Search: ' amateurs'

Wembley may not be full but for fans of two former League clubs the Blue Square play-off final represents more than just a day out. And for the players, there’s the chance to meet Martin O’Neill. Taylor Parkes was there

One of the innumerable problems with the concentration of power in 21st century football is the banalisation of the big event. Like boy pharaohs fed powdered gold, fans of the chosen few grow blase and faintly nauseous (“not Barcelona again!”), while the rest exist in a world of shadows and reflections, where up and down begin to lose their meaning. Days like this can restore your faith. Neither Cambridge nor Torquay are strangers to League football, so re-entry is an itch that must be scratched, more than an adventure – but for everyone involved, this is a very big deal. Wembley Park station is heaving, not just with shaven-headed forty-somethings but kids and old ladies, girlfriends and boyfriends, well-wishers and day-trippers (and a child in a Chelsea shirt who doesn’t quite get it). Grey skies and high winds don’t so much dampen the festive mood as accentuate the drama, as we weave through police horse dung down old Olympic Way, towards what will, for men of a certain age, always be “the new” Wembley Stadium.

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It is not only the FA Cup that mixes minnows with giants: county cups do so, too. Gavin Willacy champions these wrongly neglected events

Having despatched Northern League Second Division strugglers Prudhoe, Newcastle United face the University of Northumbria in the cup ­quarter-finals. This is not fantasy football, FIFA 08, or Football Manager. It’s the Northumberland Senior Cup, one of the many county cups that feature Premier League giants taking on not only players who are unknown outside of their front doors, but whole teams that few people have even heard of. In the midst of the 21st century sports business world, they are as much of an anachronism as the Boat Race, the ­Varsity Match or cricket festivals.

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Their 1990 victory over Austria traumatised the opposition and the Faroese have been reopening old wounds, reports Paul Joyce

The Faroes’ first competitive international, on September 12, 1990, has passed into football folklore. As none of the 18 islands that comprise the North Atlantic archipelago had a suitable grass pitch, their opening Euro 92 qualifier took place in Landskrona, Sweden. Their opponents, an Austria side that had just played at Italia 90, were so dismissive of the Faroese amateurs that striker Toni Polster predicted a 10‑0 landslide. The Austrians even cancelled their final training and went to watch Denmark play Wales in Copenhagen.

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Unless something is done to improve grassroots facilities, we will never be able to improve standards of play, writes Gavin Willacy

I’m all for selling off playing fields. The majority of our pitches are good for nothing but walking a dog or building houses on. That suggestion may be considered heresy by callers to phone-ins and fellow feature-writers, but selling them off could be the answer to one of English football’s biggest barriers to progress.

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Massimo Bonini turned down Italy to stay true to his native San Marino, reports Paul Virgo

Massimo Bonini was the strong, silent type behind Juventus’s success in the 1980s. His running and tackling in midfield provided a platform for the headline-grabbing exploits of Michel Platini, Paolo Rossi and Zbigniew Boniek further forward. Indeed, when the late Juve chairman Gianni Agnelli pulled Platini up for having a cigarette one day, the Frenchman famously quipped that “what really counts is that Bonini doesn’t smoke”.

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