This is the time of year when the newspapers are filled with hopes for the coming year, with pleas for respect for referees, less diving and world peace. All very laudable but, really, we can’t be doing with any of it. There is only one thing we’ll ask for – that this year’s FA Cup isn’t won by one of the top three, or Liverpool. We’re even prepared to tolerate one of the curses of the modern age, tracking camera shots of whooping fans in jester hats and curly wigs, provided they are celebrating a victory for an underdog.
Alun Rogers on promotion, Cup upsets and having big red neighbours
Are home crowds as big as they could get?
Attendances have long been a sore point. It can’t help having Manchester and Liverpool a leisurely 45 minutes away, but the town and outlying population have been expanding at an incredible rate over the past ten years. The inhabitants display a keen affection for Poundland-style shops; it might just be a cheapskate attitude that afflicts attendances.
Dear WSC
I enjoyed Roger Titford’s nostalgic piece about half-time scoreboards (WSC 202). Many people will remember Huddersfield Town’s big scorebox at the old Leeds Road ground. It was manned from within and, although it couldn’t boast Fulham-style coloured lights, it was still a complicated business to fathom its information. Scores were displayed in three groups (A, B & C) of eight and unless you watched it constantly, you couldn’t be sure whether the scores shown were from Group A or Group B. I missed many a goal and other dramatic incidents early in second halves through over-attentiveness to my programme to see how (for example) Plymouth and Blackburn were getting on. It was usually 0-0.
Stuart Barker, Carlisle
The eternally controversial former Rangers goalkeeper took the high road to Elgin in the autumn – but, as Dan Brennan relates, the low road would have led, amazingly, to Brazil
For all its merits, Elgin is not Rio. Ask Andy Goram. This summer, the 39-year-old former Rangers goalkeeper appeared close to an improbable move to Brazilian top-flight side Botafogo, after a chance encounter with the club’s representatives in Selkirk, where he was organising a six-a-side tournament.
In the new edition of his book Morbo, Phil Ball meets the ever-polite people of Vigo and La Coruña, the north-western cities that have unexpectedly become Spain’s new football powerhouses, challenging Madrid and Barcelona from a weather-beaten land
In August 2002, most of Spain was covered by a wet blanket of stubborn grey cloud instead of enjoying the usual weeks of sunshine. Curiously, Galicia, the north-western region of Spain that normally suffers from an average of 320 days of rain a year, was enjoying its best summer for 50 years, baking under cloudless skies while the rest of the country shivered in the rain. Approaching a young couple on the beach at La Coruña, a reporter for Spain’s national television channel, TVE1, held out a microphone to the bikini-clad girl and asked her how she felt for the rest of Spain. With an indignant flick of her sun-bleached blonde hair, she tersely replied: “Que se jodan.” (“Fuck ’em.”) The rest of Spain was outraged, yet at the same time amused by the confirmation that the Galicians thought of Spain as a land-mass hardly worth considering.