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Empty plastic seats are a common feature in top-flight football in 2010. Adam Bate wonders why one region isn’t reacting to success

On the face of it these are heady days for West Midlands football. West Bromwich Albion’s promotion from the Championship has resulted in the region’s four biggest clubs all enjoying top-flight status for the first time since the 1983-84 season. Wolves have just achieved their highest league finish for 30 years while Birmingham’s ninth place last time out was their best effort in over half a century.

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First Division defences extended the season of goodwill to Boxing Day in 1963, when 66 goals were scored. Jon Spurling reports

As Christmas 1963 approached, weathermen warned a shivering nation to expect a recurrence of what had happened 12 months previously. The winter of 1962 was the worst since the big freeze of 1946, when the snow began on Boxing Day and wiped out football for virtually the next two and a half months. The occasional game was played here and there, but most were played out in the minds of the newly created Pools Panel, who met each weekend in a secret London location and guessed what each result might have been.

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Neil Andrews tracks the development of the bench and can't help but feel shortchanged by its most recent incarnation

Change is meant to be a good thing but it can go hideously wrong. Take the humble substitutes' bench. Once the bastion of the 12th man and his manager, it is now an overcrowded, characterless affair packed full of reserves in club tracksuits who look like they're serving double detention after being caught smoking behind the bike sheds.

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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

Buy this book

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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This month marks the 40th anniversary of League games being shown live in Scandinavia, as Lars Siversten reports

“We don’t train tomorrow, so tonight we’re going out to celebrate. But if Exeter had equalised Leeds’ 2-1 lead at the death I would have cancelled the whole thing.” Surprisingly not the words of some overzealous Yorkshireman but those of Kjetil Rekdal, manager of Norwegian club Aalesunds FK, talking to the press after his team had gone through to the semi-finals of the Norwegian cup. How could shoddy defending in League One possibly endanger a group of jubilant Norwegian footballers’ plans for the evening?

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