The art of the programme is alive and well in the lower echelons. Owen Amos flicks through the pages
Once, football clubs had programmes. Now, they have matchday magazines. They have shiny covers and shameless names: Blue Review, Red Watch, or worse. They are, they stress, official – as if, somewhere, there’s a thriving market in knock-off Southend United matchday magazines. And, of course, cliche wafts into every corner, like smoke in a taxi. Worst of all, they cost £3.
Harry Pearson ponders whether there really is a collective football sensibility in the north-east and concludes that there probably isn’t
A dozen or so years ago I was sitting on a plane at Brussels airport. Our departure had been slightly delayed to allow passengers from a connecting flight to join us. Eventually they arrived and marched down the aisle to the rear of standard class, an elderly couple trailing the scent of sun tan oil and eau de cologne. Nothing unusual in that except that on closer inspection the pair turned out to be Newcastle United chairman Sir John Hall and his wife, Lady May.
Cameron Carter digests the latest verbal jousts between Rafa and Alex and co and detects more childish bickering than cunning mind-games
A significant proportion of advertisements these days, particularly the daytime ones, depict attractive, long-suffering women coping with a man who, though apparently the husband, could also be her idiot child. This is so that the female consumers being targeted can laugh knowingly to themselves about how childlike men are before nipping out to spend good money on Buttercup Eyelid Cleanser and dog insurance.
The world of Twitter is gaining more followers by the day, with clubs now producing their own official pages. Ian Plenderleith tries to work out what all the fuss is about
People who have never looked at Twitter (twitter.com) tend to ask: “What is Twitter actually supposed to be?” They used to ask the same things about email and blogs, but then at least a feasible, semi-coherent explanation could be given to even the technologically inept. Once you’ve been inside the super-inane world of Twitter, however, a response is much more challenging, because the point still eludes you. It’s perhaps best described as mankind’s best attempt to waste millions of hours since the invention of prayer.
With the Conference giving varying punishments to different clubs, fans are understandably unsure as to the reasoning behind their decisions. Matthew Gooding reports
Another season is reaching its climax, and the fate of football clubs up and down the country is slowly becoming clearer. But in the Conference, such trivial matters as final league position are often irrelevant when it comes to determining issues of demotion and promotion. For this is a division that has seen at least one club relegated for non-footballing reasons in each of the past three seasons, with Canvey Island and Boston suffering demotions, and Halifax and Scarborough going out of business all together and re-forming further down the pyramid.