The new WSC contains both a spotters' guide football calendar, and our 2008-09 season preview – featuring every English league and SPL team.
Both are available with the latest issue of WSC on sale now.
The title race was over by Christmas, but in the end it wasn't that bad a season in League Two, writes Ron Hamilton
Over recent seasons it has become an increasingly popular pastime for League Two aficionados to point and sneer at the lopsided and avaricious Premier League, scoffing at the hype and hoopla in comparison to the somewhat earthier charms of football’s basement division. Yet while much of this scorn is predicated on the assumption that the lower leagues represent the last vestiges of football’s soul, the 2007-08 season has seen the fourth division’s occupation of the moral high ground somewhat undermined.
Points deductions have set the agenda in League One, writes Huw Richards
This was the Year of the Asterisk, with three teams – Leeds, Luton and Bournemouth – suffering points deductions. It also saw our Premier League-fixated national media, not for the first time, missing the point lower down. Hypnotised by the spectacle of Leeds and Nottingham Forest, regarded as Premier League members-in-exile, so far down the tree, they ignored the fact that much of the season was dominated, and the best-quality football played, by teams with a radically different provenance. Doncaster and Carlisle have both spent time in the Conference, while Swansea nearly went there only five years ago. If nobody quite reached the sublime heights attained by Blackpool in the later stages of 2006-07, there was some genuine quality.
This season's Championship has been a strange affair, says Tim Springett
The Championship, we are told, is the fifth richest football league in the world. That doesn’t alter the fact that it will always be the poor relation of the Premier League. The financial gulf between the two continues to grow and one could be forgiven for thinking that Derby’s abject experience this season served as a deterrent to many teams in the Championship to strive for promotion. It was a division that, in 2007-08, nobody seemed to want to win.
Halifax bounced back into the League once, but a failure to do so again has led to aseemingly terminal decline. Many want to keep football in the town but, writes Peter Brooksbank, they cannot agree how
Friday May 9, 2008. As the rest of the football world was being ordered by Sky to whip themselves into a frenzy for the final Premier League Sunday of the season, supporters of Conference strugglers Halifax Town spent their day glued to the internet, tapping the refresh button every other minute and glancing nervously at the clock. They weren’t, however, waiting on updates of a play-off game or a Trophy final. In a macabre parody of online minute-by-minute match reports, they were watching the Halifax Courier’s live updates from a meeting organised by administrators Begbies Traynor with the club and their owners, a last-ditch effort to keep Halifax Town alive. And, to the fans’ horror, it was not going at all well.