Search: 'Billy Meredith'

John Charles was arguably Wales's greatest ever sportman. Huw Richards remembers the career of a footballer who could have traded his boots for boxing gloves

Last year John Charles said: “Only grandfathers remember me now.” How wrong he was was shown by well observed minutes’ of silence at venues as diverse as Kidderminster (playing his home town Swansea), Manchester United (v Leeds) and Bologna (v Juventus) and the tribute, moving in its unexpectedness, from Leeds’ extremely ungrandfatherly Alan Smith.

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With footballers receiving unprecedented levels of public attention, Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association, talked to WSC about the things that keep him busy

There has been a series of violent incidents in high-profile matches lately. Are footballers getting out of control?
It’s always been difficult. We have tried all sorts over the years. We’ve worked to make sure that players know the laws of the game, we’ve got referees to visit clubs, we’ve tried to have ex-players as referees. One thing I was disappointed about over this past weekend [February 12 – involving the games at Chelsea v Wimbledon, Newcastle v Man Utd and Leeds v Spurs] is that referees lately seemed to have grasped that we were out of touch with the rest of the world and that not every foul deserved a caution. We saw some great games as a result, then the wheels came off. Someone asked me, where do you see football today, on Valentine’s day? I said, well, we don’t want any more massacres. But football is a microcosm of society. They’re saying to me “oh this is a really sad time for football” as though there is some­thing we could do to make sure it would always be on the straight and narrow. I said we’ve had prisons since civilised society began and we’ve haven’t got less now. You can fill the prisons up but it doesn’t mean to say you’ve got law and order.

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John Harding pays tribute to Cliff Lloyd, the man who formed what is known today as the Professional Footballers Association

Cliff Lloyd, OBE, who died earlier this month, was the last link with the old Players’ Union, the organisation reformed by Billy Meredith back in 1907 and now known as the Professional Footballers Association. Indeed, Lloyd was one of the last to speak to Meredith when, in 1957, he visited the ailing Welshman in his Manchester home. Lloyd recalled that Meredith had a string of  medals in a box beneath his bed which, he pointed out, had done little for him in financial terms.

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Match-fixing has always been in football. Simon Craig looks at the murky history

The lights went out at Upton Park and at Selhurst, and might yet have followed suit at The Valley and up to eight other grounds over the country.

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Joyce Woolridge explains why a guided tour of Old Trafford left her with mixed feelings

A confused Japanese woman on Piccadilly Metro Station had asked me, in what amounted to sign language, what tram she needed to board to get to Old Trafford. She waved a photocopied tourist information sheet which presumably suggested that there was only one place worth visiting in England outside London, and that was the self-styled Theatre of Dreams.

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