 263, I would like to apologise to David Lloyd, the extremely popular fans’ liaison officer at Bristol City, for the flippant remarks I made in an article about the club in WSC 262. Sorry, Mr Lloyd. I would also like to apologise to my father, a Bristol City supporter for 60 years and, like Messrs Griffiths and Lloyd, an avid admirer of Paul Cheesley, for implying in the article that he cross-dresses in his potting shed. To put the record straight: my father has never owned a potting shed. Sorry, Father.However, I would like to take issue with Mr Griffiths’s claim that I have given up neither time nor money to support and represent the club in the last 15 years. In 2002, I bought and paid for the previous season’s away shirt and gave it to a friend of mine for his 40th birthday. Until unwrapping the gift, the recipient was like an excited schoolboy and cherishes it to such a degree that he has, to this day, neither worn the garment nor, as far as I know, taken it out of the ­packaging. Further, in 2007, I attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to obliterate a Bristol Rovers graffito on the lavatory wall in a public house in Berlin using nothing more than my house keys and a briefly rediscovered passion for the Boys In Red. If Mr Griffiths were aware of the willingness of Bristol City stayaways in Germany to jeopardise long-term friendships and to commit acts of criminal damage in the name of the club, he wouldn’t have made such an unfounded accusation in a poor attempt to add some much-needed gravitas to the WSC letters page.
Matt Nation, Hamburg

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Dear WSC
The mention of the “ironic greeting” at Albion Rovers’ Cliftonhill Stadium – “Welcome to the San Siro” – reminded me of the time I popped in to see Wee Rovers, the club that supplied the Boro with Bernie Slaven, one freezing December day. We arrived at quarter to three and took our places in the only stand just in front of the PA man, who was greeting individual arrivals by name. “Hello Mr MacPherson, nice to see ye. How’s the family?” Later, as he spotted a group of Dumbarton supporters: “Hello there! You’ll find we’re a very friendly crowd here. If you could just turn to the left and shake hands with the person next to ye.” How very different from the life of our own dear Premier League.
Bob Kerr, Middlesbrough

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The season is not half-done yet relegation is assured, despite the arrival of a new manager. But amid the retail outlets and call centres, there’s no anger – it’s not so much Pride Park as Resigned Park. By David Stubbs

It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve made the trip up north by rail. It matters not that you were actually brought up in the north. No matter, either, that you have resolved not to fall into the usual trap of the condescending London-based writer venturing into the provinces and remarking on the frightfulness of it all, the supreme example of which was a piece written by the Guardian’s Katherine Whitehorn in the 1960s, entitled “You Can’t Take Aubergines For Granted Outside London”. Step off the train at Derby, step outside and the scene that greets you, dominated by a browned-off looking Midlands Hotel, makes you deeply conscious not just that you have stepped outside your home town, but stepped outside your own decade.

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The Remarkable Life and Death of Leigh Richmond Roose, Football's First Play Boy
by Spencer Vignes
Tempus, £9.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 249 November 2007 

Buy this book

While those with even a passing interest in cricket can probably name a dozen Edwardian players without recourse to Wisden, I suspect that even the die-hard football fan finds the era before the First World War a good deal less familiar. Because while cricket regards the years that spawned Frank Woolley, Jack Hobbs and Victor Trumper as its “golden age”, to most people football doesn’t really seem to get going until the 1930s.

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