Dear WSC
I’ve heard some daft excuses for losing matches but Trevor Francis has surpassed even Manchester United’s grey shirts fiasco at Southampton with his moaning over Birmingham’s play-off penalty shoot-out at Preston. Perhaps the poor dear would like to consider the following points. At any ground other than Deepdale there would have been spectators behind both goals, and if the penalties hadn’t been at the Preston end they would have been at the Birmingham end. Therefore, by his logic, that would be unfair on the Preston players. If Birmingham were a better team than Preston they would have finished above them in the league table, therefore the second leg of their play-off and the penalty shoot-out would have taken place at their own ground. They only finished fifth over 46 league games so they were lucky to have any chance of promotion in the first place. If his players are unnerved by taking penalties in front of opposition fans what chance would they stand of surviving in the Premiership? In a ground filled with paying spectators it makes sense for the deciding moments to take place at the end where most of them will have the best view. Who cares whether the referee or police changed their mind about which end the penalties should be taken? The notion that the whole match should be replayed because of that is absolutely ludicrous. If I was a Birmingham fan I would be embarrassed that the manager could come out with such a lame excuse for defeat instead of accepting that his team was simply not good enough.
Richard Watts, Sydenham
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Stories
After 22 years of sponsoring the top division in English football, Barclays is as big a part of the football fraternity as the clubs themselves
When Barclays first sponsored the Football League (as it then was) in 1987, the angry young men (as we then were) at WSC wrote: “What the deal says about the League is this: they believe that Barclays Bank enjoys more warmth and respect in society than football itself.” It was a fair point, particularly as the sum involved was only £4.55 million over three years, which might just be enough to attach your company’s name to Patrick Vieira’s socks these days. It seemed that it wasn’t so much the money the League needed, but reassurance from the corporate world that football had not sunk irredeemably beneath its notice.
As Saltergate falls into disrepair, Chesterfield risk going under. Jonathan Westwood reports
Older than the Football League itself and currently leading the Third Division, Chesterfield are the latest club to find themselves staring extinction in the face. Home to the club since 1884, Saltergate is one of the oldest football venues in the world and it shows its age. Only the main stand has seating and the away end remains open to the elements.
WSC’s almost annual roundtable brought together three contributors from different branches of the media to discuss trends in football reporting and a host of other relevant (and irrelevant) matters
WSC It’s often said that players these days are remote from the fans. But has the attitude of players towards journalists also changed now that many of them are so phenomenally wealthy?
The annual Inner City World Cup for foreign communities living in London was held earlier this month. Filippo Ricci went along to see if England could make home advantage count
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