Search: ' Firoz Kassam'

Piers Pennington  takes on the mysteries of the Didcot triangle, with three teams that lurk around the periphery of the big time

Look at a map of England, go left from London and you’ll come across a footballing desert stretching across Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Somerset. Only three oases of league football offer succour to the parched lower division journeyman and many a camel towards the end of its career has found refreshment in Oxford, Reading or Swindon. In the middle of the three lies Didcot, the railway junction which links them, and this has persuaded some to call this area the Didcot Triangle.

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Massed ranks of WSC writers and interviewees reflect on the best and worst of 2000

Jim Rosenthal
Ups
– Premier League highlights acquired by ITV
– Cardiff losing at Gillingham to ensure Oxford United avoid relegation
– Playing for the Cookham Dean Parents against 12-year-old son Tom (lost 8-7)

Downs
– Hearing the country I had backed to win Euro 2000 (Italy) had lost in the final in extra time. They were still leading with two minutes to go when I boarded a flight home after the French grand prix.
– Oxford United’s owner Firoz Kassam telling the fans after the Luton game to “piss off” unless they gave him their support. The club’s “saviour” is taking us into the fast lane out of the League.
– Sitting in the stadiums of Florence, Rome and Turin and hearing the racist abuse directed at black players of Manchester United, Arsenal and England

Hope for 2001
– It stops raining and English clubs go all the way in the Champions League.

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Poor management, failed takeovers and petty squabbling – the struggles facing Cardiff City, West Bromwich Albion, Oxford United and Barnet

“It is almost as if the club has forgotten how to do anything successfully,” one recent visitor to a Cardiff City internet bulletin board re­marked. That includes selling it to a member of the Sullivan family, which has been a reg­ular agenda item since the early 1990s, when David Sullivan first expressed an inter­­est.

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From the local chippy to class hotels, Firoz Kassam has been a success in business. Martin Brodestsky evaluates his time as chairman of Oxford United

Distinguishing features Kassam is a self-made multi-millionaire, with three hotels in London, and he has just received planning permission for another one in Oxford. Kassam came to England from Tanzania as a teenager and worked his way up from the local chippy until he got to where he is now – with money to waste on a no-hope lower division football club with delusions of grandeur.

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Updates from clubs in trouble including Chester City and Oxford United

Among the plausible candidates for this season’s spectacular calamity club are Chester City, where Kevin Ratcliffe’s resignation as manager after the first three games of the season has severely dented any optimism generated when Terry Smith, the former coach of the Great Britain gridiron team, took control of the club in July. Understandably, given the mess left by the previous administration, City fans have so far been prepared to give Smith the benefit of the doubt, despite his “colourful” past on the UK ice hockey and gridiron scene. 

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