Previously best known for providing comedian Eric Bartholomew's stage name, the seaside resort could soon have a Football League team. Geoff Walters reports
Until 1995 my experience of watching Morecambe had been restricted to the Northern Premier League. Memories are of high-scoring games in dilapidated grounds featuring players who would have looked more at home on Blackpool beach, and the peculiar habit Morecambe had of scoring every time I decided to move to another position in the ground.
Amid heated debates (no, really) over restructuring non–league football, John Carter explains why Ryman Isthmian clubs are stuck in the middle of a biscuit
Isthmian League fans reckon Claremont Road’s climate has more in common with the Yukon than Cricklewood. But bone-chilling temperatures alone don’t explain why only 243 fans turned up for the mid-December clash between long-time rivals Hendon and Enfield. Yes, there were special circumstances: most of Enfield’s fans have “done a Wimbledon”, deserting to breakaway new boys Enfield Town; the club’s travelling support now typically consists of three men sharing a cup of Bovril. Nevertheless, many of the terrace foot-stampers that afternoon remember times when the fixture could be expected to draw ten times the paying customers it does today.
Tom Bower, whose investigations helped bring down Robert Maxwell, turns to football in his latest book, Broken Dreams. It left Harry Pearson screaming …
A decade or so ago Paul Kimmage, who would later ghost Tony Cascarino’s autobiography, wrote a book about his experiences as a professional cyclist. A Rough Ride told of systematic drug use by riders in races such as the Tour de France. In Britain, where bike racing ranks alongside clay-pigeon shooting, Kimmage was rewarded with the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. In Europe, where cycling is big news and big business, however, he was denounced by everybody from fellow riders to sports journalists as a fantasist and an embittered loser. The Irishman had predicted this would happen. There existed, he said, a code of silence within the world of cycling when it came to drug taking, extending from the mechanics to the upper echelons of cycling’s ruling bodies, from the team masseurs to all branches of the media.
In this extract from the BBC book Football Confidential 2, the reporters from Radio 5 Live show On The Line quiz agent Paul Stretford aout his company's shareholders, people with familiar names like Souness, O'Neill and Keegan
The first thing to meet you after walking through reception into the light, modern offices of the Proactive Sports Group plc is a life-size, waxwork figure of Peter Schmeichel, in full kit, poised to make a save. Initially it is a strange and disconcerting sight but the Dane has been an important figure in the rise of Proactive, one of the UK’s leading football agencies, which its current chief executive, Paul Stretford, started in his basement in 1987. High-profile Schmeichel is just one of the 260 clients the company now has worldwide.
Today, Chile; tomorrow, the world. Dave Hannigan reports on the roundabout route but boundless ambitions of the Palestinian Authority's national side
Counting down towards the start of the qualifying campaign for next year’s Asian Cup in China, Palestine are hopeful that an influx of some South American flair via the parentage rule will yield success on the field and positive publicity off it.