Search: 'Alan Pardew'

When team selections are made by senior players rather than managers things can only end badly, writes Mark Brophy

To an outsider, it seems mad that a club that has been in the top four of the Premier League pretty much all season should be rumoured to be in turmoil and on the verge of dismissing their manager. Yet that is exactly the situation Chelsea and Andre Villas-Boas have found themselves in at various points, usually coinciding with a marginal dip in performance level or results. These are not the chief reasons for the speculation, however. Constantly looming in the background is the over-confident shadow of player power.

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By the time it was scrapped in 2008, the Intertoto Cup had little respect. In 1995, when English sides were first made to enter, it had even less. Owen Amos looks back at that first season

From 1961 to 1995, the Intertoto Cup was a summer tournament for mid-ranking, mainland European clubs. It offered pre-season football, modest prize money and – most importantly – kept the pools companies happy (Australian state league games having the same function here). By the mid-1990s, according to the November 1994 Intertoto newsletter – yes, there was one – the tournament was stagnating. The pools companies wanted better games, and bigger names. The organisers asked UEFA for help and, after some discussion, the Intertoto was made the fourth UEFA club competition.

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Charlton have gone from being a well-run Premier League club to an institution defined by calamitous mismanagement on and off the pitch. Mick Collins examines a cautionary tale

After two relegations in three years, Charlton fans have become used to looking for silver linings, however hard they’ve been to locate. Of very limited consolation, though, has been the ease with which we can now start a footballing conversation. No matter how remote the setting, a mention of your allegiance to anyone with even the vaguest of interest in the game, brings a guaranteed response: “What’s gone wrong at The Valley, then?”

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In May, St Andrew’s and the Madejski were cloaked in relegation doom. Now the hope of automatic promotion – with the play-off anxiety that accompanies that prospect – suffuses the meeting between the teams second and third in the Championship. Are they about to swap places? Roger Titford was there

Only an idiot or a football manager would say this was just another game, just another three points.  It stands like a giant sign post, the opening game of the second half of the Championship season, a potential turning point.  Birmingham City have occupied one of the automatic promotion spots from the off but they are beginning to splutter, trailing Wolves by six points. Reading are now only one behind the Blues. Both clubs were relegated from the Premier League last season and both are desperate to get back up before the parachute money runs out and they fall to parsimonious ignominy with a dull thud. It is second versus third in a three-horse race where only the first two get decent prizes and it is being run at an exceptional pace. We’re all off to witness and feel “momentum shift”. If I just wanted to see what happens I’d be better off at home watching it on Sky with my cough. But I’m making a rare away trip, despite Sky, because Reading will need every voice and body we can get in the stadium.

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So, the big-money takeover didn’t happen. As Charlton fans go back to what they know, Tom Green takes a rueful look at recent events

The announcement, when it came, was blunt. “The board of Charlton Athletic plc was today informed by Zabeel Investments that it will not be proceeding with the proposed acquisition.”

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