Oceania's masterplan to attract the attention of the football world paid off spectacularly as an avalanche of goals in the World Cup qualifiers set new records. Matthew Hall counted them all in
Nicky Salapu picked the ball from his net 57 times during his country’s four World Cup qualifiers over Easter, but then he is the goalkeeper for American Samoa, officially the worst national team in the world.
Ipswich, everyone's favourites to go down at the start of the season, look like ending it with the fair play title, manager of the year, golden boot and a place in Europe. Csaba Abrahall and Gavin Barber asked chairman David Sheepshanks where it had all gone right
Despite the success of this season, clubs like Ipswich cannot guarantee a perennial Premiership place. How difficult is it to plan for the future bearing in mind the financial gap between the Premiership and the Football League?
It’s not difficult to plan for the future but it’s more difficult to implement it. Five or six years ago, we sat down and I said: “Can we get back into the Premiership next season?” Everyone’s heads went down. “Can we get back into the Premiership the year after?” You know, “Who’s he?” “What about five years?” And they began to say yes, they thought we could. I said “Why?” and the first thing was youth, because by then the development of players from the youth team could have come to fruition and all the other component parts to it. Out of that was born a long-term plan. It wasn’t just the youth, it was the commercial management, the community, the press relations, the way in which we looked after our customers, our sense of ambition – being able to be more up front about what our aims and objectives were, not to live with this old-fashioned idea that there’s no crisis at Ipswich unless the wine runs out in the boardroom, which I felt wore really thin with the supporters – and I’m a supporter. The reason I came on the board in 1987 is because I wrote to [then chairman] Patrick Cobbold. I was a season ticket holder and said that I thought the PR of the board and the way in which the club was being run was terrible. I felt the whole situation was just drifting. This was after 17 great years of First Division football and European glory. I’ve always felt we’ve got to wear our ambition a bit more on our sleeves. It doesn’t mean we have to let go of the traditional values and high standards and friendliness as a football club, but we’ve got to really mean business. So that resulted in a plan being born, the five-year plan that everyone knows about. It wasn’t difficult to make the plan, it was much more difficult to implement it, because every year we were having to shoot ourselves in the foot by selling players. We had to make unpopular decisions. Although I’m a fan, I’m also responsible to the supporters, the shareholders and everybody else, as are my fellow directors, to look after the health of the club and to try and make the decisions that are in the best interests, short and long-term. So much of football is about short-term glory which leads so often to boom and bust. We’re not about that. That’s not down to me, this is a phenomenal team effort by everybody who’s worked for this football club. I certainly haven’t worked for the last six years to see this disappear in a puff of smoke. We’ve worked to get into this position so we can go on to make it even bigger and even better.
While English clubs shrug off the annual doom-laden analysis from financial commentators, Scotland's elite have been assessed as even flakier. Ken Gall reports on some alarming figures
Recent evidence would suggest that the required reading for Scottish Premier League chairmen during the close season would be a well-thumbed Guide to Who’s Cheap and Available Around the Second Divisions of Europe. However, following the publication in April of the remarkable sets of accounts by all SPL clubs, they would be well advised to pick up instead a copy of JK Galbraith’s The Great Crash, in which the eminent Harvard economist describes how speculation, profligacy and unsustainable financial practices led to the Wall Street crash of 1929.
Gunther Simmermacher reports on a culture of buck-passing in the aftermath of South Africa's latest disaster
Never again, the football establishment of South Africa vowed after more than 40 fans died at a match between the country’s most popular clubs, Soweto teams Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs. Fast forward a decade, and the well-meaning platitudes – voiced after 42 fans were crushed to death in the remote town of Orkney on January 13, 1991 – proved less than prophetic. On April 11, 43 more fans died outside Ellis Park stadium in Johannesburg during the Chiefs v Pirates derby.
While the Premiership clubs can afford costly measures to keep hooliganism out of their stadiums, the price is being paid lower down the leagues and out of sight of the camera. Mark Rowe reports
Graham Hodgetts has the lives of an admittedly less than full Villa Park in his hands. In the control room under a stand roof he stands with his shirt sleeves rolled up, spectacles dangling from his right hand. As Villa’s safety officer – all league clubs have one – he looks calm, but then he was a police officer for 30 years, retiring as superintendent. Leeds are visiting on a January midweek night. There are about a dozen people in the control room, half of them uniformed officers, looking at a dozen CCTV monitors and taking most interest in the images of fans on their feet at the back of a stand, well guarded by police and stewards.