Matt Nation’s enjoyment of sixth-tier football in Germany has taken a hit. A long bike ride to the game was just the start of an afternoon of play-acting, clumsy football and dodgy sausages

Just as titles are proverbially won or lost on wet weekday evenings against the league’s dunces, cycling to a football match into a headwind without a handkerchief will make you reconsider whether you attend sixth-tier football because you like it or because you’ve not got the resources to do anything else. After 15 miles on a blustery trunk road, not even the most carefully placed boys’ brigade blow will prevent your cuffs from looking like they’ve been overrun by a battalion of molluscs. Getting to this game has made you look and feel disgusting. Your willingness to turn a blind eye is thus slightly lower than it might otherwise be.

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For Flamengo goalkeeper Bruno scoring goals has become as important as saving them and he’s not alone, says Robert Shaw

By common consent, the Vasco da Gama v Flamengo derby on March 22 was a relatively clean game marred by overzealous card-waving from referee Luiz Antonio Silva dos Santos. However, observers also pointed out that the official somehow missed a wild halfway-line follow-through by Flamengo goalkeeper Bruno that threatened to decapitate Vasco’s Edu Pina.

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Martín Palermo recently became Boca Juniors’ record goalscorer, though some historians disagree. Sam Kelly investigates

On March 1, in La Bombonera, Martín Palermo scored the opener in Boca Juniors’ 3‑1 win over Huracán. Luciano Figueroa would score the hosts’ other two, but the following day it was Palermo on the front pages. Not only was it his first goal – in his third appearance and first start – after six months out with a knee injury, but it was his 195th in official competition for the club. He had just become the highest goalscorer in Boca’s history. Except for one thing: there’s a player who got more than 195 goals for Boca. Roberto Cherro, whose spell with the club lasted from 1926 until 1938, scored 221 times, and Palermo is still some way off that.

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Jonathan Paxton recalls how an almost famous season for Stoke was ruined by manager and star player falling out

“All teams have their era,” my Grandad often tells me. “It’s just that Stoke’s came between 1939 and 1945.” Most biographies of Adolf Hitler focus on stronger crimes against humanity ahead of denying Stoke City their chance of winning silverware but few in the Potteries would argue that the club’s golden generation lost their best years to the war. In 1938-39 the team managed by former player Bob McGrory finished seventh playing some of the finest football in the country. Freddie Steele scored 26 goals at centre-forward, centre-half Neil Franklin was just out of the youth team and, on the right wing, the Potters had Hanley-born England superstar Stanley Matthews who made his debut aged 17 in 1932. Fans were rightly optimistic.

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John Turnbull reports on how a book about a Brit who played in the Soviet Union may not be all it seems

Russian studies expert Jim Riordan includes dramatic tales in his memoir published last year, Comrade Jim: The Spy Who Played For Spartak. Such as a live cockroach appearing in the author’s cabbage salad at Moscow’s Higher Party School, where Riordan, a member of the British Communist Party, had enrolled. He also encounters Nikita Khrushchev, Yuri Gagarin and Lev Yashin and plays cricket with members of the Cambridge spy ring. Journalists and football historians in Russia have said little about these incidents. But regarding the central claim in Riordan’s book – that he started two home matches for Spartak Moscow in 1963, becoming the only Westerner to play in the top tier of Soviet football – they have one word: “nonsense”.

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