Search: 'Jimmy Sirrel'

There is not ingrained reason to pick one team or the other in Nottingham, says Al Needham. And now it's County's turn again

As anyone from Derby or Leicester will tell you, Nottingham is not a “football hotbed”. The relationship between the city’s two clubs is more like a resentful older brother (County) and his more successful, patronising sibling (Forest). When the half- time results are announced at the City Ground, a County lead is cheered – Forest really want to see County rise to their level. If Forest are behind at half-time, the fans at Meadow Lane laugh and jeer – they really, really want Forest to fall to theirs.

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Most football fans look back at 1981 as the year Ipswich lost the title, and deserved to take it back to Suffolk. David Wangerin disagrees

In the dim and increasingly distant days bef­­­­­­­­­­­­ore the Premiership, live football on TV and the Champions League, it was a widely held assertion that small, settled squads were a desirable thing, and that a collection of a dozen or so talented, mot­ivated and well-organised players stood as good a chance as any of winning the championship – as long as they kept their limbs and ligaments intact and their noses clean.

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Stephanie Pride talks to Howard Wilkinson about the future of youth coaching in England and possible regrets he has from an illustrious career

WSC Do you feel there is still a suspicion in this country of bringing the more technical aspects of coaching into the game?
Howard Wilkinson Yes, there’s a cultural attitude which is, if you like, anti-coaching, or against having an analytical attitude to sport, and it does make life difficult because it colours everyone’s attitude. It’s come out recently when we’ve had foreign players who start to talk about the differences and make negative comparisons with the preparation they’ve been used to. It comes out with foreign coaches coming in – people like Arsène Wenger. The sort of preparation that he employs I don’t think is that much different to the sort of preparation that others would employ, nor would it be fundamentally different to that which I would employ, but because Arsène’s come in and done it, it’s had a positive influence. People say “ah well, it’s come from abroad, it must be good, it’s worked there” – and I think that’s good.

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