The internet’s infinite size has led to a huge rise in the number of people writing about football, but as the game occupies more and more of cyberspace the clubs and FAs are frantically trying to control the message and quash negative headlines. Ian Plenderleith examines how the thought police are getting on

Complete control
In January, the German press said Bayern Munich had put together a list of 20 “relevant” media outlets, and that they were planning to grant information and interview access only to those they thought fit to cover the club. Bayern were presumably thinking that if they could keep a close eye on who was reporting on the team, they could better spin the stories and curb any criticism. It’s unlikely that there were many independent webzines on the list.

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'King Kev' gives lovers and haters in the media something to talk about. And do they ever

We are caught in a vicious circle of Geordiedom. A set of media-driven archetypes have dominated the back-page reports of Kevin Keegan’s return – hailed by both the Sun and the Daily Mirror as God On The Tyne – and are vigorously embraced by the very people they patronise. The main thrust of this onslaught was gleeful, ridiculous hyperbole about the special nature of Newcastle. Kenny Dalglish, communicating via the Daily Mail’s Steve Curry, saw St James’ Park as “a thrill centre where the password is passion”. In the Daily Telegraph, Henry Winter quickly identified “Toon Army foot soldiers”, reading news of Keegan’s arrival “with such awe, like scholars feeling the Dead Sea Scrolls, touching the words to check if they were really true”. The People’s Dave Kidd told of his father-in-law cutting short a holiday for Keegan in 1982: “Take the tent down, pet, we’re ganning home.” A standard-issue Geordie tale, until Kidd breathlessly informs us that he wasn’t “one of those tattooed, topless-in-the-snow Newcastle fans either. He was a coroner.” Thanks for that, Dave.

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There is something hugely significant about picking a leader in England and it is not lost on Fabio Capello

Fabio Capello will have a lot to adjust to in his new job. One issue is how to bolster the confidence of players who have become experts at losing; more specifically, there’s the question of how to put across technical instructions on the training ground given that his main coaching assistant, 70-year-old Italo Galbiati, doesn’t speak English and his new English assistant, Stuart Pearce, doesn’t speak Italian. Another problem that will be new to him is the importance attached to the captaincy – the Italian media may analyse a team selection in microscopic detail, but no one really cares who the captain is. Indeed, in many cases, it has simply been a question of giving the armband to whoever happens to have the most caps. How differently we do things here.

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England need to get Jack Warner on side if they hold any hope of hosting the 2018 World Cup

As you know, the England team won’t be too busy this summer. So they are arranging a friendly for June, in Trinidad to celebrate the centenary of the FA there. This will be the first time that a full England team have played in the Caribbean, which is surprising, though not more so than the fact that their only ever game in Anglophone Africa was in Durban in 2003. 

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A season in which northern clubs made a revival saw Aston Villa move into the third tier, by Keith Wilson

The long-term significance
The promotion of Blackpool and Huddersfield represented a brief revival for traditional northern clubs – against a prevailing trend. At the start of the 1960s Blackpool had been one of five Lancashire town teams in the First Division. By the end of that decade, with the abolition of the maximum wage badly affecting many smaller clubs, only Burnley were left – and they were to be relegated with Blackpool in 1970-71 (to return briefly in the mid‑1970s). Huddersfield, who had spent several seasons more at the top level than their west Yorkshire rivals Leeds, returned to Division Two after two seasons. Like Blackpool, they have spent much of the past 38 years in the bottom two divisions.

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