Andrew Scowcroft explains why he's no longer willing to help service his club's debts as much as ten months in advance
During Crystal Palace’s 4-1 win over Blackpool, my friend Chris and I had the break-up conversation, the one in which I said: “I’m not renewing my season ticket.” Although October 3 seems ridiculously early to bring it up, it was the date that Crystal Palace published their season ticket brochure for 2010-11.
Al Needham observes the turbulence at Meadow Lane from the other side of the river
When it was announced in the summer that Notts County’s Supporters Trust had given their stripy monochrome cow of a club away to Munto Finance in exchange for a fistful of magic beans, the immediate reaction on the south side of the Trent was genuinely positive. If ever any club needed a sugar daddy, it was them. The thought of a proper cross-town rivalry was an exceedingly tempting one. And as a friend of mine said: “So what if they ended up in the Premier League while we fell out of the League? We’d still be patting them on the heads and saying ‘Are you in Europe, then? Good on yer, duck’ while we were playing Ilkeston Town.”
For Notts County fans the last few months have been like no other. Julian McDougall tries to keep up with things
In the second half of 2009 ordinary long-standing Notts County fans were subjected to a series of psycho-political experiments. Novelists from Charles Dickens to Margaret Atwood have stretched social reality to develop extreme scenarios which allow readers to explore their anxieties about the world – blending utopia and dystopia to produce complexity which reflects the ambiguous nature of human thought. But if a writer had made up events at Meadow Lane this season, their publisher would likely reject it as “too far-fetched”. Sven-Göran Eriksson arrives, Kasper Schmeichel signs, Sol Campbell comes, rumours link us to David Beckham, Roberto Carlos, Roberto Mancini and Kevin Keegan. Sol goes. The Guardian print allegations of corruption on a daily basis. Bust before bloody Christmas.
Sarah Gilmore attempts to understand the basis of the problems at Fratton Park and wonders just what the future might hold
On May 18, 2008, along with an estimated 250,000 people, I walked down to the seafront to celebrate Portsmouth’s FA Cup win. I’ve lived in the city since the mid-1980s and witnessed several pretty major events occurring here such as the commemoration of the D-Day landings and the bicentenary of the victory at Trafalgar. But neither of these events came close to involving virtually every person in the city and beyond.
It's taken a while, but football clubs are slowly getting an official presence on Facebook to match the fan-made pages. Mark Segal logs on to see who's ahead of the game and who's getting left behind
As Simon Cowell found out at the end of the year, you underestimate the power of Facebook at your peril. The campaign to make Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name the Christmas number one was a classic example of how social media, and Facebook in particular, is changing the way people connect with each other.