Wednesday 1 Villa and Newcastle are both through to their respective “finals” in the Intertoto. John Gregory seems underwhelmed by his side’s away goals win over Rennes: “If we’ve got to play in the competition then qualifying for the UEFA Cup is what it’s all about.” Barry Town beat Porto 3-1 in the second leg of their Champions League tie. The Football League deny reports that Celtic and Rangers may be invited into this season’s Worthington Cup, although League chairman Keith Harris hopes to see them included next year: “They would help spice up the competition for our sponsors and improve its appeal to the television audience.” Celtic’s 4-3 win at Old Trafford in Ryan Giggs’s testimonial is enlivened by several near-fights, most featuring David Beckham. Dutch goalkeeper Edwin van der Sar is the subject of the first-ever transfer deal between Fulham and Juventus, moving for £7 million. Portsmouth sign 1998 World Cup star Robert Prosinecki from Dinamo Zagreb.
Search: ' Egypt'
Stories
Only Senegal prevented the reappearance of the same five African teams who made it to the World Cup in 1998. James Copnall reports on an exuberant upset
Successive wins against Morocco and Namibia propelled Senegal to the World Cup for the first time ever, and launched hundreds of thousands of Senegalese into the capital Dakar’s dusty streets for a party that lasted all night and long into the next day. A last-gasp 5-0 victory over the feeble Namibians, coupled with Egypt’s 1-1 draw away to Algeria, sealed the tightest of World Cup groups in favour of the “Lions of the Teranga”, who can now start planning their excursion to Japan and South Korea.
Ian Plenderleith discovers a brave new world of websites
If you only buy World Soccer to pore over results and league tables from impossibly distant lands, but despair that the scores are usually two months old, then help is at hand. The website of the Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation is a football statistician’s wet dream of both archived and bang up to date results and standings from anywhere in the world where a football is kicked in earnest.
Mick Slatter looks back at the highs and lows of Africa’s Cup of Nations which ended with Cameroon being crowned champions following a controversial penalty shoot-out
Maybe Victor Ikpeba will wind up wearing a brown paper bag over his head and advertising stuffed-crust pizza (or whatever the Nigerian equivalent might be). But he doesn’t deserve such ridicule. His penalty hit the crossbar and crossed the line. There was no need for video replays or freeze-frames or any other visual jiggery-pokery; it was clearly a goal. But the Tunisian referee saw it differently and his (obscured?) view cost the Super Eagles the African Cup of Nations.
Foreign players were effectively banned before 1978 but, as Matthew Taylor discovers, there were ways for a select few to ply their trade
Before the arrival of Ossie Ardiles and Ricardo Villa at Tottenham in 1978, foreign players were rarely seen on British football pitches. A mixture of xenophobia and sheer arrogance convinced the authorities that there was little need or desire to import players from abroad. The British – mainly the English – clung to an assumed role as footballing masters who had nothing to learn from their continental pupils, especially on home soil. Even so, the British game was never completely insulated from the outside. The place of foreigners in our domestic football did not suddenly emerge as an issue in the wake of the Bosman judgment, or even in 1978. There had, in fact, been a trickle of foreign footballers into this country for almost a century before the present flood.