Cris Freddi reviews the local tie which ended non-League Canvey Island's FA Cup hopes
“You can’t be serious about these shrimps.”
“We’re not, really…”
The Shrimpers Club bar. Some poor sod hobbling round the pitch in a pink prawn outfit, tail trailing in the mud. Who decided we needed cuddly toy mascots? Cyril the frigging swan. Dumber and dumber.
The vioence at Africa's Champions League final was the climax of a troubled year. Alan Duncan fears little will change as a result
The reputation of African football suffered yet another knock following December’s ill-fated second leg of the Champions League final between Tunisian outfit Espérance de Tunis and Ghana’s Hearts of Oak, in the west African country’s capital, Accra. The match, the climax of the continental club calendar, degenerated into scenes of pandemonium with 18 minutes of the second half remaining when security forces responded to a hostile, missile-throwing faction of Ghanaian fans by firing teargas up into the stadium’s north stand, with one canister landing above the VIP enclosure.
Who are G-14 and what do they want? More money, as if you didn't know. John Sugden investigates the gathering threat to UEFA's control of European club football
Manchester United, Arsenal and Leeds are all through to the second group phase of the Champions League but, while that may induce a sense of well- being in England, we should not be blinded by the glitz and glamour to the reality that European club football is mired deep in crisis. Already reeling from the unfolding consequences of Bosman and the latest European Union attack on the transfer system, UEFA are faced with a new double challenge to their monopoly over the European game. As usual, the essence of the latest crisis boils down to money, or, to be more precise, who generates the cash and who gets their hands on the lion's share of it.
Lots of people have said nice things about David Coleman since the BBC put him out to grass. Harry Pearson isn't one of them
Trying to decide who is the best football commentator of all time is clearly a pointless exercise, on a par with arguing over who is the better looking, Kevin Phillips or Phil Stamp. Nevertheless, the news that the BBC will not be renewing David Coleman’s contract has provoked just such a debate and a recent convening of the Radio 5 sports panel, among others, unanimously declared the septuagenarian gurgler from Stockport the greatest ever.
Tottenham wasted ten years under the stewardship of Alan Sugar, says Adam Powley. But there is no guarantee his successors will be any better
It says something about the sentimentality of football fans that when Alan Sugar called it quits at White Hart Lane, Spurs supporters were in conciliatory mood. Having finally seen the man so long identified with the club’s decline speak in such an apparently convincing manner about his “sad failure”, many felt a tinge of regret at his decision. Even Save Our Spurs, the pressure group most readily identified with opposition to Sugar, paid generous tribute to his tenure at the club.