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Tackling Scotland's Towns and Teams
by Daniel Gray
Luath Press, £9.99
Reviewed by Gavin Saxton
From WSC 287 January 2011

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Daniel Gray – a social historian, Englishman and Middlesbrough fan exiled in Edinburgh – decided last season to explore his adopted homeland through its lower-league football teams. So, picking out 12 fixtures around the country, he set out to learn about Scotland and its football. The result is this series of vignettes, 12 chapters each based around a match, but for the most part an excuse to delve a little into the history of the home teams, the towns that host them and the connections between the two.

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As Martin Ling begins his second spell as Cambridge United manager in the space of a few weeks,  Matthew Gooding reflects on a bizarre sequence of events at the Abbey stadium.

Although it isn’t unusual to see a manager returning to his former club, it’s rare to hear of one going back to the job he left just a week previously. And when you also consider that Martin Ling’s first spell in charge of Cambridge United only lasted eight days, you begin to get a flavour of what a bizarre summer it has been for fans of the Blue Square Premier club.

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Tom Davies looks at clubs experiencing difficult times

Beware rich men bearing loans might well be the cautionary mantra of this decade, and the latest to discover the perils of debt are Wycombe Wanderers. Fans’ joy at promotion from League Two has been tempered by a rancorous summer in which managing director Steve Hayes has been accused of bullying the supporters trust into giving up its shareholding to grant him outright control. Hayes, who also owns the rugby union club Wasps, with whom Wycombe share Adams Park, wants to shift both to a 20,000-seat new stadium, to be operated by a separate stadium management company.

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Setanta is no more, but what did the channel do for viewers outside of the Premier League? Our writers assess the channel’s influence on the Conference and Scottish Premier League

The Conference
In WSC 259 I confessed to having given in to the lure of pay-TV, opting for Setanta rather than Sky for the sake of my bank balance. Now I am not so proud about my choice.

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Having slid to the fifth tier Fortuna Cologne are looking to a web-based model to revive the club, explains Paul Joyce

Under their dictatorial president Jean Löring, Fortuna Cologne were possibly ­Germany’s least democratically run club. Löring once fired manager Toni Schumacher at half time during a match in 1999 with the words: “I, being the club, had to react.”

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