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A home game against the reigning champions is often a foregone conclusion. On this occasion things went very differently as Neil Hurden saw the hosts comfortably dominate their out of form visitors

It’s the Saturday before Christmas, it’s uncharitably cold and my mind is dis­orientated by mixed signals. Only three days before, Fulham performed heroics in the St Jakob stadium in Basel, hanging on to win 3-2 and to secure a last 32 draw against UEFA Cup holders Shakhtar Donetsk in the Europa League, the financially poor but spiritually enriched man’s Champions League.

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The 2010 World Cup draw has revived US interest in a meeting with England 60 years ago, as Ian Plenderleith reports

In an era when English football seems to carelessly treat its pre-1992 history as an embarrassment that only serves to complicate clean-cut Premier League records, the United States is paradoxically looking to resurrect a past that will help it to feel more accepted in the global game. Unfortunately for the US, that past largely consists of a single game – the 1-0 victory over England in the 1950 World Cup.

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Al Needham observes the turbulence at Meadow Lane from the other side of the river

When it was announced in the summer that Notts County’s Supporters Trust had given their stripy monochrome cow of a club away to Munto Finance in exchange for a fistful of magic beans, the immediate reaction on the south side of the Trent was genuinely positive. If ever any club needed a sugar daddy, it was them. The thought of a proper cross-town rivalry was an exceedingly tempting one. And as a friend of mine said: “So what if they ended up in the Premier League while we fell out of the League? We’d still be patting them on the heads and saying ‘Are you in Europe, then? Good on yer, duck’ while we were playing Ilkeston Town.”

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For Notts County fans the last few months have been like no other. Julian McDougall tries to keep up with things

In the second half of 2009 ordinary long-standing Notts County fans were subjected to a series of psycho-political experiments. Novelists from Charles Dickens to Margaret Atwood have stretched social reality to develop extreme scenarios which allow readers to explore their anxieties about the world – blending utopia and dystopia to produce complexity which reflects the ambiguous nature of human thought. But if a writer had made up events at Meadow Lane this season, their publisher would likely reject it as “too far-fetched”. Sven-Göran Eriksson arrives, Kasper Schmeichel signs, Sol Campbell comes, rumours link us to David Beckham, Roberto Carlos, Roberto Mancini and Kevin Keegan. Sol goes. The Guardian print allegations of corruption on a daily basis. Bust before bloody Christmas.

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It's taken a while, but football clubs are slowly getting an official presence on Facebook to match the fan-made pages. Mark Segal logs on to see who's ahead of the game and who's getting left behind

As Simon Cowell found out at the end of the year, you underestimate the power of Facebook at your peril. The campaign to make Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name the Christmas number one was a classic example of how social media, and Facebook in particular, is changing the way people connect with each other.

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