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The Vikings are leading the way in Europe: a new competition for the top teams in Denmark, Norway and Sweden is attracting plenty of interest, including from Margot Dunne

There is, as anyone who has ever witnessed the voting at the Eurovision Song Contest can tell you, a bond between Scandinavian countries born of more than a shared love of herrings, saunas and flat-pack furniture. It was perhaps inevitable that Norway, Swe­den and Denmark would sooner or later link their football together in some way as there have been mutterings about it for many years. Thus the formation of the Royal League (so named because the three nations are all monarchies) comes as no surprise. They are, after all, broadly similar countries whose football clubs face roughly the same problems.

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As Mark Griffiths reports, the bleak situation at Wrexham is slipping further downhill and threatening to snowball

It is a misplaced notion that all troubled teams find a knight in shining armour and scrape through: Wrexham are in serious danger of oblivion. Set to go into administration on December 3, they aren’t merely, like some other clubs that have taken that step, the victims of financial mismanagement: they have an owner whose interests would appear to be best served by the club disappearing. The situation reported in WSC 212 has worsened considerably. Then it seemed majority shareholder Alex Hamilton hoped to profit from relocating the club and selling the land the Racecourse Ground occupies. It now appears that such activity was merely a smokescreen. Next July Wrexham will have to leave their stadium, home since 1873, having been served notice of eviction by Hamilton. By then their assets might well have all gone: transactions have been taking place without directors’ knowledge; managing director John Reames’s attempt to warn fans of what was going on led to club officials being ordered to rip the offending page out of the programme.

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In the first of a series of articles looking at how the tournament was received at home, Al Needham strokes his chin, sifts through the discarded plastic flagpoles and wonders where all those crosses of St George came from. And does it mean anything anyway?

It’s good for a country and its people to take stock and re-evaluate its sense of identity every now and then, and I did just that in a bus shelter last month, sitting next to an elderly Jamaican woman, watching the endless procession of cars with plastic white flags with red crosses clipped to their windows. Where had they come from? It wasn’t this bad in 2002. Had a giant sandcastle firm been made bankrupt, or something? Was it just a local thing? And what did it all mean? “Look at these fools,” said the Jamaican woman, all of a sudden. “They don’t know what it means to be patriotic. In Jamaica, we have the flag up all year round, not for some… pussyclaat football game.” Then she sucked her teeth. For a very long time.

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What's going on in Mitteleuropa these days? Ian Plenderleith discovers that the angst of the low crowds in the heart of the continent is alleviated only by poetic team names, a healthy beer culture, fine Canadian-made hats and Hungarian goose liver cooked in a patriotic red paprika

One quiet morning recently I found myself sitting at the computer reading out loud the results from the 26th round of play in the 2003-04 season of the Slovak second division. Dusla Sala 1 Tatran Presov 2. It sounded so good that I did it again. There was a certain kind of poetry to it and a special feeling that comes with knowing you are likely the only person in the world right now sitting at his computer and reading out loud the results from Slovakia’s division two.

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As a teengager Neil Forsyth stood on a terrace which had seen European semi-finals and a final and where, amid the swearing, the snowballs and the cheers, it turned out that everybody knew his name

Where in Europe lies the road that plays host to two European Cup semi-finalists at two separate home grounds? The answer is Dundee, where Dundee’s Dens Park Stadium lies just 100 yards from Dundee United’s Tannadice Park. In April 1984, United raced to a 2-0 first-leg lead against Roma at Tannadice before capitulating in the return leg amid intimidation and appalling refereeing, leaving Liverpool to defeat the Italians in the final. And Dundee? Ach, who cares?

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