Leading your country or captaining Arsenal is not as easy as managing a lower-division team – at least judging from Tony Adams’ turbulent reign at Wycombe, writes Paul Lewis

There was general surprise when Wycombe Wand­erers appointed Tony Adams as manager back in November 2003. There was a similar reaction when he walked out, 12 months into his first shot at football management. The ending was a messy affair. Adams had spent the previous weekend mulling over the latest defeat – 1-0 at home to Yeovil, a scoreline that had taken his Football League record with Wycombe to nine wins and 20 draws from 46 games. By Tuesday morn­ing he had made up his mind, deciding the players would hear it first before a 9am training session. The news filtered back to the club offices and to the media. Adams switched off his mobile phone so the club were unable to contact him directly to confirm the reports. At around 1pm he released a press statement through his agent citing “personal reasons” as the cause of his departure, which was confirmed by a later meeting with a clearly furious chairman Ivor Beeks.

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The investigation took six years, but Juventus’s doctor has just been convicted of doping players. Matt Barker wonders if the 1990s record books will be rewritten

Having cake-walked qualification for the knockout stages of the Champions League and with the side sitting comfortably in pole position in Serie A, this is shaping up to be a vintage season for Juventus, under new coach Fabio Capello. But the findings and verdict of a recent anti-doping inquest threaten to taint the club’s image. The investigation was prompted by the comments of Zdenek Zeman, a former Roma, Lazio and Napoli coach, now at Lecce. In a 1998 magazine interview, the Czech declared it was “time for Italian football to come out of the pharmacy”, pointing the finger at Juve in particular and talking of a process that had “started with [Gianluca] Vialli and has arrived finally with [Alessandro] Del Piero”.

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Our regular update on clubs in crisis by Tom Davies

Harry Redknapp’s departure from Portsmouth has led to a flurry of speculation that he might be interested in taking over at Bournemouth, his former club. It’s all paper talk at present, but, whatever other baggage Redknapp might bring, his cash would come in handy for a club around £4.5 million in debt. The League One club narrowly avoided a stadium repossession order last month, brought by Bristol & West, who are owed £300,000. The order was only postponed until February, though, and the stringent terms of the B&W deal have been raising plenty of hackles, as the building society’s loan was arranged by Bournemouth president Stanley Cohen, who also happens to be a non-executive director of Bristol & West.

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As Mark Griffiths reports, the bleak situation at Wrexham is slipping further downhill and threatening to snowball

It is a misplaced notion that all troubled teams find a knight in shining armour and scrape through: Wrexham are in serious danger of oblivion. Set to go into administration on December 3, they aren’t merely, like some other clubs that have taken that step, the victims of financial mismanagement: they have an owner whose interests would appear to be best served by the club disappearing. The situation reported in WSC 212 has worsened considerably. Then it seemed majority shareholder Alex Hamilton hoped to profit from relocating the club and selling the land the Racecourse Ground occupies. It now appears that such activity was merely a smokescreen. Next July Wrexham will have to leave their stadium, home since 1873, having been served notice of eviction by Hamilton. By then their assets might well have all gone: transactions have been taking place without directors’ knowledge; managing director John Reames’s attempt to warn fans of what was going on led to club officials being ordered to rip the offending page out of the programme.

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John Williams fondly recalls one of the games great characters

I last saw Emlyn Hughes in the summer of 2004. He was working for the Football Association on a fans’ roadshow in Manchester as part of the preparations for Euro 2004. Emlyn’s job was to leaven the necessary talk about train times, policing and fan embassies in Portugal with some humorous and stirring England football reminiscences. He didn’t disappoint. On wobbly legs and occasionally slowing in speech, Yosser offered both barbs and bouquets for current England players, while recalling his own past battles for Liverpool and England. He, deservedly, had the audience glazed in utter admiration. The physical and psychological signs of the illness that finally claimed him were clear then, but it was hard to know whether the old fighter was winning his battle or bravely carrying on regardless. Sadly, it proved to be the latter.

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