The case for and against the idea of bringing video replays into football to aid referees' decisions and cut down on mistakes
Yes ~
Spurs v Leicester this season. Leicester have just pulled a goal back with ten minutes to go and, suitably reinvigorated, they tear into the home side straight from the restart. Robbie Savage clatters into Les Ferdinand, Ferdinand eyeballs Savage and a predictable midfield melee erupts.
Cris Freddi's regular series continues with a look back at a famous win over Spain in 1985 that had Welsh fans dreaming of the World Cup finals
You’d kill for a playmaker. Just one. In the last 30 years. But this is Wales, and they don’t make them here. Rugby, yes. Even now. A second division country but still producing the odd Arwel Thomas. But football? Forget it. No world-class creative midfielder since Ivor Allchurch, who peaked in the Fifties. And Scotland and Northern Ireland think they’ve had problems.
John Secker talks about his club Blackpool – the best players he's seen play for them, their local rivals success and the struggle to get out of Division Two
How do Blackpool fans view the current revival of other Lancashire clubs? Is it seen as an encouraging sign or there a sense of frustration that Blackpool should be in there too?
Blackpool fans hate their local rivals, but the amount of venom varies. There is little apparent rivalry with Blackburn, perhaps because it is so long since we were in the same division. It is very different with Burnley, and above all with Preston, who are definitely the team Blackpool supporters love to hate. The other thing is that Blackpool have had their own revival recently – in late 2000 we were next to bottom of the League, and now we are fairly comfortable in the Second Division.With a little luck we could be playing Preston or Burnley again before long.
Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger explains why most German fans were not quite as upset by the result in Munich as their English counterparts would have liked
All German Sunday papers have sold out at Munich’s main railway station, that’s why everybody on the train to Frankfurt is now hunched over the Observer or the Sunday Times. Or maybe it’s because, in this coach, they’re all English. Apart from me. The two men from Leicester at my table have immersed themselves in pieces on a cricketer called Keith Parsons and the Ryder Cup, respectively. The six or eight fans from near Liverpool behind me are discussing with gusto an article that mentions “drunken English football fans”, “baton-wielding German riot police” and “blood pouring from wounds”.
Liverpool were supposed to be world-beaters in the early Eighties. But, given the chance to prove it, all they came up with was excuses, says Cris Freddi
The move to Tokyo saved the World Club Cup – or at least that’s how Europe saw it. Now that they no longer had to travel to South America to have lumps kicked out of them by Estudiantes and Nacional, European clubs felt it was safe to dip their toes in again. A one-off match on neutral territory – English clubs in particular had been getting good at those. So how do you explain the first half here? Try the early goal perhaps. Liverpool weren’t especially good at recovering from those. Here they were caught flat-footed at the back by a flick from Zico that caught out Hansen and sent Nunes in to score.