Search: 'badge kissing'

Kenny Miller has just rejoined Rangers, causing more than one eyebrow to be raised in Glasgow, reports Douglas Beattie

A funny thing happened to Walter Smith during the white-knuckle run-in to last season’s Scottish ­Premier League. A desperate 1-1 draw at Motherwell had just put the title back in Celtic’s hands and yet immediately afterwards the Rangers manager was being asked on television about rumours that Scotland striker Kenny Miller was a summer transfer target. Smith bristled before tersely dismissing the question.

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Love, Death and Football
by Jason Cowley
Simon & Schuster, £14.99
Reviewed by Terry Staunton
From WSC 270 August 2009 

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Michael Thomas’s last-gasp goal for Arsenal at Anfield on May 26, 1989, has proven to be hard to top, in terms of live and unscripted televised sporting drama. Possibly the most replayed clip from a domestic football match of the last two decades, what has happened to the game in the intervening years forms the basis of Cowley’s persuasive argument that nothing was ever the same again.

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Swansea's latest big-match success was against Carlisle. But, to the frustration of Huw Richards, as always a fixation with near-neighbours overshadowed the victory

Fans chanting ecstatically. Players cavorting triumphantly on the pitch. You know the routine, seen anywhere someone is celebrating the attainment of some prize – a cup, promotion, or maybe survival.

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WSC was first published in March 1986 and soon found itself part of a publishing boom. Al Needham casts his mind back to the heyday of football fanzines and what his own favourite, Nottingham Forest’s ‘The Almighty Brian’, meant to him 

Like many writers, I got my start in fanzines. In the mid-Eighties, I had an idea that was so obviously brilliant, I used to lie in bed wondering why no one had thought of it yet. So I bought a typewriter from an old woman on the next estate, emptied the local WH Smith of every bit of Letraset they had, monopolised the Banda machine at college and produced the first ever, erm, American football fanzine. (Five hundred back issues of Third and Long are still available in my Dad’s loft, if anyone’s interested. No? Fair enough.)

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Dear WSC
As an avid AFC Wimbledon fan, I was amazed at Robert Jeffrey’s article (WSC 212) which makes the club look like it is in a total mess with constant bickering and some pretty unpleasant fans and management running the club. I am not sure how we could have won 42 league games out of 46 if we were in such turmoil. Things are never perfect, but for goodness’ sake the feeling for the club has never been stronger or more positive, while suggesting we treated Kevin Cooper like Tottenham did Sol Campbell is such a disgraceful distortion. Plus rubbish like “We have, quite simply, forgotten how to be happy.” I know no one at the club who even feels vaguely the same way, so perhaps he should think of doing something else on his weekends as it won’t get any better than this.
Richard Brazier, via email

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