He has been at Chelsea since before the fall of the Berlin wall, yet has played barely 100 games. Mike Ticher looks at the enigma of the underemployed keeper
“Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish that man would go away.”
Every club now has a community scheme, but some are much more effective than others. We looked at how two first division clubs have tried to balance ambitions on the field and engagement with their local area. Millwall chairman Theo Paphitis outlines his strategy to Andy Lyons
Is there a tension between trying to get Millwall into the Premiership and trying to maintain the community programmes the club has established?
No, they go hand in glove. Without the community you haven’t got a football club. The community scheme is about remembering your roots. If we get some success on the playing side along the way then that’s great too, but it shouldn’t happen in a way that prejudices the connection with the community. Without the club funding our community scheme couldn’t operate but it is run separately from the club as a charitable trust. We have just taken on the Lions Centre, which is what used to be the council leisure centre around the corner and that is the hub of our operations. What we’ve got here dedicated to community is probably more than what a lot of people have got dedicated to their entire football club. That’s been key from the day I arrived. It means we can get kids to come to us. Going to schools with a couple of people in club tracksuits giving away a few freebies is fine, but actually geting them here to let them spend a day at the club, see the stadium, see the changing rooms, play on the five-a-side pitches with some professional FA qualified coaches – that’s totally different. Also, it allows us to have classrooms and computer equipment. Football is the key, but we don’t bring them in just to knock a ball about.
Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger explains why most German fans were not quite as upset by the result in Munich as their English counterparts would have liked
All German Sunday papers have sold out at Munich’s main railway station, that’s why everybody on the train to Frankfurt is now hunched over the Observer or the Sunday Times. Or maybe it’s because, in this coach, they’re all English. Apart from me. The two men from Leicester at my table have immersed themselves in pieces on a cricketer called Keith Parsons and the Ryder Cup, respectively. The six or eight fans from near Liverpool behind me are discussing with gusto an article that mentions “drunken English football fans”, “baton-wielding German riot police” and “blood pouring from wounds”.
Ulf Roosvald spent time with Tord Grip when England's assistant coach first came to London. Here he profiles the man who walks two steps behind Sven
It was the day of calm before the storm. Tord Grip prepared himself by renewing his wardrobe. He stepped inside a men’s outfitters in Soho and said a friendly good morning to the shopkeepers – in French to Karim from Algeria, in English to his colleague. Two months in London had been enough to become a regular. When he leaves he is carrying two bags with a new blazer, two pairs of trousers, three ties. “I’m not vain by any means, but I have to look good if I’m going to sit next to Svennis. He always wears tailored suits, you know.”
Phillip Cornwall & Tom Davies debate how having Sven-Göran Eriksson in charge of the national team will affect fan attitudes
Yes ~
Who would have thought, a year ago, that losing to Germany could be the best thing to happen to the English game in over 30 years? But, provided that we do what is necessary against the Greeks, how else to describe the appointment of Sven-Goran Eriksson?