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Going down the tube

Some of the biggest global websites rely entirely on contributions from users. Ian Plenderleith looks at what two of them have to offer football fans and finds some artificial community spirit elsewhere

Going in to the “soccer” section of YouTube is a little like entering a massive second-hand record shop that has no categories or alphabetical order. You feel a shimmer of excitement, knowing there’s probably some good stuff in there somewhere, and possibly even everything you want. The difficulty, though, is wading through all the crap to find it.

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Capital losses

London clubs are shining at the highest levels, but some lesser lights in the city are in steep decline. Gavin Willacy charts the struggles of former semi-pro giants brought low in part by property prices

On August 15, Enfield FC marked the 25th anniversary of their first home game in the Conference. It was their first home game of the season, a local derby and, as on that day in 1981, was played alongside the A10. The car park was packed. Unfortunately, the drivers were there to play five-a-side next door to Ware FC, 13 miles from Enfield’s spiritual home. The home end was populated by just 13 Enfield fans and one pram (occupied), who bayed throughout their home defeat to Potters Bar Town in the Ryman League Division One North. 

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Rogerio Ceni

Tranmere's Gavin Ward's celebrated 80-yard goal against Orient leaves just another 63 to go to match the current king of goalscoring keepers, as Robert Shaw reports from Brazil

Liverpool fans may recall the São Paulo goalkeeper’s heroics in Tokyo last December, but the truly distinctive aspect of Rogerio Ceni is the havoc he wreaks at the other end. When Ceni’s delicately clipped free-kick and penalty salvaged a 2-2 draw for São Paulo against Cruzeiro on August 20, he set a world-record scoring tally for a keeper of 64 goals, two ahead of the Paraguayan José Luis Chilavert.

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Blackburn Olympic 1883

Many early FA Cup triumphs deserve to be just footnotes of a bygone age but, as Tom Green explains, that of Blackburn Olympic in the 1883 final was a turning point in the history of the game

 At the start of 1882-83, Blackburn Olympic weren’t even the best team in Blackburn. If anyone was going to challenge the public school old boys who still dominated the game, it would surely be Blackburn Rovers. They were the team with the money, the connections and the support – they had even poached Olympic’s captain, Joe Beverley.

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Montenegro

The latest split in the former Yugoslavia was the result of a vote rather than conflict, mercifully, with football playing its part in urging people to vote for independence, as Djordje Nikolic explains

Soon UEFA will have a 53rd member, Montenegro. The entity officially known as the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro lasted only three years; from 1992 to 2003 the two republics had formed what was left of Yugoslavia. In May the voters in Montenegro decided, narrowly, for independence. In the next few months they will become the sixth separate country created from what was Yugoslavia. Given the closeness of the referendum, it’s even possible that football influenced the outcome.

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