Everyone agrees top footballers are playing too many games, except Roger Titford, who can remember when they endured far more without whining. Phil Ball and Neil McCarthy sum up the situation in Spain and France

England
Once again, the top clubs are calling for a reduction in the number of fixtures. Arsène Wenger (31 players used already this season) is to the fore of the com­plaints, while Alex  Ferguson’s strategy for managing his club’s 60-game workload is plain to see. “The recovery time is too short,” Wenger said after Arsenal’s defeat at Middlesbrough in March, which followed a midweek UEFA Cup match. “It is nonsense to have only two and a half days of preparation.”

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Barry Hearn didn't need the media to undermine Leyton Orient's anti-racist policy. As Dave Winter reports, he was quite capable of doing that himself

Apart from the regular awards for the best turned out pitch in their division, the greatest source of pride for many Leyton Orient fans in the recent years of failure has been the club’s imaginative community programme, featured in WSC 148. It has played a leading role in the Kick Racism Out Of Football campaign, yet the credibility of this award-winning scheme has been thrown into doubt by the recent comments of Orient’s chairman Barry Hearn.

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When Kosovo and Millwall are in the same sentence, it can only mean trouble. Lance Bellers explains how a non-existent racist incident ended up in the press

Last month, for the third year running, Millwall set aside one of their fixtures to act as a focus for the efforts the club makes to combat racism and to en­courage all sections of the south London community to come to the ground. This year, 1,500 local school kids were given free tickets to visit The New Den for the Blackpool game. The day was backed by Southwark and Lewisham councils and the Metropolitan Police.

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Blyth Spartans are still the best known non-League club from the north-east thanks to their 1978 FA Cup exploits. But, as Ken Sproat explains, their centenary year has not gone smoothly

Increasingly, the term “north-east football” means only Newcastle United, Sunderland and Middlesbrough. The arrival of George Reynolds has brought some cheap publicity to Darlington, but Hartlepool rarely get a mention and at non-League level Gates­head’s sporadic forays into the Conference attract little attention either nationally or locally.

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One works, the other doesn't. Joe Boyle reflects on the gulf between Sunderland and Newcastle when it comes to the way they treat their supporters

So, Alastair Campbell is worried that new Labour aren’t getting their message across. There is a simple remedy: speak to Lesley Callaghan, press office sup­remo at Sunderland. Callaghan could teach Campbell a thing or two about communication. In fact, she could probably tell him a thing or two about politics too. “Social inclusion,” she told me, “is at the heart of everything we do. Everybody at the club has to buy into that ethos.”

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