Roger Titford remembers Reading's 1994-95 season
Reading have only spent 11 seasons out of the lower divisions since we joined the League in 1920. For ten of those 11 seasons our main preoccupation was to stop falling back into the lower divisions. For one season alone we walked with the giants and might have replaced someone like Aston Villa or Everton in the Premiership. It was 1994-95 and Reading went famously from “2-0 up and a penalty” to lose to Bolton in the play-off final.
Phil Ball remembers Grimsby Town's 1979-80 season
There’s pleasure in purgatory. Thus speaks the Grimsby Town supporter, a strange creature stuck out in the wilds of north-east Lincolnshire, miles from anywhere, in a cut-off place with a cut-off mentality to boot. If you are handed the burden of following this club from an early age, you very soon learn that you are likely to spend the rest of your life having the piss taken out of you, a curious state of affairs which nevertheless hardens you and makes you all the more determined to face things out – to go into the world, as Val Doonican might have put it, walking straight and looking at your adversaries in the eye.
David Montrose remembers West Ham United's 1985-86 season
August, 1985: the omens were ominous. West Ham had ended the previous season just clear of relegation, and Paul Allen, Hammer of the Year, had since decamped to Spurs under freedom of contract – a trenchant vote of no-confidence. Few thought jockey-sized Mark Ward, ex-Oldham, would prove an adequate successor. The acquisition of St Mirren’s Frank McAvennie, meanwhile, aroused more mystification than anticipation. Who? Even his position was uncertain. Striker, midfielder?
The blueprint for the European Cup was laid down in pre-war Budapest, Vienna and Prague. Cris Freddi recalls the mayhem and magnificence of the Mitropa
The name derives from Mittel Europa (central Europe) and the Cup was the baby of Hugo Meisl, international referee turned secretary of the Austrian FA and manager of the national team. After the Second World War, it couldn’t compete with first the Latin Cup, then UEFA’s three major club competitions and, although it staggered on in one form or another until 1992, ended up no better than an Intertoto.
Is women's football is due to make a big breakthrough on to the UK sport scene? Two writers have conflicting opinions
Yes ~
“Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but it is hardly suitable for delicate boys.” So said Oscar Wilde. If the women’s game continues to develop at the pace witnessed during the past decade, this observation could soon gain common currency.