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When Saturday Comes The half decent football magazine

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The Archive

Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.

Generation game

Adam Bate explains how the launch of the NextGen Series, dubbed the teenage Champions League, will help bridge the gap between youth football and the senior level

These are exciting times to be a young footballer coming through one of Europe’s premier academies. This season has seen the launch of a new competition – the NextGen Series – pitting 16 of the continent’s major clubs against each other in a teenage version of the Champions League. Spanish football expert Graham Hunter summed up the excitement best: “I find it impossible to understand why this brilliant but simple concept hasn’t existed for years.”

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 - The Archive

Community spirit

Peter Geoghegan looks at St Mirren supporters’ bid to buy the club through turning the Buddies into a Community Interest Company

Billed as a “national day of action”, November 30 witnessed the largest strike in Britain for a generation. That evening, 70 supporters gathered at St Mirren Park not to protest changes to public sector pensions or Tory cutbacks but in a bid to resuscitate an innovative community-led takeover of the Paisley club.

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 - The Archive

Three hundred club

To commemorate the 300th issue of WSC here are a few notable moments from our history, along with some WSC trivia

A new issue had just been unloaded from the printer’s van. We opened one of the bundles, each of which had been covered with a sheet of paper. On the front cover, where a picture of Graham Taylor is supposed to be, is a close up of a studded black leather boot with an enormous heel. It is Skin Two, an S&M magazine. A phone call to the printers confirms that the wrong bundles had been loaded on to the van. A few miles away, Skin Two staff unwrap their new issue, stare at Graham Taylor and wonder if they have gone too far this time.

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 - The Archive

Critical mass

If referees are as awful as claimed, we should help them out with some some extra body parts – or a microphone. Ed Wilson reports

There are some sections of society that it is difficult to feel sympathy for, even when you know they have been treated harshly. Reality TV stars fall into this category, as do Tory MPs – Edwina Currie is the point of intersection in that particular Venn diagram. Previously, I would have lumped referees into this demographic too. You only need to hear the enthusiasm that greets a referee falling over to grasp their standing among most football fans. But in recent months, my attitude to them has softened. I no longer see them as slightly absurd pantomime villains. Referees are people too.

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 - The Archive

The great unwatched

With Sky now filming matches with up to 24 cameras it seems unthinkable that audiences could miss top-flight football, but games went unrecorded as recently as 1990. Mike Whalley explains

If anyone ever produces a DVD tribute to former Sheffield Wednesday striker David Hirst, it ought to include clips of his efforts as an emergency goalkeeper against Manchester City on New Year’s Day, 1990. It won’t, though, because no footage exists. Having scored Wednesday’s first in a 2-0 win, Hirst went in goal to replace the injured Kevin Pressman and made impressive saves from Steve Redmond and Colin Hendry.

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 - The Archive

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