Search: ' Johnny Rep'

Never mind the Champions League, here’s the Hellenic: the television claims that it’s showing live football – but 125 people in west Berkshire know better as Roger Titford witnesses

It is a dark, wet Tuesday. The leaves are coming down and the league tables are shaping up. It’s a big night at all levels. Manchester United and Arsenal are on ITV in the Champions League. My boys, Reading, are away in the Championship (on local radio) while the LDV parks itself into view. But my eye is caught again by the crude, A4, home-crafted poster on the town noticeboards; no hype or promises, just pure facts – Hungerford v Didcot, Hellenic League, KO 7.45pm.

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Dear WSC
A three-sided stadium (WSC 221)? Luxury. Here at The Shay we’d probably settle for such an arrangement. We do have a quite impressive three-sided stadium but the embarrassing fourth side, a large main stand down the full length of one touchline, has remained incomplete for several years. Originally intended to raise ground capacity to around 12,000, it’s a mocking reminder of the brave, but ultimately doomed, ambitions of a previous board and their vision of Halifax Town as a thriving League club and Halifax RLFC as a successful Super League side. Today, as both clubs struggle to attract crowds of two and a half thousand, those dreams seem a very long way away. Various scaled down proposals for the East Stand are currently under consideration but, as those of us who remember being promised accommodation in there as part of a season ticket deal stare mournfully across at the handful of blue and white plastic seats dotted randomly along the concrete rows, the idea of knocking the whole lot down and turning it into a car park doesn’t seem such an outrageous idea after all.
Charlie Adamson, via email

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What defines a career, money or medals?

If Rio Ferdinand succeeds in getting his Manchester United salary increased to £120,000 a week, he will receive in a month what someone on the average wage would take 19 years to earn. In recent newspaper reports on his contract negotiations, Rio was depicted wearing a Che Guevara baseball cap, so he may have plans to redistribute his bloated income in a manner befitting someone who identifies with a Marxist revolutionary. But it is none the less fair to assume that he will receive advice to the contrary and that his wages will continue to be spent on fast cars, holidays in exclusive resorts and helping Jody Morris to release fire extinguishers in hotel corridors.

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Even if League Two strugglers Cambridge United are saved by a supporters’ trust they could be in the Conference next season, to Graham Dunbar 's chagrin

In his working life, as director of the prime minister’s media strategy, Godric Smith can sleep easy, all but sure that he will be on the winning side at the expected general election on May 5. His sporting life offers less certainty. As a supporter of Cambridge United, he cannot be sure he will have a club to watch after the League Two season ends two days later.

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Michael Owen is in danger of becoming a symbol of Real Madrid’s decline – but is winning fans over and doing pretty well when given a chance, as Phil Ball explains

So Michael Owen is the latest victim of those nasty local cliques in which Johnny Foreigner has spec­ialised, ever since Kevin Keegan went to Hamburg? Real Madrid’s Raúl, a nasty piece of work according to certain recent reports in the English sports media, has apparently been making life un­comfortable for the latest export of Eng­land’s finest, telling the recently departed José Antonio Camacho to leave him out of the team because he wanted his mate Fernando Mor­ientes to play instead. Raúl was also the al­leged guilty party in the cold shouldering of Nicolas Anelka, but if this was true then surely he deserves a medal for bravery above and beyond the call of duty.

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