Ian Plenderleith looks back to the late 1970s, when Lincolnshire buzzed with football enthusiasm – for Nottingham Forest

Where is Lincolnshire? It’s the second biggest county in England after Yorkshire, but you’d be sur­prised how few people know the answer. Even some of the people who actually live there. A similar sense of bafflement can be seen etched on the face of anyone who might be asked the following: name three pro­fessional football clubs in Lin­coln­shire? And what have they ever won?

Read more…

Piers Pennington  takes on the mysteries of the Didcot triangle, with three teams that lurk around the periphery of the big time

Look at a map of England, go left from London and you’ll come across a footballing desert stretching across Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Somerset. Only three oases of league football offer succour to the parched lower division journeyman and many a camel towards the end of its career has found refreshment in Oxford, Reading or Swindon. In the middle of the three lies Didcot, the railway junction which links them, and this has persuaded some to call this area the Didcot Triangle.

Read more…

Thanks to the influx of foreign players, British football now attracts an increasing number of journalists from countries which previously paid it scant attention. We cornered three of them – Ronnie Reng from Germany, Marie-Jose Kleef from the Netherlands and Italian Filippo Ricci – to find out what impression it had made on them

When you first came to England, what was the one thing that most surprised you about football here?
Ronnie Reng That it’s still conducted in a childish manner – and I mean that in a positive way. Both in the way they play and how the supporters watch the game. One of the first matches I saw here was when Dortmund were playing at Man Utd. About half an hour before kick-off I thought I had the wrong day because there was nobody there. The fans didn’t show up until five minutes before kick off. I think that’s a good thing – they clap if they like something or they boo and then they go home. So it’s still pure entertainment. And it’s also played in a childish way. Players want to attack all the time, they don’t want to stop and think, and the supporters clap if somebody really hoofs it forward or if someone makes a great tackle, even if it would have been more sensible to look up and pass.

Marie-José Kleef The amount of tackles in a game is unbelievable. This season I was at Leicester v Aston Villa and the only thing happening was people tackling each other. There weren’t two passes in a row. The players were never waiting for the right moment, just pushing all the time.

Filippo Ricci For me it was Chelsea v Liverpool and to find that the away fans were just one row away from the press box. When people stood up, the jour­nalists were asking if they could sit down – and people did. Having no fences in the stadiums and having op­posing fans in the best position to see the game was very strange. In Italy they would be stuck in some cor­ner surrounded by police with the worst views of the game. 

Read more…

Former England international Tony Woodcock had two spells as a player with Cologne and settled in Germany aftr retiring. He has since worked as a coach and for a management company representing players as he told Andy Lyons

“I got a FIFA agent’s licence when I joined the company I now work for 18 months ago. We do everything connected with sport from TV production to internet coverage. My depart­ment is sports management, dealing with boxers and ice hockey players as well as footballers. When I first moved to Cologne from Forest [in 1979], a transfer to another country was a complicated business, like something from a James Bond story, with secret talks and flying here and there. I learned a lot about how things were organised and later in my career players would come to me for advice on things like moving clubs.

Read more…

Clive Charles, one of the most sought after coaches in the US, says he benefited from leaving Britain. Mike Woitalla reports 

British coaches in American soccer are as easy to find as fast-food restaurants on Main Street. In a nation long dependent on foreign teachers, who more likely to dominate the tutorial corps than expatriates from a land of the same language?

Read more…