Search: 'Brian Kidd'

Mark Poole describes the season in which Celtic won the championship on goals difference

The long-term significance
The year Hearts threw it all away, in one of Scotland’s most dramatic league finales ever. The Jam Tarts last won the title in 1960 and only Celtic and Rangers have won it since Aberdeen in 1984- 85. Hearts, unbeaten in seven months, went into the last day of the season needing just a draw.

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Non-League teams are increasingly from suburbia. So the visit of a steelworks team to a colliery town is an unusual event in one of the country's oldest competitions, the Northern League. Harry Pearson reports

Saturday afternoon in the north-east and its raining. It’s not a heavy rain. It’s the sort of fine rain that hangs in the air, all-enveloping like an unfinished argument. The bus from Peterlee to Horden drops me off at a stop next to a Spiritualist church. Down the road towards the porridge-coloured North Sea there’s a medical centre named after Manny Shinwell, the Labour minister responsible for nationalising the coal industry. Outside the Comrades Club a mother and a ten-year-old girl in a party frock unload a chocolate fountain from the back of a Renault Clio and scurry indoors. A poster in the window advertises a night of entertainment featuring “Donna, Promising Young Vocal Artiste”.

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'King Kev' gives lovers and haters in the media something to talk about. And do they ever

We are caught in a vicious circle of Geordiedom. A set of media-driven archetypes have dominated the back-page reports of Kevin Keegan’s return – hailed by both the Sun and the Daily Mirror as God On The Tyne – and are vigorously embraced by the very people they patronise. The main thrust of this onslaught was gleeful, ridiculous hyperbole about the special nature of Newcastle. Kenny Dalglish, communicating via the Daily Mail’s Steve Curry, saw St James’ Park as “a thrill centre where the password is passion”. In the Daily Telegraph, Henry Winter quickly identified “Toon Army foot soldiers”, reading news of Keegan’s arrival “with such awe, like scholars feeling the Dead Sea Scrolls, touching the words to check if they were really true”. The People’s Dave Kidd told of his father-in-law cutting short a holiday for Keegan in 1982: “Take the tent down, pet, we’re ganning home.” A standard-issue Geordie tale, until Kidd breathlessly informs us that he wasn’t “one of those tattooed, topless-in-the-snow Newcastle fans either. He was a coroner.” Thanks for that, Dave.

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In the wake of the dawn raids at Harry Redknapp's house, the sports pages rush to his defence

Harry Redknapp’s arrest raised uncomfortable questions for those who write about football. Is it corrupt? Is the game no more than a tissue of deception with a putrid core? And most pressing of all – what can we do to help out? Redknapp is, of course, uniquely popular with journalists, the most ready of any manager to hand out his mobile number and offer up a tasty quote. So what to do about it? Rob Shepherd summed up the mood in his News of the World column (December 2): “Over 25 years he’s been one of the best managers and blokes I’ve come across in football.”

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Tuesday 1 Liverpool beat Chelsea on penalties to reach the Champions League final. “In extra time we were the only team who tried to win,” says José, pouting more than ever. Joey Barton is suspended by Man City for a training‑ground fight with team‑mate Ousmane Dabo. The FA are to investigate Oldham chairman Simon Blitz, who made a £500,000 loan to Queens Park Rangers.

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