THE BUDGET airline revolution made Continental Europe very accessible for tourists and football fans alike. A return trip for barely more than £100 has made it possible for the curious spectator to extend his or her horizon beyond the 92 and non-league. As a result, we have seen the arrival of the football tourist, map-wielding […]
We remember the litter-strewn pitches of Argentina 1978 as well as the military presence, the controversy and, from a footballing perspective, the left foot and cavalier approach of Mario Kempes, the player of the tournament and leading scorer. Kempes was the only player in Cesar Luis Menotti’s squad for the World Cup that did not […]
BACK in the 1980s, a rather amusing TV series called Hold the Back Page, scripted by Stan Hey, told the story of a Fleet Street sportswriter (played by David Warner) who had moved from a broadsheet to a tabloid in order to make some money out of his profession. The series, which was critically panned […]
IT HAS been interesting to hear the criticism of players who left their club in order to move elsewhere. Some clubs and their fans take it worse than others, but ultimately, in the free market that is football, players are like you and me, they have a choice to earn their income from whom they […]
YOU ONLY need see pictures of Chernobyl to understand what happens when science goes wrong. The world’s greatest nuclear disaster took place 150km from Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine and in 1986, part of the USSR. Science and the Soviets went hand-in-hand and a scientific approach, needless to say, was also applied to its […]
BAYERN MUNICH joined the illustrious list of teams that have won the treble of domestic league and cup and Champions League when they beat Paris Saint-Germain 1-0 in Lisbon. The Bavarians’ success is remarkable given they changed manager earlier in the campaign, appointing Hans-Dieter Flick as head coach. Flick had been the number two at […]
FOOTBALL is a universal currency. The first world war demonstrated just that when troops climbed out of the trenches to kick the ball around on Christmas Day. Germans and Englishmen have always debated the great game, usually centred on 1966 and the infamous “over the line, or not” argument. In 1978, on holiday in Spain, […]
HOW OFTEN have you heard someone explain away a poor title defence with a comment like, “They needed to turn things over….they needed to rebuild”? It is true that nothing lasts forever in football and sometimes, a title winning team burns itself out in lifting the big prize. A manager gets the best out of […]
IN THE aftermath of the 1974 World Cup, English football was fascinated by Dutch and German football. England’s failure to qualify for that competition and the decline of league football into a physical, defensive product that had started to drive people away, meant that a lot of soul-searching had taken place. The conclusion was that […]
