A new and impressive stadium is available for Euro 2012 but, as Jonathan Wilson explains, it may not actually see any football

Coming in from the airport, you drive over the brow of a hill and there before you, the Donbass Arena appears, a pulsing blue diamond embedded amid the slag heaps of industrial Donetsk. It is a magnificent site and it is, in truth, a magnificent stadium, but you do wonder whether it has become a metaphor for itself, a lone and perhaps superfluous point of light in a city struggling desperately with recession.

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Josh Widdicombe watches a remade film about football fighting

“London – The Eighties” the caption reads at the start of The Firm, and it is with brushstrokes this broad that Nick Love goes on to paint his latest picture of violence in days of yore. If coverage of the recent fighting at West Ham has taught us anything it’s that there are still a lot of people that find football hooliganism quite the turn on. Combine this with a yearning nostalgia for the Eighties that can surely only be shared by Norman Tebbit and T’Pau and you have The Firm.

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A plan to make fans in Italy carry ID cards has met opposition at all levels. Paul Virgo explains

When interior minister Roberto Maroni announced on a roasting August 15 bank holiday that next year Italian fans will need special club ID cards to see away games, the plan got a fittingly heated response. Ultras throughout Italy united in expressing outrage at the tessera del tifoso and their intention to fight it. The innovation brought the volcanic best out of Palermo chairman Maurizio Zamparini, who described it as “a police system, Fascist, a measure that goes against liberty”.

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Attending Tottenham's match at Portsmouth last year led to a traumatic experience  for Ian Trow, who has just been cleared of abusive chanting charges. Adam Powley takes up the case

The new football season had barely got underway before a handful of incidents involving supporters stirred old prejudices about fans being trouble makers. But while fighting at West Ham and trouble surrounding Emmanuel Adebayor’s goal celebration for Manchester City against Arsenal sparked predictable alarm, the experience of one supporter shows what can happen when innocent bystanders are tarnished by association.

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The hosts are coming to terms with new realities of the bottom division, financial hardship and predatory bigger clubs, while the visitors are happy to be playing their second season in the League. Charles Morris reports

I first went to Crewe Alexandra’s ground in early, wide-eyed childhood. Ever since it has been a place capable of conjuring up some much-needed magic amid the industrial surroundings of Coronation Street-style houses to the west and the town’s railway station and sidings to the east.

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