Search: ' midlands'

The season is not half-done yet relegation is assured, despite the arrival of a new manager. But amid the retail outlets and call centres, there’s no anger – it’s not so much Pride Park as Resigned Park. By David Stubbs

It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve made the trip up north by rail. It matters not that you were actually brought up in the north. No matter, either, that you have resolved not to fall into the usual trap of the condescending London-based writer venturing into the provinces and remarking on the frightfulness of it all, the supreme example of which was a piece written by the Guardian’s Katherine Whitehorn in the 1960s, entitled “You Can’t Take Aubergines For Granted Outside London”. Step off the train at Derby, step outside and the scene that greets you, dominated by a browned-off looking Midlands Hotel, makes you deeply conscious not just that you have stepped outside your home town, but stepped outside your own decade.

Read more…

by Anthony Cartwright
Tindal Street Press, £9.99
Reviewed by Matthew Brown
From WSC 269 July 2009 

Buy this book

Novels about football are notoriously difficult; good ones distinctly rare. It’s been a long time since Brian Glanville’s Goalkeepers Are Different and although that was basically a tale for teenage boys, it still stands out in the football fiction landscape. More recently David Peace’s The Damned United, yet that could be filed under the dubious “faction” label.

Read more…

The Globalisation of Football
by John Samuels
Book Guild, £17.99
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 253 March 2008 

Buy this book

The author confesses he started out with an analysis of the decline of midlands football but his publishers, seeking returns more global than those encompassed by the Nuneaton-Cannock-Worcester triangle, persuaded him to broaden his scope. He went away and did his reading, but his analysis is not particularly compelling.

Read more…

It may not be the best phrase to use around QPR, but “trigger happy” describes Milan Mandaric’s attitude to managers at Leicester. How will new boss Gary Megson fare against another man in the firing line, wonders Al Needham?

Leicester is a strange city. It’s actually the biggest in the east midlands, but it keeps it quiet. Until recently, the airport within its boundaries was called Nottingham East Midlands. It’s got a National Space Centre for no discernable reason whatsoever (unless they knitted a jumper for Neil Armstrong, or supplied NASA with space crisps) and, when you make the horribly long walk from the station to Walkers Stadium, you could swear blind you were in a rugby town. You spend most of the journey on Tigers Way (the part of the A594 dedicated to the local egg-chasers), craning your neck to see if there’s anyone in blue shirts ahead of you, and that you’re actually going in the right direction and the game is actually on.

Read more…

Ever-fewer home-grown players are breaking through at major clubs as managers look abroad for youngsters as well as first-team players. Gavin Willacy examines what’s going wrong for British kids

As another summer of frantic buying draws to a close, I have yet to hear a single manager say they are steering clear of the shark-infested transfer market and sticking instead with their youth system. For all their Football Icon hype, there is still no sign of a first-team regular emerging from Chelsea’s academy – ten years to the month since John Terry turned pro, the last Chelsea trainee to make it to the top. Arsenal had yet to field a locally farmed player this season before Justin Hoyte appeared in the second leg of their Champions League tie against Sparta Prague, a match that was largely a formality. Liverpool fielded just one Brit in their return match against Toulouse (Peter Crouch). Only the absent Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard in their entire first-team squad are home-grown. Meanwhile, Rafa Benítez has signed 20 teenagers from other clubs in the past two years, many of them foreign.

Read more…