Wednesday 1 Chelsea, Ashley Cole and Jose Mourinho are found guilty of meeting in a hotel for immoral purposes and face fines totalling £600,000, with Chelsea also receiving a suspended three-point deduction; all will appeal. “The public don’t expect players to move just at the drop of a wallet,” warns David Dein. Darren Bent joins Charlton for £3 million.
Search: 'Paul Stretford'
Stories
Saturday 2 Arsenal rampage past Charlton, 4-0 at Highbury. “He’s the most exciting player anywhere,” says Alan Curbishley of two-goal Thierry. Everton’s good run comes to an end with a 1-0 defeat to Spurs in a bad-tempered game highlighted by Jamie Redknapp’s clogging of Tim Cahill, which may be referred to the FA. “It was a momentous effort,” says Gary Megson, surrounded by streamers and popping corks, as West Brom win a match, beating Bolton 2-1. Wigan top the Championship once more by beating Rotherham 2-0 while Reading are held at home by Burnley. QPR go third by winning at Stoke, but Tony Pulis claims Marc Bircham play-acted to get Gerry Taggart sent off: “Taggart’s a tough warrior. He’s incensed.” “If the fans want me to go then they will keep doing what they have been doing,” says Leicester’s Micky Adams, who is barracked during a 1-1 home draw with Preston. In League One the Arsenal of Bedfordshire drop points for only the second time in a 1-1 draw at Tranmere, who score with a rebound from a twice-taken penalty. Brentford are nine points back in second after beating Oldham. Yeovil top League Two again, but only three points separate the top seven. Kidderminster blow a chance to get off the foot by letting in a 90th-minute equaliser to next-to-bottom Cambridge. Paul Gascoigne is to leave Boston after two months; Scottish club Morton are said to be mustard-keen to offer him their manager’s job. Why, Morton?
Having made £6 million less from last season's Champions League than the previous year, Manchester United chief executive David Gill yearns for UEFA to revert to the second group stage format for the competition
There is a never a shortage of opportunities to despair at how the businessmen who run major clubs do not understand the principles of football. David Gill, chief executive of Manchester United, for example, recently declared that he wants to see the return of the second group stage in the Champions League when the current contract ends in 2006. “I think all the big clubs would have preferred to keep it. There was a higher quality of opposition in the second group phase than the first one.” “Higher quality”, of course, means western European teams containing famous players who appear in Nike ads and would fill all the stadiums for three extra group games with tickets at 30-plus quid a throw.
Sunday 1 Mark Palios resigns, saying: “My action is essential to enable the Football Association to begin to return to normality.” Sven gossip-broker Colin Gibson is also reported to have offered to quit. At this rate Tord Grip will soon be answering the phones.
While today graffiti is a public method of making coded statements, in the 1970s it was about football and plain speaking, if not always great spelling, as Jim Heath recalls
Apart from Arsenal fans spraying their hair red in honour of Freddie Ljungberg, it’s been a long time since spray paint played an active part in the football supporters’ repertoire. Football graffiti had its heyday in the early 1970s when it gave crumbling stadiums that extra, almost indefinable character, the worn brick and corrugated iron surrounds of the terraces being a perfect canvas for budding artists. It wasn’t just restricted to the grounds themselves, with daubings on all points from the city centres and railway stations. Given its intimidatory presence which heightened the fear that you were going to get your head kicked in, it’s ironic that the graffiti trend was inspired mainly by the 1960s peace movement, who used it to protest against the Vietnam war and express support for Castro’s Cuba (“LBJ get out of Vietnam” was still visible on a wall opposite the Craven Cottage turnstiles into the 1980s).