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December 2007 ~ England’s failings and Sepp Blatter’s plans could combine to produce a lengthy wailing about how it’s all the fault of foreign players. But before the inquest begins, Barney Ronay points out the flaws in this view

Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly who you are supposed to blame. With England’s hopes of qualifying for Euro 2008 all but extinguished by the complex series of injustices and frustrations visited by the defeat to Russia in Moscow, the building blocks are already being shouldered into place for a major inquest. And what an inquest it looks like being. Should the final cut be administered this month, English football is already geared up for a masterpiece of introspection, an epic of self-reproach born aloft on the twin pillars of the too-many-foreign-players and let’s-revamp-the-under-sevens lobbies.

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AZ were so close to breaking the big three clubs’ dominance of the Dutch championship. Derek Brookman looks back at a dramatic afternoon in the Eredivisie

The tightest title race ever in the Netherlands, or maybe anywhere for that matter, produced an enthralling and surprising finale, although it was a familiar name etched on to the winners’ plaque.

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In the dying days of George Graham’s Arsenal reign, the Scot signed a player as far from his own image as imaginable. Jon Spurling remembers a Dutch enigma

As fortysomethings waxed lyrical about Geordie Armstrong’s “magnificent engine” and Brian Marwood was voted the club’s greatest ever short-term acquisition, debate raged among Arsenal fans on a website over who was the club’s greatest recent wide player. Anders Limpar – rather harshly – was described as a “poor man’s Robert Pires”. So what, I wondered, did that make Glenn Helder. A ­destitute’s Marc Overmars, perhaps?

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Feyenoord's measures to control their fans failed to work in Nancy. Ernst Bouwes reports

What cruel irony. In 1974, fans of Tottenham Hotspur introduced major football violence to Holland during the second leg of the UEFA Cup final against Feyenoord. Thirty-three years later, Feyenoord find themselves banned for the rest of the European season for hooliganism at a UEFA Cup tie at Nancy while their scheduled opponents, Spurs, may receive a bye into the next round (Feyenoord still have a chance that the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne will overturn the verdict).

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When countries had only one European Cup entrant, the UEFA Cup commanded attention. All that seemed to change. But, asks Luke Chapman, is the junior competition now the less predictable one?

Two years ago, after a defensive display in Turin earned Liverpool a place in the semi-finals of the Champions League, a radio reporter light-heartedly asked a Reds fan what was more important: winning the European Cup or ensuring qualification for the competition next year. “Hmm,” pondered the supporter, apparently in all seriousness, “that’s a tough one."

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