The conflict with Russia placed Georgian football in the forefront of the struggle to maintain morale, as Jonathan Wilson explains

Under normal circumstances, Wales’s friendly against Georgia in August would not have been of too much concern to anyone – perhaps not even those playing in it. As Russian military support for the separatist regions of South ­Ossetia and Abkhazia continued, however, and threatened at one point to escalate into a march on Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, it became for the visitors a rallying point.

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The Russian League plan to switch to playing through the winter, but James Appell wonders if anyone checked the weather forecast

Russia in winter is not an especially pleasant place, even when you’re wearing a thick coat. It can’t be any better wearing football kit. But the Russian Football Premier League (RFPL) have in recent years been considering moving the season of the top two divisions from summer to winter, in keeping with the majority of Europe’s major championships. Russia’s footballers will have been phoning through orders for thermal underwear since July 29 when the RFPL officially unveiled the plan to switch to an autumn-spring season by 2012. “The most important of our goals is the move to an autumn-spring system,” RFPL president Sergey Pryadkin told the press. “It’s difficult to give a fixed time-frame at this moment, but we expect this to occur in an even-numbered year where there will be a break for the European Championship or World Cup. It’s possible that it will be 2012. This is the way forward from a commercial point of view.”

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Just what the game needs to reconnect with its traditional fan base: a football-branded motorsport franchise. Al Needham witnesses the inaugural outing of Superleague Formula

It’s an obscenely crass and overblown spectacle that wastes millions of pounds a year on something that its detractors claim is nothing more than a season-long procession that clogs up the TV on Sundays, mainly decided by which teams have the most money. So why would motor­sport want anything to do with football?

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The long throw is back with a bang, as Rory Delap bamboozles Aston Villa. Glen Wilson champions this strong-arm tactic

August 23, 2008, will be noted as the day that a traditional bastion of British football made a comeback, via an injury-time winning goal in the shadow of Sir Stanley Matthews’s statue. Yes, the long throw-in is back.

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On October 15, England face a Belarus team whose coach used to be an informer for East Germany’s secret police. Paul Joyce reports

“Football trainers shouldn’t mix work and politics,” Belarus coach Bernd Stange stated in March. “That is dangerous.” His critics would argue that Stange has often used this tenet as an excuse to pursue his career while closing his eyes to the political and human consequences of his actions. A media-friendly, yet curiously elusive, figure, Stange was known in the former East Germany as “der Lügenbaron” – a modern-day Baron Münchhausen whose tall tales about his exploits needed to be taken with copious pinches of salt.

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