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Religion and football remain a potent and unpleasant mix. Dianne Millen finds the Old Firm may have ulterior reasons to distance themselves from bigotry.

When is an orange not an orange? When it’s a tang­erine, of course – or so the Rangers fans who gleefully donned the club’s notorious 2001-02 away strip would have liked the rest of Scotland to believe. At best ill-judged, at worst inflammatory, the strip drew an outcry from anti-sectarian groups. Few outside Ibrox believed the club was unaware of its connotations.

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Nowhere is the women’s game more buoyant than in Germany. Margot Dunne  reports on the homecoming for the World Cup winners and the hopes for a full-time league

Six months ago, all the average German male knew about women’s football could be written on the back of a beer mat with a blunt bockwurst. But all that was before October 12 last year when Nia Künzer’s golden goal in the final against Sweden shot her country to World Cup glory. The team returned from America and were over­whelmed by the kind of frenzied reception to which their male counterparts grew accustomed in recent decades. The trophy was paraded in front of thousands of screaming fans in Frankfurt; there were chat show appearances for coaches Tina Theune-Meyer and Sylvia Neid; and end­less magazine covers featured the new world champions in all their fresh-faced whole­someness. Journalists voted them “Team of the year” at Germany’s Sports Personality Awards – a title bestowed the previous year on Rudi Völler’s men.

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This is the time of year when the news­papers are filled with hopes for the com­ing year, with pleas for respect for ref­erees, less diving and world peace. All very laudable but, really, we can’t be do­ing with any of it. There is only one thing we’ll ask for – that this year’s FA Cup isn’t won by one of the top three, or Liverpool. We’re even prepared to tolerate one of the curses of the modern age, tracking cam­era shots of whooping fans in jester hats and curly wigs, provided they are cele­brating a victory for an underdog.

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Dear WSC
At the time of writing it is Thurs­day, September 11, 2003. Last night I along with 8,815 others ventured to Windsor Park, safe in the knowledge we could finally put to rest the 11-game goal drought. After all, we only lost 1-0 away to Armenia and we hit the post and crossbar and we mis­sed a few chances. Two hours later we had lost 1-0 again and we hit the crossbar and hit the post and missed a few chances. The media has generally chuckled at our plight, and who could blame them. BBC Northern Ireland is running a phone poll on whether or not we should scrap the Northern Ireland football team in favour of an All-Ireland -Team. This in itself is a quite ludicrous, deliberately contentious and politically loaded question from a supposedly public service broadcaster. I don’t recall a similar poll in favour of a British and Irish Lions team poll when the Irish rugby team lost to Argentina in a World Cup game. A plus point about the goal drought is that for the first time in years what little publicity we have received hasn’t been about problems with sectarianism and the national team. To an outsider it probably seems that Northern Ireland home games are a seething cauldron of bigotry and hatred.In fact, anyone attending a game without preconceived ideas would be surprised at how good the atmosphere is given the terrible ground, poorly performing team and crowd size. We are now just known as being useless, not useless bigots. I hope one day soon to look back and laugh about when we couldn’t score as Andy Smith nods another past a hapless Barthez on our way to automatic qualification for the World Cup in Germany…
Jim Lockhart, Banbridge, Co Down

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Dianne Millen explores the most suitable means of preventing  incursions on to the pitch by fans

When is a pitch invasion not a pitch invasion? When there’s only one person involved, of course, as happened twice in the second week­­­­end of the new Scottish Premier League cam­paign. Amid the debate among the condemn­atory, per­ma­tanned pundits about whether a single fan constituted an “invasion”, however, were serious safety questions.

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