Haydn Parry looks at Gillingham's recent ups and downs

What’s the current state of the relationship between Gillingham fans and the club’s owner?
Paul Scally brought a much needed businessman’s approach when he took us out of receivership in 1995 and has had nothing but relative success since, with the rise to Division One for the first time. Priestfield has also been transformed and is no longer a Victorian curiosity-cum-health hazard. But he has a propensity for PR gaffes: banning for life the unofficial supporters’ club president and maintaining the feud in his programme notes; or changing the home kit from blue to white – a de­cision swiftly reversed after the fans got restless.

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Dear WSC
After “sick as a parrot” and “early doors”, it seem we must now brace ourselves as another football cliche takes root. Ap­parent­ly, no one in the game can now re­fer to the patently obvious without reach­- ing for a little spurious gravitas by des- cribing it as “well documented”. In case it is not yet well documented just how irritating this affectation has become, I thought I’d get the ball rolling.
Jeffrey Prest, via email

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Ian Plenderleith has happy memories prompted by a shrine to Aberdeen's European heroes and toasts some hard-drinking yet non-fighting Vikings, but is distinctly unimpressed by the efforts of the G-14

Certain teams capture a boy’s imagination no matter their colours or home town. I’d never been to Aberdeen by the early 1980s, but the last Scottish team to win a European trophy (the 1983 Cup-Winners Cup) boasted one of those long-lost line-ups – crammed with tal­ented native names that never seemed to change – and rarely seemed to lose.

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They are simple in theory but increasingly contentious in practice, believes Philip Cornwall, because so much more can be at stake when a spot-kick is awarded today

That you have never seen everything the game has to offer was underlined once more in Istanbul on Oct­ober 11. Something as simple, in theory, as a penalty produced a variation that was new to me.

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Matt Nation celebrates an unkempt concrete corner of Hamburg where watching the game was far less entertaining than pushing your neighbours into the nettles – unless a visitor lost his rag

For some ears, Adolf-Jäger-Kampfbahn sounds resolutely and undeniably Teu­tonic, evoking images of combat drills, marching and Oliver Kahn-lookalikes with their faces set in neutral jumping over vaulting horses. However, in the mid-Nineties, the touchline terrace at Altona 93’s games was more playground than parade ground. People used to go there simply to muck about.

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