Cris Freddi takes us through the seasons he'd rather forget
We’re talking mainly postwar here, if only because there were fewer competitions before it. England had a bad season in 1928-29, beaten by a last-minute goal direct from a corner at Hampden and 4-3 in Madrid, their first defeat by a foreign country – and 1901-02 was a bad one for everybody, especially the 25 who died in the first Ibrox disaster. But examples came thicker and faster after 1945.
With Bobby Gould having resigned, Nigel Harris tells us why the Welsh nation is optimistic about the future with Mark Hughes
While England and Scotland endured the media spew that was the “Battle of Britain” and the Republic battled in vain with Turkey, Welsh football’s television delight was Wrexham v Conwy in a BBC sponsored trophy (Wrexham won 1-0, in case you wondered).
Having been once billed as the 'Dream Team', Davy Millar explains how Lawrie McMenemy and his backroom team's reign with Northern Ireland turned into a nightmare
And so another one bites the dust. Lawrie McMenemy is no longer the boss of Northern Ireland and his back-up team have gone with him. Joe Jordan, Pat Jennings and Under-21 manager Chris Nicholl are all looking for new jobs.
Two top-ten teams in their group and trips to war-torn countries and earthquake-affected Turkey made the Republic of Ireland's qualifying campaign tricky, but Piers Edwards tells us how they came so close to success
“For us it is a football match, for them it is a matter of life and death.” Ireland’s manager Mick McCarthy was actually talking about the earthquake in Turkey, but he may as well have been discussing the football. For the Irish, it was another unbelievable episode in a campaign full of them. For Turkey, the earthquake meant the nation desperately craved the opportunity for celebration that the play-off promised.
The 'Battle of Britain' had all the papers talking, but as Archie MacGregor discovers, the tabloids can take things a little to far
So that was the Battle of Britain. To paraphrase an apposite remark, surely never in the history of Scottish journalism has so much hype and mindless posturing been so relentlessly sustained by so few. In Scotland, the sight of the national team once again performing its party piece of glorious failure has been greeted with something approaching fatalistic acceptance. Yet mixed in with the anguish, ennui and glee (at the Wembley result) there is also a tangible sense of relief that the goddam war is over. All that remains in the run-up to the season of goodwill is a deep-seated wish that the tabloids abide by the terms of the ceasefire. Some hope.