Search: ' Portsmouth'

John Toshack’s reorganisation of Wales’ youth teams under Brian Flynn has paid dividends, as Paul Ashley-Jones explains

It’s typical that when Wales finally escape a qualifying group it leads to a play-off rather than the tournament itself. It’s also typical that, despite finishing top of our group, we draw a side as strong as England in the play-offs. Nonetheless, being so close to the 2009 European Under-21 Championship finals is a huge moment, for players and fans. Participation in such a tournament would help towards changing a losing mentality that Welsh players, at all levels, have had for a very long time.

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Developing local young talent used to be the way forward for Millwall, but they can no longer see the point. Paul Casella takes up the sorry tale

After a close-season tribunal judged that teenage starlet John Bostock’s sale to Tottenham Hotspur was worth just £700,000 to Crystal Palace, their owner Simon Jordan decided it was time to look for a buyer for his club. And he wasn’t the only south London chairman to question the point of developing homegrown talent this summer. Last season Millwall lost youth hopes David Amoo to Liverpool, Sam Walker to Chelsea and Tom Kilby to Portsmouth for combined fees of £400,000. They were all products of a youth set-up that an ailing third-tier club could barely afford to run. The club’s American chairman, John Berylson, was so enraged by the size of the fees that he closed the Millwall academy.

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Debt is a fact of life for football clubs, but how damaging will it become?

“We obviously can’t compete with the money Manchester City have so there’s no point trying. We’ve got to succeed some other way.” So said a Premier League chairman in late September. But this wasn’t a pragmatic view from someone at a club that would be happy with a mid-table finish. It was Arsenal’s Peter Hill-Wood, whose comments were reported on the day that his team went top after a win at Bolton. The Arsenal board are bucking the current trend by actively discouraging interest from outside investors, in their case Alisher Usmanov from Uzbekistan, who owns a 24 per cent stake in the club.

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Dear WSC
The checklist of things to look out for in the Football League in WSC 259 brought to my mind the imminent passing of one of the great grounds. Ninian Park is every-thing a stadium was supposed to be: old-style floodlights; a terrace the length of one side of the pitch; seagulls taking flight in panic at the surge of electricity up the pylons; a club shop with no new kit in stock before the start of the season. Some even put our relatively low attendances in recent years down to the rusty roof, crumbling concrete and general air of neglect. Terraced houses? I bet the locals were delighted to hear we were leaving. Imagine their disappointment as the new ground started going up just over the road. I’m well aware that all of the above are the very reasons some supporters use as excuses not to come, but it does sadden me that there will be a whole generation of fans who will grow up in all-seat stadiums. For better or worse, Ninian Park truly is the last of its kind. Whatever anyone’s feelings towards Cardiff City, anyone who has been attending football since pre-1992 will join me in acknowledging the approach of a landmark moment. But this being Cardiff, it would be remiss of me not to mention the prospect of a good old-fashioned pitch invasion. I’m sure I’m not alone in being secretly glad that Swansea got promoted last year, just to send the old place off in style.
Gareth Dix, via email

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Ian Plenderleith ploughs through the ruminations of Setanta's pundits

I once worked for a website that took contributions from professional footballers, but the only player who regularly sent us copy was so inane that the impossibility of turning his column into something interesting or readable caused you to take the only option available – to bury your head in your hands and weep. Another player we approached who had written some sensible blog entries on his own personal site turned us down politely on the grounds that writing a blog had been fun for the first few weeks, but then it had started to seem more “like homework”.

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