Search: ' Terry Venables'

The number of Australian players in Britain has turned from trickle to flood, fuelled by an army of agents. Neil Forsyth  traces this all back to a very English wheeler-dealer

Ten years ago it was Scandinavians. Every United Kingdom team, it seemed, had one. Cheap, professional and highly adaptable to the British playing style (apart from Tomas Brolin, on all three counts) they stream­ed across the North Sea. It wasn’t a coincidental occurrence, a sudden outbreak of itchy feet. Rather, it was down to the emergence in those countries of an ambitious and inventive breed of a relatively new football phenomenon, the modern agent. Well educated, fluent in English and with a largely untapped resource to market, the fledgling Scandinavian agents found the UK a fertile mar­ket. One, Rune Hauge, brought a novel bus­iness approach to his dealings with then Arsenal manager George Graham, leading to the Scotsman’s sacking.

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As a survey reveals the extraordinary sums the game has paid some people for doing very little, Barney Ronay hopes one man can be persuaded to put a little back

As Woody Allen once said, money is better than pov­erty, if only for financial reasons. English foot­ball currently has both in equal measures: the League is rife with talk of exactly how many clubs are toting around life-threatening debts; meanwhile, the Sunday Times Pay List 2003, published last month, reveals that, of the 500 best-paid individuals in the United King­dom, 56 made their money from football, 44 of them players.

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Nigeria's dance of the seven veils with new national coach Bryan Robson should come as no surprise to students of the west African country's football, such as Alan Duncan

Listen to any Nigerian footballer talk for any length of time and you will notice how his every football-ing fantasy peters out with a “God willing”, or an “inshallah”. While it is tempting to read into this no more than a case of fatalism, this idiosyncrasy says much of a lifetime’s experience spent learning not to take anything for granted.

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England may have lost twice to the United States but have inflicted frequent and often quite heavy revenge, beginning, as Gavin Willacy relates, with Tom Finney in 1953

Three years after their humiliation by the United States in Belo Horizonte, Alf Ramsey, Billy Wright, Jimmy Dickinson and Tom Finney were given the chance to gain some sort of revenge on those pesky Americans when the FA sent England on their regular tour of the Americas.

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In a dark season for the game as well as Stoke, Ken Sproat saw Newcastle inflict one of the Potters’ 31 defeats of 1984-85 – but can now see it wasn't all gloom

A football team cannot get much worse than Stoke City during the 1984-85 season. There, in the all-time records for being hopeless, they skulk alongside such Victorian disasters as Darwen, Loughborough Town and Glossop. The fewest points in a season (17), the fewest wins (three – all at home), the most defeats (31) and, with 24, the fewest goals (the leading scorer was Ian Painter with six, of which four were penalties). They failed to score in 25 of the 42 league matches. They suffered mathematically definite relegation with eight miserable matches still to play.

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