XLeeds United and fiscal responsibility may not have belonged in the same sentence in years past, but as Duncan Young explains, they might just be turning it around

Ken Bates must be delighted that, despite the uproar surrounding ticket price rises at Leeds, crowds are up by 44 per cent. That is, of course, compared to the opening three home games of 1986-87, the season following Leeds’s last 14th place finish in the second tier. To find comparable gates to this season you need go back 18 seasons, to just after Leeds missed both promotion and an FA Cup final by minutes. The surprising thing is not that Leeds are getting crowds of 21,000 this season, but that they averaged 8,000 more in last year’s grim campaign directly following relegation.

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A Spanish football-themed thirtysomething comedy? Sounds like a formula for success, but as David Stubbs found out, no one was laughing

As a sometime film critic, I’m usually inclined to opt for foreign movies to review. This isn’t out of some cineaste snobbishness but simple logic. Whereas all kinds of Hollywood or, worse, UK-produced balderdash is liable to get a release in Britain, foreign movies that make it to the distribution stage here will generally have been through a rigorous sifting process, been nominated at one of the prestige European festivals, put up for the Palme D’Or and so forth. Hence, they’re more likely to be good.

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Is it too good to be true? Scotland has been longing for a club to break the Old Firm's dominance but, as Neil Forsyth asks, are Hearts stable enough?

The Scottish Premier League has long been a private title battle between the Old Firm with the other clubs reduced to contesting a UEFA Cup spot, derby wins and even the honour of being a top-six team after the league splits. This campaign has so far been as predictable as ever, but with a significant difference. The catalyst of Hearts’ incredible run (eight games, eight wins at the time of writing) is printed boldly on the team’s strips. Ukio Bankas is not just the team sponsor but also the Lithuanian bank part-owned by the club’s owner Vladimir Romanov. Since replacing former manager John Robertson with George Burley, Romanov has bankrolled an influx of foreign talent to the club that Burley has quickly gelled into a highly effective team.

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Cameron Carter struggles to see the funny side

It’s been a bit of a month for weak jokes. On September 15, John Helm interrupted his commentary on Bolton v Lokomotiv Plovdiv on Five to make a pun that is even now being investigated by forensic humorists in search of traces of comedic activity. John said: “Lokomotiv look rattled. Excuse the pun – Lokomotiv, rattled.” That was the entirety of his joke. Now we all know that his co-commentator that evening, Terry Butcher, is a brave lad who carries on playing when his head is broken, but even Terry bottled it when it came to asking for some form of explanation. Instead a wondering silence ensued until John returned to his day job.

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We're told it often enough, "the Premier League is the most exicting league in the world". But is it worth it?

At any particular moment the state of mind of many football fans is a fusion of cynicism and stoic despair, an outlook (leavened, of course, with brief bouts of bonhomie and joie de vivre) that we try to reflect. It’s not always the dominant view in most sections of the media, concerned more with selling the game, and especially “the most exciting league in the world”, than with reporting on it. But every so often what might be seen as the WSC default position comes back into vogue.

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