Dear WSC
An idea for a movie script, in which hard man Vinnie Jones plays a villain called, er, Hard Man. A large group of ex-footballers who’ve been on the receiving end of one of his so-called “tackles” lure him to a deserted warehouse and wallop the shite out of him.
Stephen J Bunting, Cambridge
The former boss of Creation Records, Alan McGee, recalls how Robert Fleck lured him to StaMford Bridge and tells how football rescued him from drugs – or was it the other way round?
Did you become a Rangers fan solely because of your upbringing? It must have been at the time when Celtic were the dominant club in Scotland.
When you’re seven it comes down to who you hang around with. I was at a Protestant school in the late Sixties. I knew some Celtic fans too but the first league match I was taken to by my dad was to see Rangers – although I actually saw Celtic first, in a pre-season match against Queens Park. We lived near Hampden and they were the local club. I used to watch them too for the first couple of years that I was interested in football. You could go when you were ten and you felt safe with a space of your own in this big ground.
Keith Butterick took on the job of persuading Halifax to keep a football club and invest in its shabby ground. Here's how he got on
You have always needed a sense of humour and irony to be a Halifax Town fan. The club is currently on the verge of having one of the finest grounds in the lower divisions and has never been so rich, the recent windfall of some £700,000 after Fulham sold Geoff Horsfield adding to already swollen coffers. Yet we are languishing at the bottom of the League and, at the time of writing, looking for a manager
For 100 years, Bradford City battled boardroom conservatism, economic decline and rival clubs of two codes – and won. Mike Harrison wonders when Leeds will notice
For a city with a metropolitan population of nearly half a million (more than Manchester and nearly twice the size of Newcastle), Bradford has rarely come close to fulfilling its potential as a football centre. In some ways the figure is misleading, including as it does the rural suburbs of Ilkley, Addingham, Menston and Burley. In addition, Bradford has had a growing Asian population since the 1960s, working in what remained of the wool industry. Very few have become regulars at Valley Parade, even though the ground lies in the heart of their community. While that does not reflect well on the club’s efforts to draw them in, it does help to explain why City, even in the Premier League, struggle with a relatively modest fan base.
Leeds United no longer have to look back in anger, says Dave Cohen. They have finally shed the burden of the club's great years under Don Revie
The history of Leeds United is the history of Don Revie and can be written as follows: Chapter One: Before Don Revie; Chapter Two: The Revie Years; and Chapter Three: The Revie Legacy.