The furore over Kevin Keegan's resignation masked deeper failures in the English game, says Stephen Wagg
Kevin Keegan’s resignation as England coach after the defeat by Germany on October 7 has to be seen as some kind of some kind of consummation. The ongoing melodrama that has been the England football team and its various administrations since the late 1960s had finally embraced the theatre of the absurd.
An unaccustomed and unsettling sense of well-being seems to be settling over some of the League’s recently troubled clubs. At Southend United, the unlikely partnership of George Soros and David Webb is in place and promising to take the Shrimpers out of debt and on to higher things. How much the renowned international financier knows about the Third Division may be questioned, but for the time being the property company Delancey Estates, which he controls, is shaping the destiny of the club that once discarded this month’s England manager.
David Stubbs reviews a musical… about football. Oh dear
Must admit, the prospect of an Andrew Lloyd-Webber-Ben Elton musical set in Troubles-ridden Northern Ireland about a local football team didn’t brace me. This is going to be bad, I thought. Groan-out-loud bad. Tear your programme into sweaty shreds and assume the foetal position bad.
Alan Crockford's handy guide to the Exeter chairman
Distinguishing features Grey hair. Awful grey suits. Grey shoes so cheap and nasty looking that he might as well wear flip-flops.
Michael Richardson thought it was all over in 1966. Haydn Parry reveals the man on the Wembley pitch.
English football, Ken Wolstenholme and Geoff Hurst in particular, owe Michael Richardson a peculiar debt. For, as Wolstenholme stared down incredulously from his gantry at the impromptu pitch invasion prior to the fourth goal and final whistle in 1966, it was a young Mr Richardson who was doing his stuff, upstaging the main event in the top left hand corner of the nation’s TV screens. Michael’s 15 seconds of fame came at the age of 18, although these days he still has a public profile, of sorts, as the drummer in Elkie Brooks’s band (ask your parents).