20 June ~ With Euro 2016 nearly halfway though and the Champions League, FA and Scottish Cup finals barely behind us, it feels like the entire planet wants to attend a football match. Huge, packed venues dominate the media. And all I do is rue the fact I’ve never been in a six-figure crowd and that no ground in Europe can currently hold one.
Calls for a trial of new safe standing technology in the top two tiers are slowly starting to gather political support, Tom Hocking writesThe Safe Standing Roadshow has spent the last year showing fans and officials around the country how standing could work in the England’s top two divisions. On December 11, 2012 it arrived in Parliament. The event, held in conjunction with the Football Supporters’ Federation (FSF) and sponsored by Roger Godsiff MP, took the case for safe standing to the Attlee Suite of Portcullis House, across the road from Big Ben.
Construction began on the Stadion an der Gellerstrasse in July 1933, on former horseriding grounds to the north-west of the German city of Chemnitz. When it was opened in 1934 over 25,000 people crammed in to watch the first match there between PSV Chemnitz and SpVgg Greuther Fürth, which finished 5-1 to the home side. It now has an official capacity of 16,061 and is home to Chemnitzer FC of the 3rd Liga.
Mike Bayly on why England’s warm-up match against non-League opponents might not have been the best way to prepare for Euro 88One of the more curious international friendlies of recent times took place in June 1988. England had just qualified for the European Championships in Germany. A year earlier, on the return journey from a qualifying match in Turkey, the journalist Frank McGhee had approached Bobby Robson, suggesting England play a non-League team in their build-up to the tournament.
A late rally cannot prevent a deserved defeat for struggling Hereford United, as Paolo di Canio’s slick Swindon Town team edge closer towards promotion from League Two, writes Taylor ParkesI am from the Welsh end of the Midlands – barely 40 miles away – but Hereford is a mystery to me. A town that can only be reached by train from London via Abergavenny, it is one of those places everyone has heard of but no one knows that much about. A rather olde-worlde town centre; some tasty estates round the edge, most probably. Cider and cattle and Mott The Hoople, or were they from Ross-on-Wye? This part of the country is a strange place, anyway, lacking the South’s self-confidence, the North’s reflexive pride or even the cheery irreverence of the West Midlands proper. It is very pretty in parts, but – as I recall – prone to a quiet pessimism, a sense of being nowhere in particular. Especially here; especially today.