Search: ' Terry Venables'

As the world looks east towards the World Cup, England could be on course to righting the wrongs of 1998

You never really know until it starts, of course, but it feels as though this World Cup is going to be very different from the last one. Some of the differences are obvious, notably the fact that it is be­ing held much further away from Eng­land. While you would not want to rule it out, it seems implausible that hooliganism will be as big a theme as it was in France. Perhaps more interestingly from England’s point of view is the way the culture of the team itself has changed, lar­gely, though not entirely, due to the in­fluence of Sven-Goran Eriksson.

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Letters, WSC 184

Dear WSC
While Ian Kelp (Letters, WSC 183) makes some valid points about the bizarre soft spot banks have for football clubs in allowing them to trade on nought but pro­mises year after year, I fear that he is too pur­it­an­ical in his approach to business planning. Page one of the Company Treasurer’s Handbook tells us about cashflow planning and a seemingly valid contract pro­m­­ising revenue at fixed future times is a reasonable thing to make plans on, or, if necessary, borrow against. No business waits until the money is in the bank account before planning how to spend it, or indeed actually spending it. Would Marks and Spencer wait until it had a queue of unsatisfied customers waving bunches of tenners in the branch until it ordered a batch of knickers from its sup­pliers? Where the clubs have probably been naive is in what appears to be a less than watertight contract. If it is true that Carlton and Granada can walk away without liability for their little joint venture, the clubs should be looking at the quality of their legal advice. The fact that the share prices of both Carlton and Granada rose once the situation became public is a pret­ty depressing sign of what the City thinks of that contract.
Jonathan Gibbs, via email

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Did football really have a golden age? A new photo collection seems unsure when it was, says Doug Cheeseman, though it definitely took place in London

This is a giant airbrick of a football photobook, com­prised of black and white documentary pic­tures from the start of the 20th century to 1985. The notional theme of the book is football in its broader social con­text, in the period before commercialism took over and photographers swapped their black and white films for colour. In other words, football in all its sepia, if sometimes rose-tinted, glory.

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Australia missed out on the World Cup finals yet again. Matthew Hall watched them succumb to mild paranoia – and a better team – in Montevideo

Three strikes and you’re out, and a triple lash from Uruguay in Montevideo was enough to send Aus­tralia crashing out of the World Cup without qualifying for the finals for the seventh time in succession. The first and last time the Socceroos made it to the finals was in 1974. On the past five occasions Australia have been eliminated in sudden death play-offs, ag­ainst Scotland, Israel, Argentina, Iran and now Uru­guay. Con­spiracy theories, administrative blun­ders, plain bad luck and the comeback of Diego Mara­dona have all contributed to past failures.

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Tuesday 2 Nine Austrian players refuse to fly to Israel for Saturday’s World Cup qualifier. “It is far too dangerous there,” says one of them, Walter Kogler. Joe Royle says he is suing Man City for a £500,000 pay-off, on the basis that they were still a Premiership club when he was sacked in May, even though they had finished in a relegation spot.

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