A North v South all-Irish encounter offers a rare and welcome point of Champions League intrigue in Belfast writes Robbie Meredith, but the slicker, more professional visitors win the day

Nestled alongside the Belfast docks and airport, the Oval, home of Northern Irish champions Glentoran, immediately transports the visitor back into history. The antiquated Main Stand is 50 years old and seems to have changed little over the years, while both ends of the ground are bracketed by crumbling semi-circular concrete terraces, where supporters are hemmed in by high steel fencing. Sitting in the Main Stand, I’m confronted by the sight of Sampson and Goliath, two huge and distinctive shipyard cranes which offer a glimpse into Belfast’s fading maritime past. When UEFA and the G14 dreamt up the Champions League to bring even more cash and glamour to Europe’s elite clubs, part of their rationale was to ensure that grounds like the Oval, and teams like Glentoran, were weeded out of the competition long before the armchair millions tuned in to see Milan or Manchester United.

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New film Green Street is the latest to attempt to tap into the apparently growing US market for English hooligan-chic. Barney Ronay emerges battered and baffled

West Ham United aren’t particularly happy about Lexi Alexander’s new film about English football hooligans, part of which was shot in and around the Boleyn Ground. They’re not the only ones. Having sat through the entire two hours, I’m not very happy about it either. Also distressed, presumably, will be a trailer full of casting agents, stylists, location managers and accent coaches, who between them have managed to recruit and train a platoon of football faces that veers from the Irish-Cockney-Dick-Van-Dyke turn of Pete, head of the GSE West Ham crew, and star name Elijah Wood’s pale and frankly laughable imitation of a hardened street-fighter. “It just doesn’t make any sense. What are you even doing here?” Wood’s character is asked by his sister Shannon half an hour into the film. Wood has just turned up on her doorstep in South Kensington. Moments earlier he was being expelled from Yale over some vague business to do with his preppy room-mate selling drugs. Shannon, you feel, might have a point.

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The game's uncertain financial climate is causing top flight players to fall further and faster than they once did, leaving Cameron Carter bewildered by the pace of the change

There’s a terrible feeling you get as you get older – the sense that your world and its familiar landscape are being discreetly removed by stage-hands while you’re not watching. John Thaw dies, child-smacking is driven underground, Club biscuits devolve to just one orange flavour; it feels, if you’re being particularly paranoid, that the way is being cleared, little by little, for your own exit. It doesn’t help that, amid the hype of big name transfers in summer, some familiar faces are slipping into retirement or semi-obscurity without so much as a goodbye.

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Do English coaches deserve more credit? Not if Mathias Svensson is to be believed, as Marcus Christenson reports

Sven-Göran Eriksson has been in charge of England for four and a half years – and yet no consensus seems to have developed on whether the Football Association was right to appoint the Swede as its first foreign manager. So the debate rages on. This summer Bristol Rovers manager Ian Atkins, having just completed the FA’s UEFA Pro Licence course, claimed that English coaches and managers get “the best training in the world” and added: “I think people are over-critical of English coaches and that is wrong.”

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Shaun Wright-Phillips' move to Chelsea has caused surprise and anguish for Manchester City fan, among them Ian Farrell, who nonetheless hopes that the transfer won't sully the reputation as one of the Premiership's good guys

Though controversial transfers always seem to bring odd cases of the sort of stagey shirt-burning antics so beloved by the media, most football fans in this cynical age tend to be well insulated against genuine outrage. But on Monday July 18th, something did happen that was as truly shocking as hearing that the Andrex puppy had savaged a child: Shaun Wright-Phillips became the bad guy.

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