Search: ' Ron Greenwood'

With Aston Villa having an outside chance of breaking into the top four and the billionaire owners at Man City the four Premier League giants might be starting to panic

It’s rare that more than one of the Big Four has a bad weekend. That all should fail to score on the same day, November 24 – with Fulham and Newcastle’s draws at Liverpool and Chelsea, respectively, treated like cup shocks – was a statistical fluke. Nonetheless the fact that the cartel have looked unexpectedly vulnerable at times this season ought to be a cause for celebration, given that their domestic dominance is sapping the life out of the league. Aston Villa’s goalless home draw with Man Utd – greeted by a curious, cricket-derived headline in the Express, Villa’s Bunnies Find Some Bite – might not seem like a sign of changing times given that it simply ended a run of 14 defeats against the same opponents. But it followed on from a comfortable win at Arsenal the previous week and a widespread sense that, finally, here was a club well placed to break into the elite, at the expense of a team being widely derided as “bottlers”.

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The Toughest Job in Football
by Brian Glanville
Headline, £18.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 246 August 2007 

Buy this book

“I didn’t see any reaction in the team. That was the thing that left me amazed; there wasn’t the rage you expect from an England team that’s losing.” So said Fabio Capello after watching Bobby Robson’s team thrashed humiliatingly by Holland at Euro 88.

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Helen Chamberlain’s former sidekick has celebrated leaving Soccer AM for 6.06 with a book. Taylor Parkes wants to know why anyone – anyone – thought it was a good idea to expose the presenter’s ego and prejudices across 288 smugly written pages

Soccer AM is a bad memory: hungover mornings in other people’s flats, disturbed by a crew of whooping simpletons, the slurping of pro and ex-pro rectums, cobbled-together comedy that made me long for the glory days of Skinner and Baddiel’s old shit. Yet Tim Lovejoy himself, with his fashionably receding hair and voice oddly reminiscent of Rod Hull’s, I remember only as an averagely blokey TV presenter – in fact, one of the few averagely blokey TV presenters to make me clack my tongue in irritation, rather than buff my Gurkha knife. Other than as a namesake of The Simpsons’ self-serving man of the cloth, he barely registered; just a bland, blond ringmaster in a cocky circus of crap. Almost a surprise, then, to find that his new book is not just ­tedious in the extreme, it is utterly vile.

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Derby won the title with a low 53 points, as the title fight was between a mish-mash of "town" teams. Roger Titford reports

The long-term significance
If there was a remake of this season it would be called “What Happens When Big Clubs Go Bad”. For the last time, possibly ever, a variety of “town” teams – Ipswich, Burnley, Derby and Stoke among them – contested the League title deep into the spring. It was an unusual year in many respects: miners did relatively better than stockbrokers in the economic crisis, glamrock was dying and punk not yet born, and England’s big three suffered like never since. It was Liverpool’s only trophyless season between 1973 and 1984. Arsenal spent some time bottom of the table, which they haven’t done since. Manchester United weren’t even in the top flight. Revie, Shankly, Nicholson, Greenwood and Sexton had all followed Sir Alf Ramsey out of long-occupied managerial seats in 1974 and a chance emerged for the lesser lights to shine. It sounds now like an impossible feast of equal opportunity, but at the time they said it was dismal, mundane, violent and “the death of football”.

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Ron Greenwood passed away leaving behind him a distinguished career. Darron Kirkby remembers the former England manager

England’s 6-3 defeat by Hungary in 1953, their first by an overseas side at Wembley, must have been a humiliating experience. But, for one fascinated spectator, the match crystallised a view of the game that was to manifest itself in English football’s most glorious afternoon.

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