Search: 'NASL'

Steve Wilson recalls a time when the biggest names in football turned out for a game of six-a-side. How come it never caught on?

Imagine that the Masters Football tournaments that help fill the void each summer were played during the season. Now imagine that, instead of the best-supported sides being regionally invited to knock together a roster of paunchy, balding alumni, each of the 20 Premier League clubs sent along a squad padded out with first team regulars. Madness? By today’s standards, perhaps, but back in the 1980s it was a regular, and entertaining, occurrence.

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Forty years ago the Atlanta Chiefs of the North American Soccer League played across the baseball infield, over gridiron markings and beside a smoking teepee – called into action for goal celebrations – to bring the city its first sports championship

Stadium demolition is something of an American art form. They typically attract crowds who chronicle the devastation for later enjoyment. The destruction of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium early one day in August 1997 was no different. Some 30,000 people turned out so they could experience first-hand the seismic jolt triggered by a chain-reaction explosion that in half a minute buried a brief three decades of sporting history.

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by Brad Friedel with Malcolm McClean
Orion, £18.99
Reviewed by David Wangerin
From WSC 268 June 2009 

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No colourful boots for Brad Friedel – no self-aggrandising tattoos, no trophy wife, and certainly no flamboyant hairstyles. But, almost inevitably these days, there is a book. Not that we should begrudge this Premier League stalwart a foray outside his penalty area; indeed, how a collegiate star from Ohio became one of England’s most dependable goalkeepers and a hero of the 2002 World Cup would seem to be a story worth reading.

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The Willie Johnston Story
by Tom Bullimore with Willie Johnston
Know the Score, £17.99
Reviewed by Alex Anderson
From WSC 265 March 2009 

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Featuring the most infamous hay fever remedy ever and 20 red cards in 20 years, Willie Johnston’s career is publishing gold dust. Yet by the end of this structureless, misspelled, style-free trudge of factual inaccuracies, you’re left astounded not by Johnston’s experiences but by author Tom Bullimore’s inability to provide a remotely commensurate book.

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by Brian Belton
John Blake, £17.99
Reviewed by David Wangerin
From WSC 256 June 2008 

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We’ll leave it to West Ham fans to decide whether Ade Coker (nine appearances in three seasons), Clive Charles (14 in four) and Clyde Best (174 in seven) represent the “East End Heroes” of the title. But “Stateside Kings”? If anybody associated with America’s egregious pansy sport even approached the status of a sovereign, they certainly weren’t playing for the Boston Minutemen or the Portland Timbers.

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