Setanta’s Conference coverage has been surprisingly refreshing – more so than the station’s attempts to reinvent the wheel when it comes to sports news and the Premier League, believes Josh Widdicombe

If ITV Digital taught us one thing, it is that lower-league football is less popular with television audiences than a knitted monkey. So, like a team about to sign Nigel Quashie, you might think that someone should have warned Setanta of the mistakes of the past before they splashed out on 79 games from the Blue Square Premier (aka the Conference) to supplement their Premier League coverage.

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It is now 19 years since a non-League team knocked a top-flight side out of the FA Cup, but at Anfield David Nicholls saw Havant & Waterlooville come closer than anyone dared imagine

Comments flooding on to the havantandwaterlooville.net forum after the 4-2 replay win over Swansea suggested that the success had reaffirmed many fans’ faith in the FA Cup. Away ties had meant that Cup fever took a while to build, especially as the Hawks always have to fight Pompey for elbow room in the local press. The Hawks have struggled to establish a distinct identity, given their location on the edge of a large estate built to accommodate Portsmouth families displaced by Second World War bombs – the social housing is still administered by Portsmouth City Council, despite being well inside Havant Borough. However, the Cup run has now put H&W on the map, even internationally: magazines in Canada, Australia and Japan requested accreditation, while Spanish daily Marca dedicated a full page to the Anfield build-up.

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Sectarian chanting in Glasgow is in decline, but new unpleasantries have emerged. Now, the target for some at Rangers is Jock Stein. Alex Anderson is ashamed of what some of his fellow fans sing

Initially, I thought the jaunty new chant I heard at Ibrox last winter was “Red, White, Blue! Red, White, Blue!”. It was only when it reached my section of the ground that I realised those three syllables were actually “Big Jock Knew”. The “Big Jock” is Jock Stein, arguably the greatest manager Britain has produced and the nemesis of Rangers’ post-war domination in Scotland. He is slanderously and ridiculously accused of “knowing” of and failing to report the instances of child abuse that occurred in the late Sixties and early Seventies at Celtic Boys Club – a feeder club established in 1966 which coaches boys from under-tens to late teens. A former coach, Jim Torbert, was eventually jailed in 1998 for having molested several boys over a seven-year period.

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Relegation to League One, administration, Kevin Blackwell – Luton and Leeds share quite a lot. So why not add the points, too, when the teams meet at a packed-out if still fairly charmless Kenilworth Road, asks Neil Rose

There is something exciting about having Leeds United in town. Irritating though the whole concept of clubs being “big” or “small” is, there is no denying that Leeds have an aura about them. It’s an aura that attracts by far the largest league crowd of the season to Luton, as well as more police than every other home game combined. It generates an edgy atmosphere at times, punctuated by the odd, quickly subdued fight at both ends.

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A France midfielder and amateur film director, sacked for “insubordination”. Andy Brassell  looks at a player for whom the World Cup was the nadir not a peak

“I wouldn’t have liked to have left people indifferent about me.” As the former France midfielder Vikash Dhorasoo contemplated a football epitaph for himself having formally confirmed his retirement, at least one career objective had been comfortably fulfilled.

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