A new type of football violence is emerging in the Italian capital, says Roberto Gotta
Italy has again been surprised by an outbreak of football violence, and moved swiftly, though as usual too late, to correct it. It wasn’t the usual city centre skirmishes but a different kind of violence: political slogans written on large banners and racist chants, a disease which had been spreading for a long time without anyone noticing.
Wednesday 2 “There was nothing kick and rush about that,” says Martin O’Neill as a Matt Elliott goal takes Leicester to the Worthington final at the expense of Villa. “We had our chance and we choked,” says John Gregory, who also claims that Leicester are about to take Stan Collymore off his hands, though the clubs are yet to agree on a fee. Swindon, eight points adrift at the bottom of the First, call in the administrators. They are currently losing £25,000 a week. “I believe we’ll be the first of many,” says chairman Cliff Puffett. The football authorities lobby the government to bring in restrictions on the number of non-EU players used by English clubs to two per team. “A Premiership team without one player from the UK sends out the wrong signals,” says the PFA’s Gordon Taylor. Ears burning, Gianluca Vialli says: “A quota might protect young English players but clubs won’t be able to compete in Europe if we stop some non-EU players joining us.”
With the next Premier League deal in the offing, ITV’s Jim Rosenthal discusses changes in broadcasting since the arrival of Sky and casts doubt on Duncan Ferguson’s mystique
What has been the main impact of Sky since 1992 from the broadcasters’ point of view?
They’ve taken football coverage on to a new level and basically, for us, they have created a lot of work within the industry. Football saved Sky, but in return people in TV recognise what Sky have done for football. They have obviously created a vast amount of wealth for the game – wealth that football has spent as it always will, not necessarily wisely. If you give football club chairmen £1, they will always spend £1.10.
Desperate Australian clubs are once again queuing up to employ faded British strikers. Matthew Hall explains why
It can no longer be ignored. Relations between Britain and Australia have sunk to a new low and it’s nothing to do with trade wars or our flawed bid to become a republic. It is, however, all to do with current rates of exchange. It goes a little like this: we send you Nick Cave, saucy soap starlets and Harry Kewell. What do we get in return? Hale and Pace, backpackers by the planeload, and Ian bleedin’ Rush.
Dear WSC
What with Scotland outplaying England over two legs in the recent Euro 2000 play-off and Sunderland returning with nothing after playing Liverpool off the park a few days later, I have come to the conclusion that professional football is a mockery of a game. As a Liverpool fan, I was delighted with the result of the game at the Stadium of Light but as a football fan I would generally prefer to see the best sides winning. With this in mind, I propose a minor change in the rules of professional football. I think that we should lobby FIFA to rid football of goals. At the end of many a game, the best team on the day has failed to get what they rightly deserve just because they have failed to score, which is blatantly unfair. What we should do is replace the “goals system” with a system similar to the one on TV’s Ready, Steady, Cook! programme. If one section of the crowd was replaced by a section of neutral fans, this wouldn’t be too hard to implement. Simply issue them with cards depicting a footballing equivalent of “Green Peppers” and “Red Tomatoes” (meat pies and cold cups of tea, for example) and get the ref to ask them at the end of the game which team they would prefer to win. OK, so Man Utd wouldn’t fare too well as most neutrals enjoy watching them lose, but no system is without its flaws and would this be a bad thing anyway? FIFA has always strived to find a way of ensuring fair play and the best teams winning but up to now have only come up with rubbish like two referees. I think my system may be just what they are looking for.
Phil Griffiths, via email