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Stories
Seb White looks back over the season where Gary Johnson’s insatiable Yeovil Town strolled to succes
The long-term significance
In the summer of 2002 the Football League finally approved an extra promotion/relegation place between the top tier of non-League football and Division Three. In 1987 the controversial election process had been replaced with one promotion and relegation spot between the two. Strict ground regulations saw three clubs in the mid-1990s being denied promotion, this and the increasing good fortune of non-League sides in the FA Cup saw a clamour for change.
The decision to increase movement between the divisions has been vindicated with all the teams that finished in the top six this season now members of the Football League. Three other sides – Barnet, Stevenage Borough and Burton Albion – have also made the step up. The extra promotion place has also done those relegated from the Football League a favour with Shrewsbury Town, Carlisle Utd, Exeter City and Torquay Utd all returning via the play-offs.
In a consumer age where new club kits are released annually, Ian Plenderleith takes a look at the good, the bad and the pointless websites dedicated to the humble football shirt
It's a weary old truth that one of the greatest frauds of the modern game perpetrated against the averagely stupid fan is the annually redesigned replica kit. This used to be a topic of certain outrage among supporters and consumer bodies alike, but now it has become just another accepted sector of the fat-packed pie-chart labelled “Revenue Streams”. Rather than refuse to buy it, we peer at the new design like daytripping pensioners in a souvenir shop. Oh look, the collar’s done a V this year, and there’s a funny squiggle on the sleeve. And have we gone a more embarrassed shade of red as well? No problem, it’ll hide my shame as I fork out another 40-plus quid.
Simon Goodley looks back on a successful but deeply uncomfortable season
I have an awful admission to make. I am a Notts County fan (that’s not it) and a strange thing has happened to me during our farcical season. Having had nothing much to celebrate since we won the old Third Division championship in 1998, I spent the majority of my team’s League Two title-winning season hoping that our challenge crumbled.
Dear WSC
In WSC 272 Jonathan O’Brien finds it remarkable that Celtic’s Bertie Auld “straightfacedly asserts that beating Dunfermline in the Scottish Cup final in 1965 was more important than the title win a year later”. But Auld is not alone in his assertion. No less a man than Jock Stein said in the Dunfermline history Black and White Magic: “It wouldn’t have gone as well for Celtic had they not won this game.” The Celtic history The Glory and the Dream also notes: “The largest framed photograph in [Stein’s] office at Celtic Park showed Billy McNeill borne aloft at the end of the match.”Celtic had won nothing since “the 7-1 game”, a freakish League Cup final triumph over Rangers in 1957. So this win, Stein’s first trophy seven weeks after officially becoming manager, stopped a rot which was threatening to turn Celtic into also-rans in Scotland. Without it the Lisbon Lions may never have been and there may only ever have been one “nine-in-a-row” in Scottish football. And that would never do.
Mark Murphy, Chessington