Search: 'Alan Hudson'

As Matthew Le Tissier calls it a day, Cris Freddi looks back on some of the other players who have been almost great, but not quite, in his tricky position

So goodbye then, Le Tiss. Thanks for the sequence of great individual goals that season. If you’d got yourself injured there and then, we’d have called it a really big loss, someone who had the makings of a great player. Instead, they’re saying you didn’t have enough ambition to leave an unfashionable club. I think that’s bollocks personally, but we all agree that something went AWOL in the last few years.

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In the first of a series on players who have had an unusual appeal to fans, Al Needham mourns the failure of his schoolmate to hit the heights

It’s a galling experience when you realise you’ll never make it as a football star, but even more of a kick in the nuts when you live vicariously through someone else and they don’t manage it either. Only two people I grew up with made it in football; one was a call girl pictured on the front of the News of the World with Alan Hudson. The other was Wayne Fairclough. 

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Known as many things, mainly to rude to print, the referee has a tough job. Cris Freddi is taking no pity on the men in black

As always, there are enough examples of dreadful refereeing to fill a book, let alone a couple of pages. Only room here for a quick mention of Alan Hudson being given a goal for Chelsea against Ipswich, when the ball hit the side netting, and Clive Allen being den­ied one when his free-kick came back off the stan­chion, both pushed aside by more momentous ex­amples.

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Frank Clark talks to WSC about his new book, Kicked Into Touch, which charts the ups and downs of more than a decade in football management

You had some uncomfortable experiences as a manager. If you were a player now, would you still want to become a manager?
Yes, for two reasons. As a player I knew I wanted to stay in the game when I stopped because I loved being involved. I’d feel the same today. The other factor, of course, is the amount of money you can earn. There’s no question that the job has got much harder, for various reasons: Bosman, the sums of money involved, Sky. The spotlight has become that much more intense. The other side of the coin is that managers are being paid wages at least on a par with some of the players.

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Cris Freddi trawls further through the dustbins of 20th century football by selecting champion crap sides from the merely awful

This is a category you know you’re not going to be able to cover properly. For a start, there are so many poor teams around, at every level. Selkirk losing 20-0 in the Scottish Cup, Hyde 26-0 to Preston in the FA Cup, the Austrian club who lost every match in a season except the one in which their opponents didn’t turn up because they’d folded. There’s always some schoolboy side cheerfully conceding dou­ble figures in every game. We could all make acceptable lists and none would look the same.

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