Dave Espley describes how quirks of geography and fluctuating fortunes on the field have left Stockport fans struggling to find a long-lasting rivalry of note

Oh, to have a natural rival. You followers of teams which share their town or city with another club don’t know you’re born. Despite a population approaching 300,000, the Stockport public can hardly find it in themselves to support one team, let alone two, with the result that County fans, over the years, have had a number of rivalries, based on various esoteric reasons.

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Goalkeeping fans, budding writers and followers of non-league football in Sussex all have their concerns addressed in  Ian Plenderleith's website round-up

The cyber-slimming of the past few years has seen the crash of numerous financially and conceptually flimsy foot­ball internet ventures, but late­ly some interesting in­de­pen- dent websites have em­erged from the digital carnage. While highly financed schemes have been bounced into the Deleted Items box, a trend for small-scale, hobbyist home­pages has slowly returned and yielded a few pleasant surprises.

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 Ben Lyttleton explains why Marco van Basten, back in football after years away, has the pedigree to become the next great Dutch coach

Marco van Basten will end his ten-year exile from foot­­ball later this year when he completes his coach­ing qualifications and all the signs are that he will be a more successful boss than his former Milan team-mates Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard.

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His name is enough to secure him a coaching licence, but Diego Maradona’s forays into management have convinced few of his credentials, reports Ben Backwell

Following Argentina’s disastrous 2002 World Cup cam­paign, Diego Maradona declared from his Cu­ban retreat that he was willing to take over coaching the Argentine national team “for free”. “I have always said, and I repeat, that I am willing to manage the team without charging a single peso,” said Maradona, ad­ding that he would put the team “in order”. According to polls carried out by local websites among Argentines then howling for the head of coach Rafael Bielsa, there were few takers, and the offer was discreetly ig­nored by the country’s football ­association (AFA).

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Barney Ronay examines why average players often make good bosses while star names struggle

It is a footballing axiom that great players rarely make great managers. No swag-bag of playing honours, no bulging armoury of international caps can prepare a middle-aged footballing man for the vertiginous leap into management. In fact, the most successful man­agers in English football currently – Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger and Gérard Houllier – all eked out relatively mediocre play­ing careers.

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