THE PANDEMIC may be having an unexpected impact on the football management sector in that fewer managers have been sacked so far in 2020-21. With the Premier League at the halfway stage, only one manager, West Bromwich Albion’s Slaven Bilic, has departed in a mid-season taxi. There will surely be more to come, but the […]
IN A UPTOPIAN world, football clubs would represent the towns they come from and their players would be locally-reared, devoted to their places of birth and loyal to their clubs. The world has changed: in Victorian England that may have be the case, an age where someone from a neighbouring town would be treated much […]
ACCORDING TO some red top papers, Burnley are going to be bankrupt in August. There’s no denying that football at all levels is going to face a financial squeeze in the coming months as revenue streams dry-up, but Burnley’s position is arguably no different than many clubs and indeed better than most. “Football clubs should […]
BURNLEY, with a population of around 80,000, is the smallest town ever to give birth to a Football League Championship winning team. It has the classic image of a Lowryesque mill town of chimneys, and at one stage, looms outnumbered people. And in the football club’s heyday, a large percentage of local folk would shuffle […]
IF LONDON’s often abysmal infrastructure had got its way, I would not have reached Craven Cottage on time for Fulham’s second Premier League home game of the season. Train delays, tube disruptions, over-crowding from the Notting Hill Carnival and to top that, incessant rain. Normally, that wouldn’t bother me, but a damaged knee made the […]
IT IS hard not to like Watford, a sentiment that dates back to the days of Elton John, Luther Blissett and John Barnes. Admittedly, their style of football under Graham Taylor wasn’t the most aesthetic – function over form, to be sure – but Watford also provided the football world with some genuinely warm moments. […]
BOLD statements about a team’s potential are often made in the months leading up to World Cups. It is a time when normally grounded and stable individuals often make ridiculous claims about football teams. Remember the over-used term “golden generation”? It’s no longer fashionable or wise to use such words to describe a football team, […]
Wolves fans recently bid farewell to Jack Hayward, the local businessman who rescued the club he supported as a boy and helped to lift out of the mire. Hayward, who died aged 91, represented the old type of club chairman and benefactor, the local man who wanted to put something back into the institution that […]
Anyone who grew up in an era when Ipswich Town were among the top clubs in the country, playing a brand of progressive football that drew comparisons with the best that Continental Europe could offer, has difficulty in coming to terms with Ipswich’s current reduced status. Portman Road is still a neat stadium, imposing in […]
