Only Senegal prevented the reappearance of the same five African teams who made it to the World Cup in 1998. James Copnall reports on an exuberant upset

Successive wins against Morocco and Namibia pro­pelled Senegal to the World Cup for the first time ever, and launched hundreds of thousands of Sen­e­galese into the capital Dakar’s dusty streets for a party that lasted all night and long into the next day. A last-gasp 5-0 victory over the feeble Namibians, coupled with Egypt’s 1-1 draw away to Algeria, sealed the tightest of World Cup groups in favour of the “Lions of the Teranga”, who can now start planning their excursion to Japan and South Korea.

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Ken Sproat went abroad for his holiday, but all he found was a thousand lousy replica shirts and the noise of inane Premiership chatter rining in his ears

Suitcase packed, passport and money checked a dozen times, now it’s time to think of the other hol­iday calculation – who to avoid. Some choices are straightforward – there’s the bloke who looks like Hitler, or the man who reads computer magazines, his swimming trunks almost in rubbing proximity with his thick grey socks. Plus work col­leagues and anyone who might be Rodney Marsh or Eric Hall.

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Gillingham have enjoyed a huge transformation since 1992. But getting out of the Football League is almost certainly beyond the limit of their resources, says Haydn Parry

If you had told me a decade ago that Gillingham would finish the 2000-01 season in a comfortable mid-table berth in the First Division, I wouldn’t have be­lieved you – or I would have thought you meant the first division of the Kent League. The past decade has been a golden age for the Gills. After a century of scraping about in the lower divisions (and worse), we’ve pack-ed most of the remarkable moments in the club’s his- tory into ten years. Yet we’re not so intoxicated by our own success that we fail to recognise what is now prob­ably an unbreachable financial gap to the Prem­iership.

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The Football League has suffered by comparison since the Premier League began. But, says Roger Titford, in many ways the lower echelons are in rude health

“Are you lot all still here?” Surprisingly, almost ten years after the hugely successful launch of the Premier League the remnant Football League is still going – all present and correct. The FA’s Blueprint for Football, which incorporated the essential ideas for the Premier League in 1991, said little and seemed to care less about life in the Football League in the new era. Prospects were “not encouraging” and “radical action” was needed, though the only measures suggested were the fam­iliar ones: a reduction of four clubs, much ground-sharing and a return to reg­ionalised lower divisions. This pes­simism about the state of the Football League is still widely present among fans and the media today.

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With the Football League struggling to keep in touch with the Premiership at one end, closing the door on the conference at the other, and coping with the fallout from the Chesterfield affair, chief executive David Burns speaks to Andy Lyons and explains how fans can expect the league to fight its corner

The Football League has vastly increased the amount of money it earns from TV, but the gap with the Premier League is still growing. What, if anything, can be done about that?
I don’t believe the gap can be closed. The TV deals that are struck are superb for football, and that money will be spent within the game. But while the financial gap grows on the income side, it also grows on the expense side, so the bottom half of the Premiership don’t have a great financial advantage over, say, the top half of the First Division.

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