Search: ' flags'

Ian Plenderleith trawls the web for minnows and finds that the smallest European football associations and their clubs are, like their teams out on the pitch, willing but not always particularly able

Like it or not, small and mostly useless Euro­pean footballing nations are now an in­tegral part of the game’s landscape. This month’s column tackles the highly charged question that many have asked but few have been able to answer – can countries such as Lux­embourg and Liechtenstein compete on the web any better than they do on the field?

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There were more than one team of football winners in Athens, though there waas some squabbling over what Iraq's achievement means, reports Matthew Brown

For a nation that supposedly fell in love with the game this summer, Greece seemed strangely indifferent to the Olympic football tournament. Per­haps they simply needed a break after all that Euro 2004 euphoria, but many matches at the Olympic Games were played out in front of virtually empty stadiums. In general the crowds rose above 20,000 only when Greece were playing or if the game was held in Athens itself. In some cases, the attendances barely rose above 5,000 and in others were fewer than 1,500.

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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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Few clubs can be held responsible for the rebirth of a club, but Gavin Willacy believes Preston would not be where they are now without the Town End, which even enjoyed a moment of life after death

Most readers probably have no idea what the Town End at Deep­dale is. It’s now known as the Alan Kelly Town End, a steep modern stand with the face of Preston’s record appearance-maker usually covered up by season-ticket holders’ bums. Al­though the fans chose to name the stand after Kelly – a Republic of Ireland keeper who played 447 times for the club in the 1960s and 1970s – it is only in the last decade that the Town End has become an integral part of North End folklore.

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While today graffiti is a public method of making coded statements, in the 1970s it was about football and plain speaking, if not always great spelling, as  Jim Heath recalls

Apart from Arsenal fans spraying their hair red in honour of Freddie Ljungberg, it’s been a long time since spray paint played an active part in the football supporters’ repertoire. Football graffiti had its heyday in the early 1970s when it gave crumbling stadiums that extra, almost indefinable character, the worn brick and corrugated iron surrounds of the terraces being a per­fect canvas for budding artists. It wasn’t just re­stricted to the grounds themselves, with daubings on all points from the city centres and railway stations. Given its intimidatory presence which heightened the fear that you were going to get your head kicked in, it’s ironic that the graffiti trend was inspired mainly by the 1960s peace movement, who used it to protest against the Vietnam war and express support for Castro’s Cuba (“LBJ get out of Vietnam” was still visible on a wall opposite the Craven Cottage turnstiles into the 1980s).

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