Search: 'Laurie Cunningham'

Theo Walcott has made a unique backward step – making his England Under-21 debut after playing for the senior side. But, asks Csaba Abrahall, what’s the point of the junior team?

Thirty years ago this month, an England team featuring Ray Wilkins, Glenn Hoddle and, um, Steve Sims took on Wales at Molineux in their country’s first Under-21 international. A European Under-23 tournament had taken place in various formats since 1967, but UEFA felt the gap between Under-18 and Under-23 football was too large and opted to fill it by lowering the age limit leading up to the 1978 European Championship.

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Bolton's final day defeat was enough to hand Forest promotion and set them on their way to their first league championship, writes Geoff Wallis

The long-term significance
Ian Greaves’ Bolton narrowly missed out on promotion for the second season running, this time on the last day. Third-placed Forest learnt of Bolton’s defeat to Wolves as their holiday-bound plane landed in Palma, Mallorca. Within the next two years Brian Clough and Peter Taylor’s team would win the League championship for the first (and probably only) time, win the League Cup twice and become European champions. Bolton finally went up in 1978.

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Ron Atkinson may be apologetic his infamous faux pas, but as David Stubbs writes, he isn't exactly convincing

“Whatever happened to forgiveness?” asked Ron Atkinson in plaintive response to a verbal pounding from Darcus Howe on Adrian Chiles’s documentary What Ron Said (BBC1, December 13). Howe was lambasting Atkinson for his infamous off-microphone outburst regarding Marcel Desailly, whom he dubbed “a fucking thick lazy nigger.” Howe suggested that Atkinson should be made to clean Rio Ferdinand’s boots for ten weeks, which Atkinson protested was “out of order”.

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What was your club's never-to-be-repeated greatest moment? For Limerick fan Emlyn Begley it was almost beating Real Madrid, as he recalls in the first of a series

There was a time when Real Madrid didn’t spend £40 million on a galáctico every summer. There was a time when Limerick FC were not bottom of the Irish First Division. There was a time when these two sides met.

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Is ITV's former pundit an idiot, a racist, or both? Al Needham wonders whether that is what matters most about a pundit's fall from grace, or whether his fate tells us how far we have come and how far we have to go

In the end, after all the finger-pointing, hair-shirt wearing, editorials and think-pieces, the only truly shocking thing about what Ron Atkinson said was that, for pretty much the first time in his public life, he came out with a phrase that came frighteningly close to plain English. He didn’t describe Marcel Desailly as “totally nigmatic with his workrate, to be enocular”. He refrained from mentioning that the Chelsea defender had been “giving it big lips all game”. He didn’t even advocate giving minorities the full gun, or bunging them in the mixer.

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