Search: 'shirts'

Kevin Bartholomew looks at how Brighton ended up being at the bottom of the Football League

On a Thursday evening in May 1983, Brighton lost 4-0 to Manchester United in the FA Cup Final replay. The outstanding memory of that day for many Brighton followers was the support the team received. Despite the result, by the end of the match Albion fans were, incredibly, outsinging the Red Army. This was in recognition of the Seagulls’ achievements in the FA Cup that season: the campaign had included victories over Newcastle, Man City and Liverpool, and we had come agonizingly close to beating United in the first attempt at the Final. But it also demonstrated the affection held for a club that had risen from being a mediocre lower division outfit to a side able to do battle with the best teams in the country.

Read more…

Celtic's Fergus McCann has got big ideas. Problem is they're almost all bad ones, as Gary Oliver explains

In the week scientists went loopy over what they believed to be an organism from Mars, Celtic’s owner and managing director, Fergus McCann, reminded fans that he is Scottish football’s own little green monster – one that remains extremely hostile to its alien environment.

Read more…

Steve Davies takes a look at the figures in the annual review of football finance, which as expected offer good news for the big boys and bad for everyone else

Premier League clubs are on the gravy train while the Endsleigh League drift toward oblivion. That, at least, is the commonly held view, and the report prepared by Deloitte & Touche into football finance provides an opportunity to see whether it is supported by the facts.

Read more…

Jon Rea explains why the fun of Euro ’96 never quite made it to Nottingham

The disappointing support from local fans is only partly helpful in explaining why, for Nottingham at least, Euro ’96 was the story of the party nobody came to.

Read more…

Harry Pearson saw France come to Newcastle (well, Northumberland).

“Can you believe this?” David Thompson, headmaster of Haydon Bridge High School is saying. He has a mobile phone in one trouser pocket and a walkie-talkie in the other. The walkie-talkie occasionally bursts into life with a noise like a 60-a-day smoker waking up after a heavy session. When it does, David Thompson ignores it. It is not his walkie-talkie. He has been given it to look after by one of the Euro security men who are currently scouring the back of the cricket pavilion for Arab terrorists.

Read more…