The problem with a campaign to clean up sport's governing bodies is knowing where to start, as Steve Menary reports
Anti-corruption coalition Transparency International has put together guidelines aimed at stamping out corruption in international sport, including football.
The internet has sparked a boom in betting and inevitably there are sites that promise to help you to beat the bookies and win endless riches. Ian Plenderleith – just for fun – gave a couple of systems the once-over
I’m not a gambler, but I can bet you one thing for sure. If betting were profitable for punters, bookies wouldn’t exist. Bearing this in mind, I locked up my credit card and examined two websites that promise to help players beat the odds.
Ian Plenderleith has happy memories prompted by a shrine to Aberdeen's European heroes and toasts some hard-drinking yet non-fighting Vikings, but is distinctly unimpressed by the efforts of the G-14
Certain teams capture a boy’s imagination no matter their colours or home town. I’d never been to Aberdeen by the early 1980s, but the last Scottish team to win a European trophy (the 1983 Cup-Winners Cup) boasted one of those long-lost line-ups – crammed with talented native names that never seemed to change – and rarely seemed to lose.
Harry Pearson reads two new books about David Beckham and is none the wiser about anything – except that there is nothing about Beckham to become wiser about
What can you say about David Beckham that hasn’t been said already? Well, OK then, apart from that he is an ugly waster with a great left foot and a string of failed relationships? Ever since Gazza imploded and Becks began to replace Ryan Giggs as the football cover boy of choice, we have been bombarded not so much with information about the midfielder as interpretations of him. Who Beckham is has been submerged under what he means.
Colin Peel searches in vain for a long history of exciting derbies in the Second City, as Aston Villa and Birmingham City prepare to resume hostilities
Blues v Villa is the derby that football forgot. No other big city rivalry has had to wait as long for its protagonists to renew the duel for league supremacy. December 12, 1987, was the date of the last clash, in the Second Division, which saw Villa triumph 2-1 in front of 28,000 at St Andrews. Both Villa and their manager that day, an enterprising chap called Graham Taylor, were bound for promotion. For Blues, things got much worse before the current owners began the transformation which has the put the club where it is today.