Despite their confidence earlier this year, frustrated Conference clubs are still waiting for the League to agree more promotion places to the Third Division. Louis Williamson reports

It’s the time of the year when things start to get a little sticky around the action area of the Nationwide League Third Division. Exeter, Carlisle, Torquay and the rest are preparing for the climax of a frantic struggle for survival. If the Conference has its way, though, in future years there will be two or even more League teams giving up their guaranteed place on the pools coupon come the end of the season.

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David Montrose asks the question: are grounds really where they say they are?

Let’s get it straight right now: West Ham do not play at Upton Park. Yes, yes, commentators and journalists may say different; yes, even the players and the manager, going by their public remarks, believe they play there. They don’t. It’s easy, of course, to see how the misconception arose. The team is called West Ham. Obviously, then, West Ham must be where they do their stuff. And this Upton Park you hear about – just has to be the stadium, hasn’t it?

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Photographer Tony Davis was commissioned to take pictures of all 92 League grounds for the new national football museum in Preston. On his travels he found squalor, splendour and some terrific shopping

I’m at Deepdale, home of the national football museum, trying to arrange a trip to Blackpool to photograph Bloomfield Road. But they don’t want me. Could I come back when the ground has been knocked down and redeveloped? With only a few weeks in which to finish the project, I tell them it has to be today. A series of phone calls later, I’m on the road to Blackpool. 

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Even by the standards of the Scottish League, Airdrie have sailed appalingly close to extinction in recent weeks. Ken Gall looks for someone to blame and comes up with a cast of thousands

While attention in Scotland was fixed, as ever, on the Old Firm, the real poignancy – again, as ever – lay elsewhere; at New Broomfield, the home of Airdrie­onians FC, where a major financial crisis looked like­ly to put an end to more than a century of senior football. The Dia­monds, and their putative financial and footballing saviour Steve Archibald, appeared to be on the verge of a potentially fatal defeat at the hands of the mean-spirited and seemingly impregnable defence of the club’s appointed liquidators, KPMG. The story, however, may be slightly less straightforward.

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Players from eastern Europe may soon have the same rights as their EU team-mates. Simon Evans does not think that is any reason to panic

The Bosman ruling may have had a massive impact on the game but until now its reach has been restricted to the borders of the European Union. Whatever deal is reached over the new transfer system, it is almost certain to involve an extension of the Bosman principle to those countries with associate agreements and trade deals with the EU – and that means most of eastern Europe.

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