Some football sites want to tell you what you really need to know – but this month Ian Plenderleith celebrates those which go in the opposite direction and champion the glorious irrelevance of it all

 “Fascinating but spectacularly pointless” is a label that can be applied to many things in football – mascots, Alan Parry, the Rumbelows Sprint Challenge, Danny Wal­lace’s runs down the wing. To celebrate the game’s abund­ant tapestry of interesting but superfluous facts, people and memorabilia, On The Web this month unscientifically nom­inates a list (what could be more fascinating but pointless than a list?) of the top four Great But Useless websites.

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Not all revolutionaries are fondly remembered. Barney Ronay examines the controversial legacy of Charles Reep, football’s first tactical statistician 

Wing Commander Charles Reep has been called many things. Twenty years ago the Times dubbed him “The Human Computer of the Fabled Fifties”; an obituary described him more simply as “a football ana­lyst”; while a slightly empurpled Brian Glanville once declared him a member of FA coaching director Char­les Hughes’s “band of believers and acolytes”, the arch­angel of “a fanatical credo, a pseudo-religion”.

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Football commentator Jon Driscoll asks just what it takes for an ex-pro to be a pundit and recalls those he has worked with who suffered from foot-in mouth

Before the first football commentary I did for Talk Radio they told me they’d hired Andy Gray as the pundit. Excellent. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was right not to. They had hired Andy Gray the ex-Palace and Spurs midfielder. He was rubbish.

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New Age health expert Cameron Carter has cast away his CD of rainforest sounds and is here to promote a new route to inner wellness: televised football

We have heard people complaining about football on television. Occasionally I agree with them. Yes, it is true that Ray Stubbs and Mark Lawrenson act out a school play about two men arguing every Saturday lunchtime. I too feel discomfort at the spectacle of Garth Crooks constantly reaching for some higher meaning that poor, simple football and its participants cannot give him.

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It’s 37 years since Keith Peacock became the league’s first substitute. Philip Cornwall traces the changing role of the sub with the help of the man himself

Once upon a time, there were no substitutes. None. By the time I started understanding football, the mid-1970s, they were such an established part of the game that there was an emerging player soon to be known to all as Super Sub, and the idea that football had once been just 11 against 11 was very difficult to get my head around.

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