Blair Liddell on moving to Cumbernauld and rowing with UEFA

How did the move to Cumbernauld affect Clyde’s gates?
Initially, 30,000 fans rolled up in our first ten games at Broadwood, mainly curious Cumbernauldians plus lapsed supporters crawling out of the wood-work. But league reconstruction put paid to any chances of us building on that and our new support dwind­led fast. The season we narrowly avoided relegation to the third, our average home gate was 600. We still have a hard-core support from the wilderness years and not all are holed up in the south-east of Glasgow as is commonly supposed. The biggest disappointment is despite our good form over the last three to four seasons, average crowds have stalled at around the 1,200 mark.

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Dear WSC
Re Ged Naughton’s query (Letters, WSC 197) as to why the grass was always darker green during the cup final on ITV, the answer is simple: the grass is always greener on the other side.
Andy Hargreaves, Southampton

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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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