Dear WSC
I’m surprised that your editorial on Premiership managers working with tight budgets (WSC 208) failed to give a nod to Sam Allardyce, a man whose middle name really ought to be Prudence. The dismissive media shorthand is that Bolton play with a “band of foreign mercenaries”. The truth is that, under Allardyce, we’ve been hoping for the best while budgeting for the worst: signing out-of-contract players on short-term contracts so that all but the most basic monetary commitments could be jettisoned in the event of relegation. Sam’s realism has not just prevented financial overstretch, it’s revived the careers of malcontent players, brought sexy football to Lancashire and given us our best run in over 40 years. Yes, Megson and Curbishley deserve applause, but so too does Big Sam. Credit please.
Caleb Smith, via email
It's been 20 years since the island had a team in Serie A, but as Matt Barker writes, it looks as if Palermo and Messina will both be in the top flight next season
W ith Milan’s 17th Scudetto done and dusted, Italian attention has passed in recent weeks to the promotion chase, or rather marathon, down in Serie B. From next season Italy’s top division will expand to 20, a consequence of last year’s shenanigans that followed threats of legal action when Siena fielded an ineligible player. The Italian football federation reinstated the teams relegated from the second division (and took Fiorentina up from Serie C2 with them). Five sides will now go up from an expanded B, with a sixth playing off against Perugia.
Premiership crowds slipped a bit this season but, as John Morgan explains, it's boom time in Divisions One, Two, Three and beyond after yet another year of bumper attendances that put the rest of Europe to shame
The last thing you expect to find at a Dr Martens League Eastern Division game is a crowd. But when King’s Lynn played Histon in a top-of-the-table clash on Easter Monday there definitely was one: 1,617 people gathered together of their own free will in the same place. Empty seats in Lynn’s cavernous old wooden main stand were hard to find. The attendance might not seem much at first sight, but when you consider that the DML Eastern is on the seventh tier of English football, it becomes quite astonishing. It proved to be the highest gate of the season at that level, just one example of the attendance boom currently being experienced in England.
Ed Parkinson is delighted Hartlepool's stars are no longer thought worth a transfer to Chelsea as Stamford Bridge seems worlds apart from Victoria Park
As a follower of a newly promoted club who just achieved their highest league placing in 94 years of grim struggle, it’s tempting to view the Second Division through heavily rose-tinted specs. To me it seems a delightful, cheerful and friendly division which all clubs should visit regularly. A survey of the changes in the division since Hartlepool’s last visit in 1991 shows that rigorous asset-stripping of promoted teams seems to have fallen out of fashion. In 1991 the winners of the old Fourth Division were gleefully dismantled by middle-aged men in sheepskin coats – any promoted side would lose three or four key players to big clubs (defined as anyone who was in the First Division, had ever won a major trophy, or just had a big ground). This year all three upwardly mobile arrivals retained nine or ten of their first-choice promotion team.
Reading fan Roger Titford is worried by the state of the Nationwide as the Premiership fulls further clear
Pre-season favourites West Ham were always going to be the big story in this league, whatever they did. One of the top dozen clubs in the country (in theory) slumming it in the Nationwide; would it be ruin or revival? From a distance it sounded like a catalogue of disasters: the Rotherham dressing room; Glenn Roeder’s exit; the ruck with Reading over Alan Pardew’s contract; his failure to get a win for ages; losing a 3-0 lead to West Brom; backroom staff shown the door; Jermain Defoe collecting red cards like they were Monopoly properties before following David James out of the club; fans booing awful home performances; dismal displays in key away games; the board under pressure from shareholders. And yet like a real EastEnders script they kept it going to the last moments of the season.