Thursday 1 “I think I have arrived here at the perfect time,” says Andriy Shevchenko on joining Chelsea for £30 million. Arsenal are to be questioned over a loan payment made to their Belgian nursery club Beveren, which may have breached FIFA regulations. Ronnie Moore steps down as Oldham manager, to be replaced by John Sheridan.
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Stories
Sunday 1 The SPL title may have been decided at Tynecastle, where Hearts go two up against Celtic but lose 3‑2 to two goals in the last three minutes. Celtic take a seven-point lead. Lincoln manager Keith Alexander is sent “on leave” by the club, who are 15th in League Two.
Lincoln’s Keith Alexander, back at work after brain surgery, is one of only three black managers in the league. Grahame Lloyd asked him why he thought this was so
Keith Alexander knows he’s very lucky to be alive. Just three months after undergoing major brain surgery following a collapse at his home, the Lincoln City manager was due back in the dugout for the home derby against Boston on February 7. Alexander could hardly have chosen a more volatile atmosphere for his return but, with Lincoln’s next three matches pitching them against neighbours Scunthorpe and Hull as well as promotion rivals Huddersfield, all their games this month are high-profile and high-octane.
Leroy Rosenior is settling in well as the far south-west's latest black manager, but Nick House is puzzled by the route that took the former striker to Plainmoor
It’s fair to say Leroy Rosenior’s appointment as Torquay United’s first-team coach – manager in old money – met with some scepticism. The concern was simple yet forceful: was he any good? Reports from travellers were decidedly mixed: acclaimed as part of a trio at Bristol City; steady at Gloucester; hardly a success at Merthyr
Dear WSC
Neil Reynolds (WSC 180) thinks it inconceivable that Lee Hughes should choose to leave West Brom for Coventry for footballing reasons, but I think he should consider the facts at the time that decision was made rather than the current league table.
When Hughes signed for Coventry we were rated as second favourites by most bookmakers to be promoted back to the Premiership. Just about every pundit considered us to be more likely to get promotion than the Baggies and at the point of Hughes’s signature the full extent of Coventry’s debts had not yet been made public. These are the footballing reasons. We were considered to have a better team than West Brom. The fact that West Brom have a bigger stadium and higher attendances are not footballing reasons. The fact is that Hughes would have felt that he was more likely to get promotion with Coventry than with Albion.The real gist of this is that fans of some of the other Midlands clubs cannot accept the fact that Coventry have been a more successful club for the last 15-20 years and that this may be the reason we have been able to lure their players away (Birmingham – Liam Daish and Gary Breen; Wolves – Steve Froggatt; Baggies – Hughes) so they choose to believe that the players can only have been influenced by financial considerations. To borrow Neil Reynolds’s warthog analogy, that doesn’t wash either.
Ian Hossack, via email