Search: ' Queens Park Rangers'
Stories
Amateurs played a major role in professional football well into the 20th century, argues Peter Bateman
Blackburn Olympic’s FA Cup final win over the Old Etonians in 1883 is often seen as a watershed in the game’s history. The Cup was never again won by the amateur ex-public school teams who had dominated the first decade of the competition. In 1885 the FA bowed to the inevitable and sanctioned professionalism. Three years later the formation of the Football League by professional clubs from the midlands and north confirmed the exclusion of amateur clubs from the highest level of the game.
by Mick Kelly
Pennant Books, £9.99
Reviewed by John Carter
From WSC 275 January 2010
“May you live in interesting times” goes the Chinese saying and Queens Park Rangers supporters certainly do. They’ve had a chairman ambushed at gunpoint, been taken over by a consortium that, temporarily, made them “the richest club in the world” and welcomed seven different managers, all in four years.
The hosts are coming to terms with new realities of the bottom division, financial hardship and predatory bigger clubs, while the visitors are happy to be playing their second season in the League. Charles Morris reports
I first went to Crewe Alexandra’s ground in early, wide-eyed childhood. Ever since it has been a place capable of conjuring up some much-needed magic amid the industrial surroundings of Coronation Street-style houses to the west and the town’s railway station and sidings to the east.