Following their UEFA Cup run last season, Sorin Dumitrescu looks back on the finest hour of Steaua Bucharest, and one man in particular
Steaua Bucharest’s run in this season’s UEFA Cup brought the club to international attention for the first time since the 1980s, when they twice reached the final of the European Cup. Their triumph in 1986 against Barcelona was entirely down to one man, goalkeeper Helmuth Duckadam, who saved four penalties in Steaua’s 2-0 shootout victory.
After promotion back to the Football League, Ashley Shaw finds renewed optimism in a corner of the north-west
Few small clubs can match the fame of Accrington Stanley. Synonymous with a lost era, Stanley’s premature and unnecessary exit from the Football League in 1962 lent the club a certain romance, especially as, only a few years before, they had been riding high, attracting gates of more than 10,000 to Peel Park.
Manchester United's new deal with AIG is set to net them £14.1m a year. Steve Menary reports on the big business that is shirt sponsorship
That sponsorship is taking over football is a routine gripe from fans, but clubs are unlikely to agree. The total value of shirt sponsorship across the top flights of England, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain is £238 million this season, according to consultant Sports+Markt. That figure is 40 per cent up on 2000-01; no wonder Manchester United squeezed every pip out of their latest deal.
Simon Tyers reports that on European nights Gabby Logan shows her increasing propensity to wear yet more dark eye make up
The biennial search for the least thought-through cash-in on a major football tournament may have been settled right at the outset by the Budweiser Academy. Not only does the humour derive from the basic principle that Americans don’t know the first thing about soccer, a big comment to make when their national side are above England’s in FIFA’s rankings, but it appears whoever storyboarded the advert doesn’t even understand American sport. Bad enough that a real basketball coach, Kevin Cadle, is shown coaching gridiron footballers. Worse that we see a player collecting a punt from the goalkeeper and making off the other way with the ball in his hands, when, if he was aware of American football rules, he should be returning it towards the keeper’s end.
With candidate after candidate ruling themselves out of the race, who will take up the poisoned chalice that is the England job?
“What a mess this is,” said Graham Taylor of the latest developments in the selection of the new England coach. And there’s a man who knows about mess. It’s hard to disagree with him as we write, a few days after Luiz Felipe Scolari said no and on the eve of an expected announcement that Steve McClaren will shuffle up the bench to occupy the seat Sven-Göran Eriksson is to vacate. Time, obviously, to dispense with the men responsible for this debacle.