How many Titanic Tuesdays will there be?
Even more than usual, May looks like being a very good month for overblown football superlatives. It’s the big one; the even bigger one; the dream final. It’s a feast of football, a soccer apocalypse. Manchester United and Chelsea have been competing for three major trophies and don’t we all know it. These days it feels like it’s judgement day every day.
Neil Wallace on the year Bolton hit a ton, Man City managers came and went, and the players' union threatened a strike
The long-term significance
Expanding revenues from television became a source of conflict, with footballers pushed towards industrial action for the first time since the abolition of the maximum wage. In the summer of 1996, the Football League sought to reduce the share of the new TV deal that would go to the PFA. With over 90 per cent of the union’s members voting for a strike in October, the League finally agreed to their demand for five per cent of the income; the Premier League came to a similar agreement a year later. In 2001, however, strike action was threatened again before the PFA succeeded in holding on to five per cent of the next, hugely increased, Sky deal. And with the figures becoming ever greater, the strike threat of 1996 could recur again and again.X
Dear WSC
Why does Andy Gray keep saying “pick the bones out of that”? It’s an expression he’s come to use in every post-match analysis he does on Sky, usually in relation to a slow-motion replay of a goalmouth incident. But it’s become so frequent that it’s almost a verbal tic, as though he doesn’t realise he’s saying it. This suggests a deep-seated trauma. Could it be that he is haunted by an incident when he failed to pick the bones out of a fish, say, and consequently nearly choked while in a packed restaurant? Either that or he’s replying a vivid and unsettling dream. But it could be worse. Imagine the look of alarm on Richard Keys’ face as Andy stares into the middle distance and mutters: “The defence was as exposed as someone standing naked in front of everybody they went to school with, plus their mother and other female members of the family.”
James Potter, via email
There are still some excellent webzines about, but the intervention of the real world – aka family life – is taking its toll. Ian Plenderleith talks to the duo who have retired with Watford at (well, nearly) the top
When the internet first became a part of our daily lives around the mid-1990s, everyone who thought they had an opinion worth hearing rushed to sign up and let the world know their views. Football fans were among the surge of previously disenfranchised citizens ready to exploit the new age of ultra-democracy and a million club webzines were born.
Justin McCurry examines the issues facing clubs looking to conquer the Japanese market
It is a measure of English football’s global reach that the American owner of an English club has plans for commercial expansion in Asia. His description of Liverpool as a “franchise” might have upset traditionalists, but George Gillett’s enthusiasm about the commercial potential of the Far East has a predictable ring to it.