Tom Davies recalls the moment when Enfield FC fans had enough with the running and direction of the club and that the way forward was to form their own new club Enfield Town FC
What to do if you’ve reached the end of your tether with your chairman, your club has been made homeless and its fans are powerless? If you’re supporters of Enfield FC you say “sod this, let’s start our own club”. Later this month the newly formed Enfield Town FC will make their debut in the Essex Senior League.
Dear WSC
Alun Rogers (Letters, WSC 173) may well be right about Wales’ superior claim to Owen Hargreaves, but repeats the canard about how they “should by rights have Michael Owen”. Owen has two English-born parents. They moved to Wales, but close enough to the border that Michael James was born in a maternity hospital in England. He may live in and have been educated in Wales, and took Deeside schools records from Gary Speed and Ian Rush, but chose the training set-up of, ahem, the land of his father, at an early age. While “Owen” clearly suggests Welsh roots, the player’s own comments when asked about this subject are that his nearest Celtic relative is a solitary Scottish grandparent, while he had three English ones. In which case, is he even qualified to play for Wales?
Philip Cornwall, Lewisham
Despite vocal opposition at the time, the merger in Inverness seems to have worked, says Mark Palmer
Fish and chips. Richard and Judy. Both perfect bedfellows. But try combining two football clubs with years of history and a mutual dislike on a similarly grand scale, and the path to true love is never likely to run smoothly. Such was the scenario for Caledonian and Inverness Thistle, two of the three clubs in Inverness until the early Nineties, who did the unthinkable in football circles – not only sleeping with the enemy, but going full steam ahead to marry them as well.
Dave Hill's book Out Of His Skin analysed the racial tension surrounding the arrival of John Barnes at Liverpool in 1987. In an extract from the introduction to a new edition, Dave Hill reflects on the reaction to his book
Ever since the watershed of the Taylor Report, an anti-racist climate has undoubtedly been fostered in British football. Vocal racist elements within football grounds find it harder to proceed as if they have a divine right to define and dominate the mood, to chant, threaten and generally get away with things that would not be tolerated in any other public place. A wide-ranging campaign has been mobilised against racism in a way that would have been impossible as recently as the mid-Eighties. Such is the optimistic reading of the story of racism in English football since Out Of His Skin was written. It has substance and deserves applause. But any suggestion that racism has ceased to have a disfiguring impact on our football would be dangerously naive.
Kate Hoey lost her job as sports minister after the general election, to no one's great surprise. John Williams looks back at her term and argues that her views on Wembley were sound , but doomed
Her arrival was a blaze of brave talk and controversy, her departure something of a whimper followed by a series of moans in the Mail on Sunday, no less. In retrospect, appointing as sports minister in this particular government a women such as Kate Hoey was high risk stuff. Hoey has no strong objections to foxhunting, is at odds with her own government’s policy in countenancing a return to terracing in football stadiums, and, laudably, would rather see decent changing rooms at grassroots for all athletes in all sports than see England host the 2006 football World Cup finals.