Search: 'John Barnes'

Cris Freddi's regular series continues with a look back at a famous win over Spain in 1985 that had Welsh fans dreaming of the World Cup finals

You’d kill for a playmaker. Just one. In the last 30 years. But this is Wales, and they don’t make them here. Rugby, yes. Even now. A second division country but still producing the odd Arwel Thomas. But foot­ball? Forget it. No world-class creative midfielder since Ivor Allchurch, who peaked in the Fifties. And Scot­land and Northern Ireland think they’ve had prob­lems.

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Ken Gall tries to unravel the preposterous chain of events that has turned the affairs of Dundee FC into something akin to the plot of a TV gangland fantasy

Of all the weird and wonderful tales associated with British football, can any boast a cast as varied and a storyline as fantastic as that of Dundee FC?

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David Harrison looks back on the life of Bertie Mee – a truly unique achiever

On February 18, 1939, a young man, barely out of his teens, pulled on Mansfield Town’s No 11 shirt and ran on to the Vicarage Road pitch, to make his third League appearance. Fifty years on, he was again observing that same expanse of muddy turf, only by now oper­ating as the home club’s first-ever paid director.

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September 2001 marked the 20th anniversary of John Barnes's debut for Watford. We asked five other black players of the same generation to recall their problems with racism in the early part of their career and reflect on how things have changed since

Alex Williams
Debut for Man City: November 1979
Now: Football Community manager, Man City

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Dave Hill's book Out Of His Skin analysed the racial tension surrounding the arrival of John Barnes at Liverpool in 1987. In an extract from the introduction to a new edition, Dave Hill reflects on the reaction to his book

Ever since the watershed of the Taylor Report, an anti-racist climate has undoubtedly been fostered in British football. Vocal racist elements within football grounds find it harder to proceed as if they have a divine right to define and dominate the mood, to chant, threaten and generally get away with things that would not be tolerated in any other public place. A wide-ranging campaign has been mobilised against racism in a way that would have been impossible as recently as the mid-Eighties. Such is the optimistic reading of the story of racism in English football since Out Of His Skin was written. It has substance and deserves ap­plause. But any suggestion that racism has ceased to have a disfiguring impact on our football would be dangerously naive.

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