It’s 14 years since Napoli were Italian champions led by Diego but, as Roberto Gotta explains, while he has grown ever larger the club and crowds have shrunk alarmingly

Diego Maradona has not come back to Naples for a while. He’s visited Italy a number of times, accepting fees of up to £10,000 for appearances on local television stations, ski slopes (he stood in the snow in shorts), carnival parades and – although this was for free – children’s hospitals, the latter probably having made nurses and parents happier than the kids, who ob­viously had no idea that the chubby figure was once one of the world’s greatest footballers.

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Nottingham council have called Forest’s bluff over their cash crisis, leaving Al Needham and many fellow fans in no doubt  as to who is to blame for the problems at the City ground

It’s no fun at all being a supporter of Nottingham  Forest these days, but their latest twirl on the morbid carousel of financial mismanagement takes the bis­cuit, if not the whole packet. You’ll remember Forest – big club last century, won a few things, endearingly bonkers manager, held the world’s most jubilant relegation party, yo-yoed be­tween the Premiership and the First Division for a bit under assorted bosses. At time of writing, they have just hauled themselves out of a winless streak spanning 18 games and are staring relegation to the Second Division squarely in the face – but at least we could take comfort in the fact that we weren’t as financially ravaged as Notts County.

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Religion and football remain a potent and unpleasant mix. Dianne Millen finds the Old Firm may have ulterior reasons to distance themselves from bigotry.

When is an orange not an orange? When it’s a tang­erine, of course – or so the Rangers fans who gleefully donned the club’s notorious 2001-02 away strip would have liked the rest of Scotland to believe. At best ill-judged, at worst inflammatory, the strip drew an outcry from anti-sectarian groups. Few outside Ibrox believed the club was unaware of its connotations.

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Religion and football remain a potent and unpleasant mix. Robbie Meredith examines the problems on both sides of the border in Ireland

In 1998, in a routine attempt at male bonding, I took my son to his first international at Windsor Park to see Northern Ireland play Moldova. Our players wore green, but numerous fans sported Rangers scarves of red, white and blue or the purple and orange colours of the Orange Order. Many bellowed “No Surrender!” in the midst of the national anthem, while The Sash, the Protestant marching song, was sung regularly.

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Newspaper rumours of a Manchester United bid for Steven Gerrard set Ashley Shaw thinking about just how rare transfers involving Liverpool have been in  the modern era

As transfer stories go, Steven Gerrard’s recently ru­­moured move to Old Trafford would seem about as likely as an Osama Bin Laden peace mission to Washington. But why should this be? If Manchester United and Liverpool were ordinary businesses and a key member of staff spotted an opportunity for lucrative promotion at a rival company, then there would be few bars to a “transfer”.

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