Matt Nation issues a heartfelt plea to footballers to get on with what they do best and stop, well, messing about
“We lost because we done too much fanny dangle,” Dave Bassett once fumed a couple of years back after Sheffield United had gone down without a fight to Coventry. He may well have been right, but this was probably scant use to his team when they looked to analyze the defeat, since they, along with most people on the planet, don’t even have an inkling of what fanny dangle is.
Like it or not, the Bosman law is now always with us. And the European Commissioner responsible for enforcing the judgement foresees more upheaval just around the corner, as Philip Cornwall investigates
There are two problems with covering the Bosman ruling. Firstly, like the Venables saga it is endlessly technical, has nothing to do with anything which is remotely attractive about following football and has no end in sight. Secondly – like the Venables saga – it requires acceptance of the world as it is, not as one would like it to be.
A version of football has been played in Japan for over a millenium, but no one has managed to win a match yet, as Jon Watts explains
Half a world away from Wembley, a crowd of about 500 people have gathered in the grounds of a small temple on the outskirts of Kyoto. In front of them a group of seven men and women, dressed in elaborately-patterned and brightly-coloured robes, stand in a small circle facing inwards. One of them, an elderly Japanese man, holds in his outstretched hands a round white football.
What can Howard Wilkinson do to turn around Leeds' fortunes after such a disappointing season? Don Watson has a suggestion
Perhaps it was symbolic that Aston Villa were the opposition. There had, in our first season back in the top division, been indications to the broader audience that Leeds had at last produced a team capable of superseding all those flickering monochrome memories of the Whites of the Sixties and rose-tinted visions of the smiley-badge Seventies. But it was the performance away to Aston Villa in November ’91, televised live on ITV, that showed the world, well the country anyway, just what a force the new order really was.
John Tandy makes a case for there being signs of a method in Barry Fry's madness
What’s it like watching Birmingham City these days? Imagine you’ve tuned in to Coronation Street. You want to find out whether Kev’s going to buy the garage. Instead you find two strangers that you’ve never seen before, and they’re making no sense at all. You check the Radio Times and discover that they only joined the cast the day before. They’ve not had time to learn any lines yet but they’re making it up as they go along. Then Reg Holdsworth disappears. It’ll turn out three weeks later that he’s been transferred to Brookside in part exchange for Barry Grant. You tune in the next day, and Curly’s been flogged to Pobol Y Cwm.