Michael Hughes looks at Jamie Cureton and Bristol Rovers
Boxing Day 2000 at the Memorial Stadium, Bristol and and obscene chants are being aimed at a visiting player. Just four months previously Jamie Cureton had beena terrace hero, scoring for Bristol Rovers on the opening day of the season. Now he was back playing for Reading and facing some vitriolic abuse.
Neil Reynolds examines Lee Hughes's relationship with his hometown club West Bromwich Albion
It’s often said that scoring a goal is better than sex. If that’s true, then losing a prolific goalscorer to another local team is like catching your wife in bed with your next door neighbour. And so it was with Lee Hughes.
The world is against Leeds United if you believe David O'Leary's vision of events. Mike Ticher takes issue with a spiky work of self-defence
Football clubs are not open institutions and successful managers, on the whole, are not warm and fuzzy people. To be really good at the job you have to be a hard bastard of one type or another. The same is true of many chairmen, who are led to concentrate so intensely on what seems best for their club that the whole of the outside world is filtered through the needs of XXFC. These are hardly original insights, but they are strongly reinforced by Leeds United On Trial. Despite the storm over the book’s amazingly crass timing and title, it probably provides more evidence about the nature of football clubs in general than it does about Leeds United and David O’Leary in particular.
The Bowyer and Woodgate case cast a shadow over efforts by Leeds United to throw off their old racist image. Soheb Panja compares their progress with that of West Ham
At Upton Park the flimsy Let’s Kick Racism Out Of Football sign is sandwiched by the pitch and the notorious Chicken Run, a small stretch at the corner of the East Lower Stand where it meets the Bobby Moore Stand. The most vitriolic abuse heard anywhere in the ground is aimed at petrified players wandering over to take corners (just ask David Beckham). From my comparatively placid vantage point in the West Stand, I always check who the unlucky left midfielder is on the opposing side. I think I can confidently say, however, that the abuse these days is always because of the colour of the player’s shirt and not the colour of his skin. I always think it is too much of a coincidence that the campaign’s sign should be placed where it is.
After his trial, Lee Bowyer found himself pilloried in the press and punished by his club. Leeds fan Ian Blake was one of the few who thought he got a raw deal
Lee Bowyer, declared not guilty by the British justice system, has nonetheless been convicted by the media, a cabinet minister, a former minister of sport, politicians, fans of other clubs and, last but not least, his own club, Leeds United. This despite the verdicts of a jury who, unlike many of his present accusers, considered all the evidence.