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Life at the top – Premier League preview

WSC readers and fanzine editors weigh up the season to come

ARSENAL

Boyd Hilton

How will your team do this season?
Third (again)

Who is going to be the most important figure at the club this season?
Arsène Wenger: he’s the most intelligent person ever to be associated with professional football anywhere in the world ever, so this is our chance to just sit back and enjoy whatever he comes up with…

If you had to come up with a new piece of merchandise to sell at the club shop what would it be?
Life-size, fully realistic, 100% physically accurate model of Ian Wright.

Which player at your club most divides the home support and why?
Ian Wright: bizarrely, a sizeable portion of the fans seems to think that we’d do better without him, that he’s too old, too selfish, or some such crackpot theory. These people are clearly insane or are from the Arsenal old school and simply can’t cope with too much pleasure.

Which element of the matchday environment would you most like to change?
Installing some kind of device which sends a near-fatal electric shock through anyone who shouts “Yiddos!” and make it easier to get a half-time cup of coffee, perhaps by getting rid of the enormous bar area in the North Bank and installing 10 coffee stalls.

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Brief encounters – September 1997

More tales of footballers privileged to meet WSC readers

“On a train from Birmingham to Manchester about seven years ago I saw legendary imbiber Paul McGrath. As we were both travelling ‘oop north’, I assumed he was on his way to see his Mum. Anyway, it was about 9am and he looked as if he had had a few gallons the night before, lounging in his seat looking surly and very hung over. I took the opportunity not to speak to him.”
Ian Peddie

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Welsh assembly

Football is becoming more popular in Wales, but Chris Hughes thinks there will soon be an unhealthy rivalry with the country's favourite sport

It’s never taken much to make the men who run Welsh football act like battery hens following an appointment with the guillotine. But it was still impossible to predict that the game in Wales would once again lapse into farce after the signing of a new, lucrative television contract… for rugby.

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Remote possibilities

Alan Pattullo tells the remarkable story of a tiny club from Andorra's adventure in the UEFA Cup

A principality dug into the Pyrenees between France and Spain, Andorra is not the pastoral haven you might assume. Thanks to its tax free status it has been variously described as “a drive-in supermarket” and “a cross between Shangri-La and Heathrow Duty Free”. Not surprisingly, football too has managed to breach its borders, though the Andorran Football Association was only founded in 1994. Now members of UEFA, they will be playing in the next set of European championship qualifiers.

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Clinical finish

He could have retired, he could even be dead. But Nwankwo Kanu's career has been resumed, as Osasu Obayiuwana explains

With the flurry of media hype surrounding the transfer of Ronaldo from Barcelona to Internazionale, you might have assumed that the Brazilian would be holding court on Sunday 27th July on his first appearance at the San Siro in a friendly against Manchester United. But the Milanese fans reserved their loudest applause for the 80th minute emergence of Nwanko Kanu, who had overcome supposedly insurmountable odds to resume his playing career.

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