Search: 'Gibraltar'

Tom Davies reports on the Plymouth takeover, as well as stadium issues at Truro and Wycombe

One of the League’s more enduring messes, at Plymouth Argyle, has seemingly reached a resolution. The local businessman James Brent’s takeover, agreed at the end of October, brings an end to a saga that lasted far longer than it should have. Brent will now take ownership of Argyle, while the city council has agreed to buy and rent back the club’s Home Park ground.

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Gareth Nicholson reports on interesting developments in the south-west football scene

A footballing summer in Devon and Cornwall is generally a sleepy affair, punctuated more by tutting about the poor fare offered by pre-season friendlies than talk about player arrivals and departures. Not this summer, though, as the region’s teams reflect on seasons of highs, lows and future uncertainty.

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Dear WSC
Bruce Wilkinson (WSC 267) pointed out that ticket queues “seem a quaint ritual of a bygone age”. Waiting in a virtual internet queue bears no similarity to lining up outside the box office. I have my tickets for the FA Cup final, but I do not feel as if I earned them. Instead of getting up in the middle of the night, crossing London, losing half a day’s work, standing in the rain shuffling forward inch by inch while nervous that there are too many punters and too few tickets, I merely sat in my dressing-gown in front the PC. There is no one to talk to in the “virtual waiting room”. Your opportunity is allotted randomly. Suddenly it’s all over and you have what you came for. One should be happier as the process is simple and efficient and the desired result achieved, but somehow it feels like a hollow victory as it lacks the sense of accomplishment joy and triumph of the old-fashioned process. You can’t even wave the tickets in triumph above your head as they are sent by post.Obviously my complaining about the changes that actually improve my life marks me down as “old”. I am not asking to bring back rickets and polio and to repeal the Factory Acts but I do miss a modicum of discomfort and inconvenience. The old experience was akin to standing on the terraces or being subject to the over-zealous policing that used to mark us out as a tribe. Under the new regime the tickets are yours if your broadband speed is faster and your credit card more golden than the next, rather than if you have more commitment stamina and perseverance.Will the ultimate progress be when we treat football like theatre and opera by dressing-up smartly for the occasion and ordering our interval drinks? Or is that Club Wembley?
Patrick Sheehy, London

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We take playing international football in England for granted but as Steve Menary explains it can be a long fight to be gifted that right

When West Ham signed Valon Behrami from Lazio this summer, he became the club’s first ever Swiss international. His status may change on December 19, when FIFA meet for a second time to consider a membership application from Kosovo, where Behrami was born in 1985.

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The Lands that FIFA Forgot
by Steve Menary
Know the Score, £16.99

Reviewed by Jonathan Wilson
From WSC 253 March 2008 

Buy this book

Every country, Henry Kissinger once said, needs an army, a bank and a football team. Many of the countries discussed in Outcasts don’t have an army or a bank. Many aren’t even countries, at least not in the traditional sense. And yet all are desperate for a football team that would somehow give them legitimacy. When Tibet played Greenland in a friendly in Copenhagen, who did not see it as a strike against the Chinese authorities who would deny them statehood? And yet there is a sense in which Greenland are rather more wronged than Tibet, at least in terms of FIFA’s refusal to acknowledge them as a member.

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