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Chris Taylor & Craig Ellyard argue for and against the idea of scrapping the League Cup

Yes ~
Paul Scholes is not most people’s idea of a rebellious prima donna, so when the mild-mannered Manc refused to play in a match against Arsenal you knew some­thing was up. This season he’s been played out of position, left on the bench and generally messed ar­ound as his manager attempts to accommodate Ruud van Nistelrooy and Juan Sebastian Veron. All accepted without a murmur. “But for God’s sake,” you can im­agine him telling Sir Alex, “not the bloody League Cup!”

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Sunday 1 Blackburn move into the second promotion spot in the First Division with a 5-0 thrashing of Burnley, prompting Graeme Souness to issue a warning: “We’ll be treating every fixture like it’s the last game of our lives.” After a 1-0 home defeat by Wolves, Birmingham’s sights are now set no higher the play-offs, where they could yet be joined by Sheffield United, who win their local derby, 2-1 at Hillsborough. Leicester’s European hopes fade with a 2-0 defeat at Charlton, but Peter Taylor has identified the problem: “We are missing a footballer.”

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To kick-off a new series about trophies that are no longer with us Peter Collins recalls the distinctly lukewarm appeal of the Full Members Cup

Football chairmen abhor a vacuum. So when Eng­lish clubs were thrown out of European competition for an indefinite period after the Heysel disaster in 1985, it didn’t take long for someone to come up with the idea of a domestic cup competition that would make up for the lost glory and, most importantly, the lost revenue from all those European nights.

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Ian Plenderleith shows us websites from the top of the football hierachy, to the bottom.

There is no end of general football sites saturated from the top down with Premier this and that, but one website with the courage to eschew the tedium of big boy coverage is League Matters, which describes itself as the independent and dedicated guide to league football. And by that it means the Football League.

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