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Stories
There are very few individuals who can run on a pitch designed for professional footballers without being jeered at by anybody who sees them
As domestic football improves in Ireland, players are earning professional contracts later in their careers, says Ciaran McCauley
James McClean is one of the finds of the season, a £350,000 steal for Sunderland from Derry City. Depending on what you read, he is now worth anywhere between £10 million and £200m and could yet be on his way to Euro 2012 after winning his first cap in February’s friendly against Czech Republic.
When team selections are made by senior players rather than managers things can only end badly, writes Mark Brophy
To an outsider, it seems mad that a club that has been in the top four of the Premier League pretty much all season should be rumoured to be in turmoil and on the verge of dismissing their manager. Yet that is exactly the situation Chelsea and Andre Villas-Boas have found themselves in at various points, usually coinciding with a marginal dip in performance level or results. These are not the chief reasons for the speculation, however. Constantly looming in the background is the over-confident shadow of player power.
Goodison Park was once a place ahead of its time but, as Simon Hart reports, the rebranded “Old Lady” is now a meeting place for disgruntled supporters frustrated by their club’s decline
Step into the parish hall of St Luke the Evangelist church on the corner of Goodison Road and Gwladys Street, and you enter a world that could not be any further removed from the ad-man’s fantasy of the face-painted, replica-shirted modern “footy” fan and their agony-and-ecstasy matchday experience.