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Ever wanted to be a football pundit? Glen Wilson explains how easy it was to be mistaken for a virtual Andy Townsend

As Andy Gray took his final “boo” last month and emptied his desk of his telestrators and On The Buses DVDs, another much less prominent Andy also saw his media presence terminated. As Gray was exiting Sky Sports, Twitter was suspending the account of @AndyDTownsend, the satirical feed which had inadvertently found itself involved in the sexism scandals, having been mistaken by the Independent journalist Andy Herbert for the actual Andy Townsend.

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Simon Tyers watches ITV’s build up the Manchester derby, while Wayne Rooney’s Street Striker returns

This column recently speculated on the appeal to football show producers of David Ginola. He has to be coerced into saying anything of interest but nonetheless has the inbuilt advantages of a French accent and the fact that he’s going grey in a dignified fashion. For these people, Eric Cantona is the lodestone. Write in a couple of aphorisms, allow him to sparkle gently with a sideways look to camera and you’re away. Cantona turned up as the de facto centrepiece of Looking For Manchester, essentially ITV’s preview of a derby for which they had no broadcast rights. It did not promise much for City fans hoping for a fair hearing and, sure enough, all they got was Denis Law’s backheel and a brief clip of the 5-1 derby win in 1989.

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Patrick Kelly discusses the theatre production The Game, set in 1913, which is about football corruption in the North of England; an issue that still exists in the modern game

A corrupt business deal, a wealthy owner, a bribe to throw a crucial match. The latest production from renowned theatre company Northern Broadsides sounds like a contemporary take on modern football. Except that the script for The Game, which premieres in Halifax’s Viaduct Theatre on September 16, ahead of a national tour, was written in 1913.

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Events on the pitch in Italy were overshadowed by a bribery scandal involving several top clubs. Matthew Barker looks back on a memorable season in Serie A

The long-term significance
The fallout from the Calciopoli bribery scandals has yet to settle, with a number of phone-tap recordings surfacing in recent months. Inter, at the centre of new (unproven) accusations, are under increasing pressure to relinquish the 2005-06 Scudetto, awarded to them after it was stripped from Juventus. The bianconeri’s title from the 2004-05 season stands in the record books as void. The original sentencing was announced on July 14, 2006, less than a week after the Azzurri lifted the World Cup in Berlin. Of the top-tier clubs involved, Juventus were sent down to Serie B with a nine-point (originally 30-point) deduction for the following season. Lazio and Fiorentina’s points deductions were increased on appeal, from seven to 11 and 12 to 15 respectively, though both original punishments had included demotion to the second division. Reggina were deducted 11 points (originally 15), while Milan were docked eight (44) and, following an appeal, allowed into the following season’s Champions League, which they then went on to win.

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by Ossie Ardiles
Bantam Press, £18.99
Reviewed by Adam Powley
From WSC 275 January 2010

Buy this book

There’s a telling description of Ossie Ardiles that the World Cup winner recounts early on in this suitably idiosyncratic book. His unnamed former manager at Huracán joked: “You know what number you should be wearing? You should be wearing a question mark on your back!” Difficult to tackle on the pitch, Ardiles is similarly elusive to pin down on the page. His intelligence and insight is obvious but the reader is left with only a partial portrait.

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