Dear WSC
I am curious to know why you didn’t ask Howard Wilkinson (WSC 154) how he justified selling Cantona to Manchester Utd for £1 million. Great technical expertise there. If it came down to a spat between our Eric and the legendary Lee Chapman, I know who your readership would choose. Perhaps he’s a closet Man Utd fan. And Wilkinson is not the only one upset at his not getting the job at Arsenal. I am sure all my fellow Spurs fans are gutted too. Could he please apply if Arsène goes back to France?
Christopher Brandt, Tonbridge
After ten years of a united Berlin, Markus Hesselmann discovers that in football terms, Berlin still has an East and West feel
A pale young man with a strange haircut – short in front, very long at the back – and another in a hilarious star-spangled jersey made history with a handshake. On January 27, 1990, Olaf Seier, captain of 1FC Union from the GDR’s Oberliga, greeted Dirk Greiser, his counterpart at Hertha BSC, who were then playing in the Bundesliga’s second division. Two months after the Wall came down, 52,000 fans in the Olympic Stadium watched the first friendly between the two most popular Berlin teams.
Jamie Rainbow tells us about Teletext on the internet, the two main teams in the East Midlands and advice you need to invest in football
Combine the immediacy of Teletext with the scope of the internet and you’ve got the perfect medium for keeping abreast of all the latest football news. Or so you might think. The reality is something of a letdown. Although the Teletext site provides links to specially written club columns and is available for longer than the televised version, that’s about all it has to offer.
Milan have crashed out of Europe in the early stages. Richard Mason reports on how their charismatic owner is trying to prevent this ever happening again
Milan’s failure to secure even a place in the UEFA Cup after the first phase of the Champions League is richly ironic. They are the Italian champions, and yet they are the only one of the three Italian sides involved not to qualify for the next stage.
Celtic and Ajax are making noises again about the possibility of North Atlantic League, but Ken Gall is not to sure about the whole idea
In his unjustly neglected 1911 classic The Devil's Dictionary, the great American satirist Ambrose Bierce accurately defined once as “enough”. Sadly, however, Bierce’s assertion that there can be too much of a good thing seems anathema to the individuals in charge of the big European clubs.