Simon Inglis, the acclaimed writer on football grounds, turns his attention in a new biography to the long-forgotten Scot who designed so much we took for granted

Every football writer ends up becoming a bore on at least one pet subject, and I’m no different. Indeed there have been times when I’ve embarrassed even myself by rattling on about Archibald Leitch, the Scottish engineer whose football ground designs dominated the landscape of British football for most of the 20th century. And now I have written a whole book on Archie, as part of a new English Heritage series called Played in Britain, which seeks to put the study of sporting heritage on the same footing as that of other areas of popular architecture (cinemas, housing, retail, industrial and so on). And quite right too.

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Sven-Göran Eriksson’s team are top of their qualifying table and heading home to a shiny new stadium next year – but, as Philip Cornwall writes, the fans don’t seem to have much to sing about

It’s 9.52am and my train is at journey’s end – in a year or so’s time. As a kid on my way home from London I always felt a thrill just here, long before I first walked up close to the Twin Towers (FA Trophy final, 1982) and went inside what was clearly to me then the home of football, English or otherwise. On winter nights I would press my face up against the windows to negate the reflections, peer out, longingly, then pull back as we rattled through Wembley Central and see the impression my forehead had made on the glass.

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The victims of Heysel have been all but ignored by Juventus while the disaster’s lessons are unheeded in Italy, reports Matt Barker, to the frustration of the relatives

The pairing of Juventus and Liverpool in the quarter-finals of the Champions League has been heralded in the Italian press as an opportune moment to remember and pay tribute to the 39 lives lost on Heysel’s Section Z terracing.

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The death of 39 fans at the 1985 European Cup final was the culmination of an era when, as Mike Ticher recalls, English football appeared to be in terminal decline

It’s the timeworn right of each generation to complain that things are not what they used to be. In 1983, Geoffrey Pearson’s classic work Hooligan: A history of respectable fears showed how at any given point in the past 150 years public opinion held firmly that society’s current state of violence and mayhem contrasted with a peaceful “golden age”, consistently located about 20 years previously. Oddly, the very time he was writing has proved the exception to his rule. In football at least, no one in their right mind would want to risk a return to the mid-1980s.

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Ben Lyttleton tells us how Tino Asprilla's desperation for a new club is becoming reality

Tino Asprilla’s search for a job in Colombia has not been going well. This year, the ex-Newcastle striker became the fourth former Colombia international to appear on a prime-time reality TV show in the hope of ingratiating himself with the public and finding work for the future.

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