Cup fever is often a passing affliction, but Colchester will move to a new ground thanks to the passion created by the Chelsea game, as Graham Dunbar explains 

For Colchester United these are the best of times being played at the worst of places. Since the demise of Cambridge United a year ago introduced the Conference to the Abbey Stadium’s old-school charms, the unofficial mantle of “League’s worst ground” has passed on to Layer Road – and that is just the home-town opinion. (Which also points out that Layer Road’s immaculate pitch is a perfect stage for Champions League football while the Stamford Bridge surface would suit most League One sides.) 

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A Sheffield derby matches two sides with eyes on other divisions, one team playing in hope of a reawakening and the other living in fear of a continued slumber. Pete Green reports

 They populate the middle divisions of English professional football. They draw four or five times more supporters – who invariably believe themselves to be the longest- and hardest-suffering of any in the world – than most of the teams who beat them. They average one managerial sacking per year. Their snores roar through the midlands and reverberate round the hills of Sheffield. They are the sleeping giants. 

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  The joy felt in Togo and Angola at World Cup qualification risks turning to fear of humiliation after a poor continental championship. Ghana also have little to cheer about and, as Chris Taylor reports, only Ivory Coast of Africa’s five teams in Germany did really well in Egypt 

It was an exciting African Nations Cup tournament and when the champions were crowned in Cairo’s International Stadium they approached their debut in the forthcoming World Cup on German soil with high hopes. Little did they realise that disaster awaited them.

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  An attempt to measure racism in the politically charged world of Israeli football appears to be back-firing, reports Shaul Adar

With Maccabi Haifa on their way to a third consecutive championship, the Israeli league isn’t the most exciting, bar daily news about Russian oligarchs pumping in money. But every Monday another Israeli football league is a source of drama and shocks. Every week, 50 observers from New Israel Fund, an über-liberal institution for promoting democratic values, go to the premier league grounds and file reports on racist chanting. All those chants are calculated by a complicated mathematical equation based on the severity of the events, their length and the number of fans taking part; they end up negative points published in a league table.

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Is it offensive to taunt people with a word they use about themselves? Some believe neither Arsenal nor Spurs fans know what they’re saying, as Jon Spurling reports

In November 2005, Alan Sefton, the overseer of “Arsenal in the community”, announced that the club would be setting up five soccer schools across Israel. Arsenal are already involved in working with a number of primary schools in mixed Jewish/Muslim areas of London, and children are encouraged to co-present religious festivals before playing football together. Sefton later confirmed his and the club’s belief that “…football unites people of different classes, social groups, races and nationalities… We don’t want it to focus on divisions and tribalism.”

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