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A dramatic season finale lives up to the pre-match hype. Swansea wobble but survive Reading’s comeback as the Welsh fans look forward to top division games and being patronised by Gary Lineker. Huw Richards recalls the events at Wembley

The essential character of this Championship play-off final was determined 13 days earlier when Reading won the second semi-final. With Cardiff’s elimination it became, as a Swans-supporting friend texted, “a football match, not a civil war”.

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The Man Who Never Gave Up
by James Leighton

DB Publishing, £16.99
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 298 December 2011

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Inconvenient truth as it is for some of us, Cardiff City's FA Cup victory in 1927 remains the greatest achievement by any Welsh club. The associated quiz question will endure until somebody else takes the Cup out of England, while the date is to Cardiff fans what 1966 is to England followers.

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The Alan Curtis Story
by Alan Curtis, with Tim Johnson and Stuart Sprake
Mainstream, £17.99
Reviewed by Paul Ashley-Jones
From WSC 278 April 2010

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Having grown up watching Alan Curtis from the terraces of the North Bank at Vetch Field, I expected to enjoy this book and wasn't disappointed. Curtis had three separate spells with Swansea as well as playing for Leeds, Southampton and Cardiff City (where he was voted Player of the Year despite his background) while winning 35 caps for Wales.

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Huw Richards responds to Roberto Martinez's departure as manager of Swansea

 In WSC 269 I suggested that Swansea fans “would not swap Roberto Martínez for anyone”. It was incontestably true when written, but by the time of publication anyone reading Swans websites could reasonably have assumed that the club had instead been managed by somebody called Judas. Some of that abuse came from the traditional inability of many fans to grasp that, whatever a club is to them, it is an employer to a player or manager. It also, though, reflected what Martínez had come to mean to Swansea.

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Since they last met at Vicarage Road over a quarter of a century ago Swansea and Watford's paths have diverged. However, as they meet again in the second tier it is the visitors who are building an enviable reputation while the hosts look to be suffering a case of post-play-off syndrome. Huw Richards was there

Watford and Swansea are forever linked by the shared experience of the late 1970s and early 1980s when both rose in a few seasons from the fourth level to the upper reaches of what we then called (and still is, whatever its official label may be) Division One. There, though, their paths diverged. Watford stayed on at the upper end of the league and have spent only two of the past 30 seasons outside the top two divisions. Swansea, by contrast, returned whence they had come and have only this year escaped the bottom two.

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