The team were still a letdown, but England had more winning ways off the pitch, to the relief of Philip Cornwall

Six years ago, at Euro 2000, I was on the point of giving up on England. I had the masochistic streak needed to cope with events on the pitch, but not what came with it for much longer: the sullen contempt for anything and anyone who wasn’t English that radiated from so many of the team’s followers even if they weren’t expressing it in word, song, action. Some of these people seethed in their sleep.

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After the introduction of Wayne Rooney England fans became optimistic, but again the tournament ended in failure to convert in a shootout

The editorial in WSC 233, in which we suggested that England would grind their way through the group stage then go out to the first reasonable team they played, proved to be prophetic. But we can’t claim any credit for special insight. Anyone who has followed the various tribulations of the national team over the past couple of decades knew broadly what would happen at the 2006 World Cup. So, clearly, did the England players, even down to the sudden extra effort the ten men produced in the last hour against Portugal, bidding to set up at least another of the heroic defeats to which they seem mentally attuned and which, if you ignore some obvious truths about penalty shootouts, they achieved.

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Thursday 1 “I think I have arrived here at the perfect time,” says Andriy Shevchenko on joining Chelsea for £30 million. Arsenal are to be questioned over a loan payment made to their Belgian nursery club Beveren, which may have breached FIFA regulations. Ronnie Moore steps down as Oldham manager, to be replaced by John Sheridan.

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Marseille were first crowned League champions, then European Champions. They were stripped of the former though, reports Aaron Donaghy

The long-term significance
The best-supported and richest club in French football, Olympique de Marseille, beat AC Milan to win the first-ever Champions League on May 26, 1993. Twenty-four hours later, news broke that Marseille’s vital league match against Valenciennes just six days earlier had been fixed. It emerged that three Valenciennes players had been paid to “go easy” on Marseille, who were chasing a record fifth consecutive league title. Valenciennes defender Jacques Glassmann claimed that he and two of his colleagues were offered £30,000 to throw the match. Marseille were thus barred from the 1993‑94 Champions League by UEFA and stripped of their league title by the French FA, while three players and a Marseille director were banned from football. A year later they were further punished with enforced relegation, bankruptcy and the imprisonment of club president and millionaire entrepreneur Bernard Tapie. The whistle-blower Glassmann claimed to have been shunned by French clubs subsequently and wound down his career playing on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion.

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Dear WSC
While it was an otherwise fairly accurate piece culminating in stating what many of us believe (WSC 232), which is that Neil Warnock is an “offensive gobshite”, Pete Green lets himself down by recycling that old rubbish about Warnock spending his career “picking up ailing clubs off the floor and setting them back on their feet”. Not quite true. In the late Nineties, Stan Ternent guided Bury Football Club from the then Division Three to Division One with successive promotions, and kept us up in Division One while luminaries such as Manchester City were relegated from it (oh how we laughed when we beat them at Maine Road in the process), before buggering off to Burnley and leaving us to the mercy of the “Red Adair” of lower-league football. Warnock’s tenure at Gigg Lane started off in patronising fashion, referring to us as “a smashing little club”. He flooded the team with under-performers he had dragged with him from his previous clubs, turned up at Gigg Lane wearing a Sheffield United club tie while we were paying his wages, got us relegated to Division Two, then skulked off to Bramall Lane, taking some of our better players with him and paying peanuts for them into the bargain. Bury were then relegated to the bottom division, went into administration and nearly out of business. So please spare us the revisionist history about Warnock. If the truth be known, Stan was the Man who turned the Shakers around – Warnock destroyed his work. And yes, I will be looking for Sheffield United to be humiliated in every match they play next season
Howard Cover, Liverpool

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