From Bolton’s bright spark to Tranmere reject and retirement aged 30, Helen Duff charts the downward spiral of a footballer who wanted to make love not war

Hope and disappointment were the competing themes of Sasa Curcic’s football career, but in the end the latter won decisively. By the time the Yugoslavia midfielder opted for early retirement two years ago, he had convinced football fans across a broad span of the planet that he was one part virtuoso to two parts woeful lummox. Remembered with fondness for his lud­icrous comments, he’s still reviled by those supporters who once saw him as a saviour and remains, in at least two English boroughs, the man least likely to be invited back to switch on the Christmas lights.

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Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia – British coaches are everywhere, reports Gavin Willacy. And if you’ve ever wondered what happened to Gus Caesar, read on

If the current trend of importing highly talented Chinese players in to the English Premier League continues, there will soon be more Asians earning a living playing football in the UK than there will Brits in Asia. But although the number of ex-pats on the pitch in the Orient is diminishing, British coaches are still much in demand.

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An Englishman you’ve never heard of who carries the football hopes of a nation of one billion people? That’s Stephen Constantine, as Dan Brennan explains

If the FA’s decision to make the FIFA Pro Licence a mandatory qualification is set to send managers up and down the country scrabbling for their revision notes, one man who won’t be suffering pre-exam nerves is Stephen Constantine. On paper, at least, Con­stantine is probably the most qualified British coach around. The FIFA A Licence and Full Badge Licence already feature on a managerial CV that runs to several pages, and he expects the Pro Licence to follow. At 40 he is one of the youngest coaches to sit on the FIFA instructors’ panel and is the only Englishman.

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Now the whole of the ground has gone, but for Tim Springett a piece of Southampton history vanished as long ago as 1981, when “progress” put paid to a very odd looking stand indeed

A Saturday afternoon in March was approaching the time of twilight when, having spent most of the match defending stoutly, Southampton’s opponents Bolton broke forward from the far end. The ball came to Hugh Curran on the edge of the penalty area, who took a shot. What happened from here on in I couldn’t tell you, since from my vantage (ha!) point I couldn’t see the goal at the near end. The next thing I did see though was Curran being mobbed by jubilant team-mates and the home players disconsolately placing the ball on the centre spot to kick off again. What on earth had happened in the meantime? As it was 1975 there was no instant replay screen or even a scoreboard in the ground to help me out, so I was left to my own powers of deduction. My opinion was that Bolton had scored. The following morning the classified results printed in the Sunday Express confirmed that I was, indeed, correct.

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In an extract from the new edition of Tor!, his book on the history of German football, Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger explains the ethnic make-up of the national side

On a cloudy Saturday, the first day of September 2001, England came to Munich for a crucial World Cup qualifier. On paper, things looked promising for Germany, who probably only needed a draw to go through to the finals. The country approached the match with op­timism, even anticipation, content with the job Rudi Völler had done so far. During his 13 months at the helm, the new national coach had put into action many of the ideas his two predecessors regarded as suicidal. Ger­many no longer played with a sweeper, although you could still have listed the formation as 3-5-2. However, it was the system Argentina had popularised during the 1998 World Cup, with a flat back three and a crowd­ed midfield that did most of the defending before the opposition even reached the last third of the pitch.

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