Dear WSC
Your piece on the delights of terracing in Germany (WSC 171) provided a stark juxtaposition with the book I am currently reading, Nick Varley’s Parklife, where remorselessly he denies the reader any escape from the fact that Hillsborough is the pivotal moment of modern English football. For a moment I bathed in a tide of nostalgia, wistful for the excitement and overwhelming passion of terrace culture. Seats were for spectators, not fans. I also recalled the crush amidst the Tottenham fans at the Leppings Lane end in 1981 referred to in Varley’s book as the disaster that nearly happened. Last month I watched another semi-final, this time sitting in the Stretford End with my children. I’m proud they share my undiminished enthusiasm for the game, but we would not be together, either at Old Trafford or in the Members end at White Hart Lane, if we had to stand. We go to every home game in perfect safety and the view is excellent. Earlier that day they had for the first time been exposed to a fraction of the experience of the old days, and the famous adage that clubs never learn. Several thousand fans arriving for the official coaches formed an orderly queue round the ground. Well past departure time the random arrival of coaches, no stewards, no information and only three police meant that we joined everyone else roaming up and down the High Road. The best informed copper had not been told where the coaches would pull up and advised us to wait and “scramble for a seat”. The club were sufficiently organised, however, to open up the club shop from 5am. Thanks to the fans there was no trouble. My kids were bewildered at this lack of organisation because their experience of supporting their team is so utterly different, and I am glad this is the case. They already know about the contempt with which football treats the fans (left home 4.30am, back home 12.45 am). The game remains indifferent to Hillsborough and the Taylor Report in so many ways, but if terraces return we will still be sitting down.
Alan Fisher, Tonbridge
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Jean Marie Weber is a tall, imposing man with a mane of white hair. At most big world and European football tournaments and a number of Olympic Games he’s been there, patrolling in the background, making sure the big sponsors are secure in the swankiest hotels of the world’s glitziest cities. He looked pleased in the Paris convention hall in 1998 when Sepp Blatter strolled to election victory to take the FIFA presidency.
Co-editor Paul Hutton mulls over The Absolute Game's revival and concludes the market for articles about Luncarty Juniors remains untapped
Sometime in April, presumably fairly early in the morning, a few hundred lovers of Scottish football will have had a bit of a fright. And that’s before having seen Craig Brown’s squad for the Poland game. Leafing through their morning mail they will have found a copy of The Absolute Game. Perhaps they gazed in a bemused way at the throwback design, wondering where they had last seen its like. And maybe they afforded themselves a wee smile as they realised their subscription money hadn’t been invested in some ropey dotcom after all.
Scotland's trailblazing fanzine The Absolute Game is making a comeback. But, wonders Tom Davies, has the printed word had its day as a tool for fans?
The welcome return of The Absolute Game seems bound to induce bouts of premature nostalgia in fans of a certain age and attitude; a throwback to the days of co-ordinated campaigns against ID cards and dodgy policing, to when the floor of Sportspages bookshop in London would be covered in inky outpourings of anger and calls to arms; to the days when jokes about haircuts and bad away kits really did seem like the cutting edge of radical humour.