Thursday 1 Ottmar Hitzfeld turns down the job of German national coach. Bradford survive: their administrators are in talks with “interested parties”. MK Dons, meanwhile, prepare for their headlong dive through, uh, League One by coming out of administration. James Milner is set to join Newcastle while his ex-team-mate Mark Viduka completes a medical at Boro (peevishness may not show up in the tests).
A relaunched domestic league has done little to divert the attention of a jaded Chinese public from Europe, writes Gary Bowerman, but sights are set high for the future
Footballing frustration hangs heavily over China. With a population of 1.3 billion, an economy fast outgrowing all others and an ingrained passion for football, the Chinese constantly berate their national team for their lowly 64th place in FIFA’s rankings. To compound the fans’ frustration, China’s recent tour of Europe yielded a scoreless draw with Andorra, a 1-0 win over Algeria and a thumping 6-0 defeat by Barcelona, while the Under-23 team failed to qualify for the Athens Olympics.
Dear WSC
In his article Mind the Gap (WSC 209), which celebrated a rise in attendances in what used to be Division Two, Ed Parkinson did confess that as a fan of promoted Hartlepool he might be viewing the league with rose-tinted spectacles. Having read the article, I feel he must have gone the whole hog and had a full rose-tinted laser eye operation. Having witnessed many games in this division last season and having seen all the teams play at least once, I can honestly say that the standard of football never exceeded mediocre. Plymouth were the only good footballing side and they didn’t look anywhere near as good once Paul Sturrock swapped addresses on the south coast. As well as attributing the rise in attendances to what he considered to be “fine football”, Ed also noted that the struggles of “a few self-styled big clubs” such as Sheffield Wednesday provided pleasure for many. However, average attendances in Division Two were only up 6.5 per cent on the previous year and, with an average home attendance of 22,000 (almost twice that of any other team in the Division and four times more than Hartlepool), is it not more likely that it was the presence of “self-styled big club” Sheffield Wednesday that caused the upsurge in attendances rather than the alleged quality of the football?
Stuart Thorpe, via email
He was trumpeted as a star at ten, but is now drifting around the Ryman League at 20. Gavin Willacy traces the career of a player for whom it all happened way, way too soon
On a fans’ internet forum last November, someone calling themself Spankyplugs posed the question: “Sonny Pike – anyone remember him? Some little kid with an afro; they would periodically have him on Blue Peter or the Big Breakfast and yap on about how he will play for England, just because he was in the Ajax youth team. He must be old enough now, so where is he?”
The arrivals of Jose Mourinho and Rafael Benítez in England demonstrate that now it is managers, rather than players, who are the focus of the Premiership's hype machine, writes Jon Spurling
Bill Shankly’s prophecy – “One day, football managers will be as famous and as well paid as their players” – appears to be coming true. Thirty years after the Scot retired from the Liverpool job, the profiles of several Premiership managers, not to mention their wage demands, have never been higher. Players’ wage increases, according to a recent Deloitte & Touche report, are slowing considerably, increasing by an average of only eight per cent last season, as opposed to 25 per cent over each of the last three years. A select band of coaches seem set to close the financial gap on their young stars. Rafael Benítez will earn around £25,000 a week at Liverpool. Jose Mourinho is to be paid four times that amount at Chelsea.