Dear WSC
As an avid AFC Wimbledon fan, I was amazed at Robert Jeffrey’s article (WSC 212) which makes the club look like it is in a total mess with constant bickering and some pretty unpleasant fans and management running the club. I am not sure how we could have won 42 league games out of 46 if we were in such turmoil. Things are never perfect, but for goodness’ sake the feeling for the club has never been stronger or more positive, while suggesting we treated Kevin Cooper like Tottenham did Sol Campbell is such a disgraceful distortion. Plus rubbish like “We have, quite simply, forgotten how to be happy.” I know no one at the club who even feels vaguely the same way, so perhaps he should think of doing something else on his weekends as it won’t get any better than this.
Richard Brazier, via email
The MLS seemed intent on turning its back on millions of Hispanic potential fans but, as Mike Woitalla relates, there is now an LA offshoot of a top Mexican team
Walt Whitman once offered his opinion on the USA’s cultural mix: “The British and German, valuable as they are in the concrete, already threaten excess. Something outside them, and to counterbalance them, is seriously needed… To that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts.” Walt said that in 1883, but it could be applied to the history of American soccer throughout its evolution. Not until 1996, when Major League Soccer launched, was America’s ever-increasing Hispanic population finally recognised as a key to success. MLS made signing Latin American stars a priority – to lure Hispanic fans and to create a skill-based style of play that would be more likely to entertain than the northern European game.
Ian Plenderleith trawls the web for minnows and finds that the smallest European football associations and their clubs are, like their teams out on the pitch, willing but not always particularly able
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A team on the slide with a glorious football past visits a city with a glorious maritime past whose club are on the up – at least until the 77th minute, as Cameron Carter describes
The six stages of grief following a home defeat are well known: shock, disbelief, anger, homicidal anger, blame, and resignation while watching Casualty. Plymouth fans should never have had to go through these on this weekend, but in the last 20 minutes Wolves snatched this game from them like the Childcatcher figure they had come to represent during the course of 90 minutes.
Where were you when you heard the news about Jimmy Glass's goal? In an excerpt from his autobiography, the goalkeeper recalls Carlisle United's JFK moment
We were well into added time when Scott Dobie hit a cross from the right. It came off a Plymouth defender and went out for a corner. I looked across at the manager, Nigel Pearson. At other times when I’ve wanted to run up the field, people have told me to go back. No faith in football to come up with a wonder moment. But now I thought, “Sod it.” What was there to lose? Nigel shrugged his shoulders and waved me up. I began my 100-yard dash up the pitch, hoping to arrive in the penalty area before Graham Anthony took the corner.