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Stories
With Sky now filming matches with up to 24 cameras it seems unthinkable that audiences could miss top-flight football, but games went unrecorded as recently as 1990. Mike Whalley explains
If anyone ever produces a DVD tribute to former Sheffield Wednesday striker David Hirst, it ought to include clips of his efforts as an emergency goalkeeper against Manchester City on New Year’s Day, 1990. It won’t, though, because no footage exists. Having scored Wednesday’s first in a 2-0 win, Hirst went in goal to replace the injured Kevin Pressman and made impressive saves from Steve Redmond and Colin Hendry.
These Yorkshire rivals may yet head in different directions out of the Championship. But in a tense occasion on a sunny day the confident pre-match favourites fall to a chastening defeat. David Stubbs reveals all
Bramall Lane’s highest ever attendance was the 68,287 who witnessed an FA Cup tie against Leeds in 1936. The rivalry between the two clubs is intense but fitful, as both have bobbed up and down between divisions over the years. In the early 1970s, when Sheffield United climbed back into Division One under manager John Harris, I recall as a young lad in Leeds watching highlights of the home and away Sheffield fixtures on Yorkshire TV the following Sunday afternoon.
Relive four weeks of statements of the obvious from the pundits, daily complaints about the wobbly ball and over-emphatic pronunciations of Brazilian names
June 11
South Africa 1 Mexico 1
“It’s in Africa where humanity began and it is to Africa humanity now returns,” says Peter Drury who you feel would be available for film trailer voiceover work when it’s quieter next summer. Mexico dominate and have a goal disallowed when the flapping Itumeleng Khune inadvertently plays Carlos Vela offside. ITV establish that it was the right decision: “Where’s that linesman from, that football hotbed Uzbekistan?” asks Gareth Southgate who had previously seemed like a nice man. "What a moment in the history of sport… A goal for all Africa,” says Drury after Siphiwe Tshabalala crashes in the opener. We cut to Tshbalala’s home township – “they’ve only just got electricity” – where the game is being watched on a big screen which Jim Beglin thinks is a sheet. Cuauhtémoc Blanco looks about as athletic as a crab but nonetheless has a role in Mexico’s goal, his badly mishit pass being crossed for Rafael Márquez to score thanks to a woeful lack of marking. The hosts nearly get an undeserved winner a minute from time when Katlego Mphela hits the post. Óscar Pérez is described as “a personality goalkeeper” as if that is a tactical term like an attacking midfielder. Drury says “Bafana Bafana” so often it’s like he’s doing a Red Nose event where he earns a pound for an irrigation scheme in the Sudan every time he manages to fit it in.
The Success Story of Major League Soccer
by Beau Dure
Potomac, £22.00
Reviewed by David Wangerin
From WSC 285 November 2010
It may not be saying that much, but Major League Soccer – now approaching the end of its 15th season – is the longest running coast-to-coast soccer league North America has ever had. And, as Beau Dure writes at the end of this book: "Whether MLS has ‘arrived' is a moot point. It's here. And it's healthy."