Search: 'Sporting Lisbon'

Phil Town explains how a recent ruling could mean more good news for Porto, while Boavista hope for a reversal of fortunes

“This is our destiny” ran the stadium banners that accompanied FC Porto’s best ever season. They won four out of a possible five trophies – Portuguese Championship, Cup and Supertaça (between last season’s Champions and Cup-winners) and the Europa League – and faltered only twice. The League Cup went to Benfica and the open-top bus broke down on the way to the city-centre celebrations for the Europa League win.

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A promising career undone by lifestyle choices. Graham Willgoss tells the tale of a good-looking footballer who made quite an impression on Harry Redknapp

Portugal has produced its fair share of gifted footballers who have embraced style over substance. None, however, has done so more openly than Dani da Cruz Carvalho, the twinkle-toed attacking midfielder-cum-striker known simply as “Dani”, who spent nine games at West Ham on loan from Sporting Lisbon in the late winter of 1996.

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Tom Hunt examines the problems in the first year of Europe's revamped club competition – and how UEFA aren't really helping

When David Moyes reflects on Everton’s inaugural Europa League campaign, it will not only be the feeble 3-0 surrender at Sporting Lisbon that gets his hackles rising. The curious case of the Blues’ 5.45pm kick-off in the first leg of their round of 32 tie against Sporting on February 16 will have left a sour aftertaste too. Moyes was unhappy that Everton were forced into an unusual tea-time start and went so far as to accuse UEFA of “diminishing” their own competition. Not the best publicity for a tournament struggling to convince people of its worth but Moyes, who had consistently fielded his strongest team in it, warranted some sympathy.

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George Best at Hibs
by John Neil Munro
Birlinn, £9.99
Reviewed by Graham McColl
From WSC 289 March 2011

Buy this book

Scottish club football began the 1970s in the cigar-toting strata of European football, but by the end of the decade it was doing the equivalent of rummaging around looking for fag-ends. Hibernian, whose hugely progressive Turnbull's Tornadoes side had jousted with the likes of Sporting Lisbon and Liverpool early that decade, were chief among the Scottish game's derelicts by the closing weeks of 1979. The Edinburgh club was in an abject state and heading for relegation.

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Winning the Welsh Cup was an achievement but a run in Europe was how a now-defunct team from Llandudno Junction made history. Owen Amos remembers Borough FC's outing in the 1963 Cup-Winners Cup

The first Welsh club to win a European tie wasn’t Cardiff, Swansea or even Wrexham. It was Borough United, in the 1963-64 European Cup-Winners Cup. The Welsh Cup winners entered the Cup-Winners Cup every year, bar the first tournament, in 1960-61, when only ten teams entered. In 1961 Swansea Town (they became City in 1970) were beaten by East Germany’s Motor Jena. The year after Bangor City were beaten by Napoli, despite winning the first leg 2-0. Then came Borough.

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