Simon Goodley looks back on a successful but deeply uncomfortable season
I have an awful admission to make. I am a Notts County fan (that’s not it) and a strange thing has happened to me during our farcical season. Having had nothing much to celebrate since we won the old Third Division championship in 1998, I spent the majority of my team’s League Two title-winning season hoping that our challenge crumbled.
Footballers are increasingly viewed by extremes in the press. James Calder worries that we have become too quick to judge
I haven’t heard much about Titus Bramble lately. I can’t say I’ve followed his career assiduously but I’m definitely hearing less about him than I used to. Time was when he seemed to be everywhere – pranging cars, giving away soft goals and attracting cheap gags from anyone with an opinion on the game. Once the epitome of “comedy defending”, the term of choice for caustically humorous bloggers and writers everywhere, Bramble seems to have slipped out of the public eye. Well, out of my eye anyway.
In their third year in League One and having lost in the play-offs for the last two seasons, Leeds were desperate to claim promotion at The Valley against hosts already guaranteed a top-six finish. Barney Ronay reports
This was supposed to be a Leeds United promotion party. That was the idea, or at least the mathematical possibility, at the start of a balmy late-spring afternoon in the Kentish London suburbs south of the River Thames. By the end of a match that started at chest-jabbing, off-the-ball-bust-up speed and just sort of took things from there, it still felt like a Leeds United promotion party; that is, a painful, soul-searching, but still aggressively defiant type of party. A party attended, perhaps, solely by feisty, gin-swilling, leopard-print-clad divorcees continually on the verge of a Gloria Gaynor party piece.
Looking forward to a half-time video link-up with the England camp? Karl Sturgeon isn't
It’s easy to be cynical about modern football, so I’d like to begin with a positive statement – the World Cup is great. Even if you missed out on FIFA’s wheeze of selling match tickets in South African supermarkets and won’t be there yourself, the competition gives the summer shape. I doubt I’m the only person impatiently awaiting the World Cup wallcharts so that barbecues, beach trips and weddings can be slotted into the gaps between group deciders, or quarter-finals B and C.
Taylor Parkes watches a new film about Italia 90, a tournament that has assumed huge nostalgic significance for the English game
First published in 1991, Pete Davies’s All Played Out is still an astonishing read. An account of the author’s travels through Italy in a blazing World Cup summer, intercut with fly-on-the-wall stuff from an England camp to which he was granted an insane level of access (the subsequent tightening up is due in part to Davies himself, whose honesty cast the game’s top brass in a less than flattering light).