Steve Evans put Boston on the football map, but only by organising a tax fraud that almost landed him in jail – and that many fans feel should have cost him his job. Peter Brooksbank reports

Moments after the end of the televised Conference-clinching win at Hayes in 2002, Boston United manager Steve Evans grinned into the Sky cameras, surrounded by champagne-soaked players and disbelieving fans. “Laps of honour are for champions,” he gloated, making reference to Dagenham boss Garry Hill, who had led his players on a premature lap of glory two months earlier. The slogan assumed instant cult status back in Boston, the club even plastering it on T-shirts in the official shop. Four years later, the phrase has a new twist on fans’ message boards: “Laps of honour are for champions, guilty pleas are for cheats.”

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Mike Newell’s outburst against a female assistant referee attracted more publicity, but Neil Rose and other Luton supporters were more interested by what the manager said about the club’s chairman

While Luton fans may be ambivalent about joining a campaign to ban female officials from men’s football, they would as one take to the streets for a campaign to ban Andy D’Urso.

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The demands for video replays to help referees grow ever more hysterical (especially when Blackburn or Bolton play). But Barney Ronay has seen more than enough already

In the last month calls for the use of video refereeing technology have become, if not deafening, then at least annoyingly insistent. After Blackburn’s 1-1 draw with Spurs in the Premiership, Mark Hughes demanded the introduction of technology “sooner rather than later”, presumably envisaging a dead-eyed über-ref hunched over his vast bank of screens somewhere in the bowels of Ewood Park. “When huge decisions at the top level have an impact on teams then something has to be done,” Hughes harrumphed, which will no doubt come as a great comfort to whichever top-level teams involved in huge decisions the Blackburn manager has in mind.

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Torquay's chairman challenges cheats. Nick House reports

The hint had been made in his programme notes. For the first time since primary school, Torquay’s new chairman Chris Roberts turned off Match of the Day rather than watch “the antics of these overpaid, scruple-less prima donnas”. What had begun as a “trickle of reprehensible incidents” had now turned into “a torrent driven by around a dozen Premier League players”.

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The SFA are looking at restructuring non-League football. Neil Forsyth reports

As seven non-League clubs take to the field in the Scottish Cup second round on December 9, they will signify more than the ever-lessening gap between the cream of Scottish non-League and the nether regions of the professional ranks. Their appearance and the now annual forays of such outfits to this stage and beyond seem to have finally forced football here to confront its increasingly unjustifiable closed-shop status.

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