Search: ' Conference North'

With small attendances and full-time wages the Football League is proving costly for Accrington Stanley, as Karl Sturgeon reflects

The Racecourse Ground, April 2008. Wrexham are playing their last home game as a Football League team, and it’s not hard to see why they’re going down: they’re losing 3-0 to Accrington Stanley, a team with a goal difference of minus 29. In the final seconds, however, Wrexham win a penalty. 3-1. Little consolation for fans already more concerned with finding Ebbsfleet on a map, but, up in the flimsy old directors’ box, someone is happy.

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Foreign players are becoming common in the Conference – there’s even an ex-Barcelona man at Northwich, writes Michael Whalley

You might expect a Blue Square Premier club to be giddy with excitement after taking a former Barcelona first-teamer on trial. Yet Nigerian defender Gbenga Okunowo’s arrival at Northwich Victoria in early December created so few ripples that the club didn’t even mention it in their next programme.

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Supporters Direct is gaining momentum and credibility, with friends in high places. Adam Brown reports on their annual conference

A cabinet minister making a keynote address, a speech by the chair of the FA and even the shadow sports minister in on the act – it’s hardly what you would expect at a conference for several hundred fan activists. But this signalled just how far Supporters Direct, the ­government-funded agency promoting fan ownership of clubs, has travelled as it held its 2008 conference.

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Newcastle, managerless and looking for new ownership, travel to a seemingly far happier club, with West Ham fans welcoming Gianfranco Zola. But fresh turmoil is about to emerge: the papers reporting on the game predict the imminent verdict in Sheffield United’s appeal over Carlos Tevez, writes David Stubbs

I caught this fixture in April, on an unseasonably warm day. The Jubilee Line was subject to one of its rare closures and I had to make the trip in a replacement bus, which, like a mobile greenhouse and packed to the rafters, wended its way at gridlocked-traffic’s pace to Canning Town, then past some of east London’s most eye-catching industrial estates before reaching West Ham. Uncannily, though the journey lasted 40 minutes, the Millennium Dome hovered throughout, seemingly never more than 250 yards away; a curse of the white elephant. West Ham, under the lugubrious watch of Alan Curbishley, darted into a 2-0 lead but then, having blown their ­bubbles, conceded two quick goals to a Newcastle team with the air of having accidentally rediscovered their self-esteem under Kevin Keegan.

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Owning a football club is now officially beyond the wildest dreams. Even Harry Pearson's

When they reach their forties, men experience a change. You begin to suspect that the manufacturers of jeans have started skimping on material, you meet young people (yes, you have started to use the phrase “young people”) that you assume are sixth-formers and when you ask politely what A-levels they are doing discover that in fact they are GPs, barristers or your new boss, and you feel strangely compelled to tell your children not to keep saying like, like all the, like, time, for goodness sake because “you’re hardly going to impress a prospective employer speaking like that”.

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