Footballers appearing on Desert Island Discs is a fairly rare occurance. Paul Brown examines what the lucky few choseWSC is not alone celebrating a big anniversary this year. Desert Island Discs, the enduring radio fixture in which celebrity castaways get to choose eight favourite records, plus a book and a luxury item, is building up to its 70th birthday.
It’s a big day for the home team as they unveil ground improvements against Premier League opposition. The Londoners face a stern test but everyone goes home smiling. Robbie Meredith reportsThe last time I went to a Fulham game was on a dull and cold night in Hamburg last year, when a late extra-time goal from Diego Forlán denied them an unlikely European trophy. Watching the team at Seaview, the compact home of Irish League part-timers Crusaders, I wonder if any of the players involved against Atlético Madrid allow themselves to think that tonight’s game could be an early step to a similar occasion next May. Do they, in the words of their supporters’ song, still believe?
While Fulham are now established in the Premier League, Neil Hurden has fond memories of older matchday customs, despite the prevailing chaos at the club for much of the 1980s and 1990sHappiness is such an awkward bastard to pin down, isn’t it? We are told that think-tankers, politicians and philosophers spend countless hours of valuable research time pondering why we’re not as happy as we were in 1948 when we now have about ten times more food to eat, infinitely more sources of entertainment to occupy us and clothes that are startlingly less beige.
Dear WSC
If Chic Charnley (Reviews, WSC 281) had had a longer fuse, it’s a racing certainty that he’d have played for Scotland and, in all likelihood, have drawn the attentions of bigger clubs in Scotland and down south. But, in gaining a model pro, we’d have lost a character who inspired love and loathing in equal part (depending on whether he was playing for your club). For a fan Chic was a uniquely interactive experience – if you got on his back he’d react and, as his disciplinary record shows, on 17 occasions that reaction led to a red card. As a fan you knew it. He’d be looking at the crowd trying to pick out his tormentors and on a good day you’d get a gesture. What better motivation could there be.At McDiarmid Park in Perth, on New Year’s Day 1997 Chico had a particularly fine blow-up. With the St Johnstone fans full of New Year spirit (spirits?) the abuse directed at Chic was ripe. With the match at 1-1 the red mist descended, and he thumped one of his team-mates. What followed was one of the high points of the last 20 years for Saints fans – a 7-2 victory over the bitterest local rivals.Equally, when playing for Partick Thistle against Motherwell in 1994 or 1995, I recall the crowd focusing even more relentlessly on the man. My memory says that again he got wound up, launched a kung-fu tackle at an opponent and earned an early bath. I’m less certain of this though and would welcome confirmation that I twice played my part in taking Chico off the pitch, definitely my most significant footballing achievement. At a later date I met Chic in a Glasgow pub. He was holding court to a rapt audience of Celtic fans whose devotion to him was greater than to many of the club’s long-term players. They knew he was one of them and they knew he’d come within a whisker of fulfilling his/their dream of playing in the hoops. Down-to-earth, frank about his errors and damn funny, it’s a shame there aren’t more like him. But if there were, there’d be chaos.
Alistair Smith, Forest Hill
Relive four weeks of statements of the obvious from the pundits, daily complaints about the wobbly ball and over-emphatic pronunciations of Brazilian names
June 11
South Africa 1 Mexico 1
“It’s in Africa where humanity began and it is to Africa humanity now returns,” says Peter Drury who you feel would be available for film trailer voiceover work when it’s quieter next summer. Mexico dominate and have a goal disallowed when the flapping Itumeleng Khune inadvertently plays Carlos Vela offside. ITV establish that it was the right decision: “Where’s that linesman from, that football hotbed Uzbekistan?” asks Gareth Southgate who had previously seemed like a nice man. "What a moment in the history of sport… A goal for all Africa,” says Drury after Siphiwe Tshabalala crashes in the opener. We cut to Tshbalala’s home township – “they’ve only just got electricity” – where the game is being watched on a big screen which Jim Beglin thinks is a sheet. Cuauhtémoc Blanco looks about as athletic as a crab but nonetheless has a role in Mexico’s goal, his badly mishit pass being crossed for Rafael Márquez to score thanks to a woeful lack of marking. The hosts nearly get an undeserved winner a minute from time when Katlego Mphela hits the post. Óscar Pérez is described as “a personality goalkeeper” as if that is a tactical term like an attacking midfielder. Drury says “Bafana Bafana” so often it’s like he’s doing a Red Nose event where he earns a pound for an irrigation scheme in the Sudan every time he manages to fit it in.