Dear WSC
I’m glad Brian Gibbs can gain pleasure from hearing Ray Wilkins (Letters, WSC 192). Us QPR supporters can’t help remembering Ray Wilkins presiding over the start of the long decline we’ve had to endure at Loftus Road. Ned Zelic is the “versatile as an egg” player referred to. Wilkins wasted a big chunk of the money QPR got for Les Ferdinand on buying him. What was Wilkins thinking of? Ferdinand was approaching his peak, you could guarantee 25 goals (and probably more) from him in a season. He was incredibly popular with QPR fans, even when he scored for Newcastle at Loftus Road a couple of months later in what turned out to be the first of the relegations QPR would suffer all too quickly. Zelic turned out to be a very bad egg, not versatile at all. We could forgive him for not being any use. It was the fact that he didn’t even try that annoyed us.
Pete Harris, via email
Search: ' Martin Edwards'
Stories
Martin Edwards' unpopular reign at Old Trafford is reassessed by Ashley Shaw, putting forward another side of the argument
Martin Edwards is a misunderstood figure. The well publicised attempts to sell his controlling interest in Manchester United have clouded supporters’ judgements of the progress made at the club under his chairmanship. Fans consistently forget his key role in establishing the club as the dominant economic power in British football, making Manchester United a respected name from the City to the Champions League.
Barney Ronay scrolls through the list of Britain's highest earners and finds it an incriminating document in the case against football's economic competence
Benito Carbone, Mark Bosnich and Winston Bogarde have something in common. Draw up a list of controversial transfers, and all three would undoubtedly feature. But Beni and the boys appeared on another list this month: the Sunday Times Pay List 2002, which sets out the 500 highest earning individuals in Britain. The List includes 46 footballers, only one of whom – Steve McManaman at No 213 – is employed outside the domestic leagues. At first glance the temptation is merely to gawp at the presence of such high profile failures as Fabrizio Ravanelli and the notoriously overpaid cheeky boys of Chelsea.
Squads are now so vast that players can sink to the bottom and never come up again. Matthew Hall goes in search of Mark Bosnich
Three years ago, Mark Bosnich had it all. He had turned down Juventus to rejoin his beloved Manchester United, the club he spent three seasons with as a teenager a decade earlier, as successor to Peter Schmeichel. During the same summer, after a night that ended in a police cell, he had remarried. Happy at work and happy at home, the future was bright. Three years later, the sunglasses are well and truly off, most likely replaced by pyjamas, slippers and a blanket. Mark Bosnich doesn’t get out much these days, and in that relatively short space of time, Bosnich has felt the wrath of Sir Alex Ferguson, then his new wife and now Claudio Ranieri.
We asked some of our regular contributors if they could remember anything about 2001. Surprisingly, quite a few of them could
Harry Pearson
Best • Seeing different faces in the home dugout at the Riverside. Finally getting a radio that allowed me to listen to Alistair Brownlee’s delirious, deranged commentaries on Century FM. His pronunciation of Marinelli alone is worth the price of the batteries. Oliver Kahn’s expression at the end of the game in Munich.