Football in New Zealand is being threatened by the demands of the Asian Confederation. Ed Jackson explains
In December, with New Zealand still celebrating World Cup qualification, the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) announced a move which may spell the end of the Wellington Phoenix – the country’s representatives in the Australian-based A-League.
A German’s view of our beautiful game
by Raphael Honigstein
Yellow Jersey, £11.99
Reviewed by Mike Ticher
From WSC 274 December 2009
Psychoanalysing national character is “a murky business”, says Raphael Honigstein, a German journalist who has lived in England since 1993. It certainly is, especially when your picture of the nation is a caricature. An unflattering view from an outsider is often unsettling. It can also be refreshing and challenging, but only if the insights are original. Honigstein has absorbed a lot about English football through direct experience and its literature (he leans heavily on David Winner and David Downing), but most of his conclusions seem to me exaggerated, too broad or half-truths, at best.
Liverpool’s American white knights have become the focus of protests after less than a year, so fans including John Williams are dreaming of the day that 100,000 of them will buy out Hicks and Gillett
Sat, irritably, on the Kop at the recent home match against Sunderland, I hunched, as always, next to the man now charged with raising some £500 million for a Liverpool fans’ buyout from the current, unloved, American co-owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett. Rogan Taylor enjoys ambitious projects. Back in 1985, after Heysel, he formed the national Football Supporters Association to give fans a public voice that the press and the authorities might listen to, before later setting up a football MBA at the University of Liverpool. Today, he thinks this club are in even greater danger than back then, when the fans were labelled beasts and the English game seemed spent. “The biggest crisis in over 40 years,” he says. Since Bill Shankly first arrived, in fact, with Liverpool languishing in the old Second Division.
The Biography
by Jim White
Sphere, £18.99
Reviewed by Ashely Shaw
From WSC 266 April 2009
Enter the words history and Manchester United into Amazon and the mind-boggling number of results returned suggest that this subject is perhaps over-subscribed. In the last 12 months alone there have been a plethora of retrospectives – so how can a new “biography” of United be justified?
It's more than a question of semantics down under, writes Matthew Hall
This has been a long hot summer for Australian soccer fans. Sorry – football fans. The wording is important. Australia kicked off 2005 with the Australian Soccer Association changing its name to Football Federation Australia and decreeing that the game will be officially referred to by its proper name rather than soccer.