Chris Taylor went to listen to a player with radical views on Italian football culture

A lecture called “Money, Politics and Violence: does Italian football have a future?” doesn’t sound a barrel of laughs. As one of the speakers, John Foot, author of Calcio, A History of Italian Football, once wrote: “Calcio is a stinking corpse riddled with maggots.” Foot now admits his outlook, written following the death of a policeman in Catania, was a little pessimistic. Now he compares the game to American televised wrestling – “violent, over-the-top, hysterical and fake” – but he still feels that it has a bright future.

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Dianne Millen reports on an attempted Scottish breakaway

Reports of the demise of the Scottish Football League (SFL) appear greatly exaggerated. Member clubs have overwhelmingly rejected the controversial proposal to create a second Scottish Premier League division – imaginatively entitled “SPL2”.

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A ticketing fiasco leads to hundreds of empty seats at a supposedly showpiece game. Bruce Wilkinson reports

Watching the FA Cup semi-final between Blackburn and Chelsea, you may have been surprised to see quite so many empty seats. The distance Chelsea supporters had to travel and the number of big games they have coming up were contributory factors, while Blackburn have had well publicised problems filling Ewood Park in the past couple of seasons. Ticket prices, however, also had a significant effect on the attendance.

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Poland and Ukraine win the race to host Euro 2012. Steve Menary reports

Was UEFA’s decision to award Euro 2012 to Poland and Ukraine really just extra punishment for match-fixing scandals and hooliganism in the favourite, Italy? The Italians had, after all, hosted the European Championship in 1968 and 1980 – albeit just four- and eight-team events respectively – and a World Cup in 1990. Poland and Ukraine have not hosted an international tournament of note. Apart from a four-team European Championship in Yugoslavia in 1976, no major tournament has ever been staged in eastern Europe.

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Cameron Carter listens to a landmark TV moment

Those of us who believed we would see a female Doctor Who before we died have been so far disappointed but a big gender breakthrough did occur last month as Jacqui Oatley provided commentary for the Fulham v Blackburn game on Match of the Day. Barring the nagging sensation that we were listening to the earnest trilling of a schoolboy competition winner, her summary of the game was, as you might expect, entirely satisfactory. There were a couple of St Hilary’s moments, as Zat Knight “saved the day” for Fulham with a goal-line clearance and Blackburn apparently had “two exquisite chances”, but nothing that accounted for the mostly negative response of a subsequent Daily Telegraph internet survey.

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