A striker dropping through the divisions suddenly found a reverse gear at Cambridge United, to the surprise of John Morgan who followed his career to a fairy-tale climax

Comically poor strikers experience a type of humiliation reserved only for them. They are considered so hilarious that the mere mention of their names can raise giggles. Shipped out to teams in lower divisions, their confidence is shattered and can never be regained. Cam­bridge United fans have witnessed a rare example of a full recovery from this affliction.

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One part of football still believes the game is about fun, not finance. Gavin Willacy celebrates the volunteers whose predecessors created the schools' FA 100 years ago

Despite the major upheavals in both professional football and the education system in this country over the past decade, the English Schools’ Football Association has survived to celebrate its centenary this season. In November 1904, encouraged by the National Union of Teachers, a group of local association secretaries met in Birmingham to form the ESFA. The founder members included the major football metropolises of London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, Bolton, Bradford and Derby, along with Northampton, Herts and Luton, St Albans, Wordsley, Hickley and Aston Manor.

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With Euro 2004 and the G-14 slumping in the Champions League, it's time to send European football for a medical. To assess the game in their own countries and across the continent, Andy Lyons talked to Spanish journalist Guillem Balagué, Holland's Ernst Bouwes and France's Xavier Rivoire

This season’s Champions League last four contains only one G-14 club, Porto. Would they still consider a league of their own if their members were to fail regularly?
GB The new format is a compromise. It protects the big clubs, gives them second chances, while keeping the number of matches down. But the G-14 are not united. Real Madrid want to take one direction, Man Utd and Bayern want to do something slightly different. There is a new middle class coming in – Lyon, Valencia – who may decide differently. Bayern also wanted to stop Depor getting in to the G-14 because they fell out over the transfer of Roy Makaay. The Depor president, Augusto César Lendoiro, was one of the first to say clubs should be paid when players go on international duty. He will try to make it an enclosed league – and that sort of thing has been stalled.

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Do you ever see a picture of a player and come up confidently with half a dozen names for him? Matt Nation knows the feeling, especially with one former Arsenal man

A recent article on European Union expansion  highlighted the problems Slovenia faces in trying to convince people that it is who it says it is. People who try to point it out on a map usually end up putting their finger on Serbia & Montenegro. The flag gets confused with the Russian one. Even George W is convinced Slovenia is half of what used to be Czechoslovakia.

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Is David Beckham "the most famous person in the world"? Perhaps the most ubiquitous, with his affairs in the papers, his official lookalike aiming for the charts and his sleeping body in an art installation. Barney Ronay tries to work out what it all means

A spell abroad at a glamorous foreign club, a Gucci-clad celebrity wife, Eastern-themed parties at their palatial home, a bogus kidnap scare, a series of hushed-up extra-marital dalliances – and finally a homosexual affair with Paul Scholes. Actually, this last detail appears to be the only major distinction between the lifestyles of Conrad Gates, blond-highlighted Eng­land skipper in the television series Footballer’s Wives, and our own David Beckham. While Conrad happily puts it about in the showers, Becks, we assume, has yet to swing that way. Although nothing, it seems, is to be taken for granted. Over the last month we have been confronted with a new version of David Beckham. Gone is the uxorious cultural icon who once inspired Julie Burchill to exclaim that in the face of his “breathtaking boldness and beauty… the clamour and loutishness of modern celebrity recede”. In his place we have a leering philanderer, a preening fraud and the possessor of a secret “mistress phone” on which he “lays bare his deepest cravings”. 

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