Dear WSC
Along with Alastair Walker and Dave Bartley (Letters, WSC No 138 and 139), I also feel that too many of your correspondents are obsessive about subjects that are essentially trivial. I must point out, though, that Bam Bam wasn’t actually adopted in the conventional way. Barney and Betty Rubble found him.
Matthew Rees, Downend
In the wake of the David Unsworth saga John Williams & Sarah Gilmore examine how football treats women who are married to, or linked with, players
In football’s “good old days”, way before 30,000-quid-a-week contracts and multi-lingual team talks, players’ wives were seen by the canniest managers mainly as a means of keeping their prized young performers indoors, out of the papers and off the bevvy.
Somewhat to their own surprise, Reading fans have been presented with a big new ground. Roger Titford assesses early reactions to the Madejski Stadium
In terms of stadium comfort no English fans can have travelled so far so fast as Reading’s followers. Only 20 days after the final, final farewell to the rusting tin and crumbling concrete of Elm Park, last used for a testimonial, we welcomed “the clarity of vision and handsomeness of space” (the Times) of the Madejski Stadium. It was like 40 years of ground improvements in a day.
You may think that whatever you did this summer has long since been forgotten, but we know what you were up to and here's the evidence to prove it. Roger Titford mulls over the 1998 WSC readers' survey
As the international treadmill begins to turn again with the European Championship, now is a good time to remind you of the costs and sufferings involved in supporting your country. Here are the results of our 1998 World Cup survey, based on the answers sent in by 700 readers.
A driveway in Yorkshire will always mean something special to Dave Cohen and his chamois leather
Whenever I come to Leeds on the train, I still experience a shudder of recognition as we chug past Elland Road, even though the ground now resembles the hundreds of superstore complexes already passed on the way up from London, where I now live. But the most significant footballing address I remember is number 41, The Drive, Leeds 17 – the modest suburban semi that for a few years was the home of Peter “Hot Shot” Lorimer, and a mere ten minutes walk from my teenager abode.