The Euro 2000 play-off draw has pitted the two oldest foes in Football against each other, but does anyone outside of Britain care?
“I would not be Kevin Keegan if I did not get excited about this,” said the England manager in a blinding flash of self-awareness on hearing the Euro 2000 play-off draw. Unfortunately, he is Kevin Keegan, and his face was splashed all over the papers after England and Scotland came out of the hat together (or what passes for a hat at UEFA headquarters these days).
Friday 1 Dennis Wise, Frank Lampard, Steve Guppy and Trevor Sinclair are the new names in Little Kev's squad to play Belgium. Paul Ince is recalled in place of David Batty, making sure the squad contains no less than the mandatory three players who have been sent off for England in the past 18 months. Newcastle sign Kevin Gallacher from Blackburn for £700,000. A consortium of Icelandic businessmen has made a bid of £6 million to buy Stoke City, hoping to install the national team coach Gudjon Thordarsson as manager in place of the luckless Gary Megson.
Saturday 2 Strugglers' Saturday sees Steve Staunton scandalously sent off in Villa's dismal 0-0 with Liverpool, a game mystifyingly described as "just balloons on sticks" by John Gregory. Bottom club Sheff Wed go goal-crazy against Wimbledon, winning 5-1 in front of a suitably Wimbledon-sized crowd, 18,077. Sunderland are second after pasting Bradford 4-0 at Valley Parade. Everton are reportedly the target of a £50 million bid from Chris Evans and Terry Venables – possibly both in the top two on any fans' list of undesirable owners. India's Baichung Bhutia makes his debut as a sub for Bury, and gets booked after two minutes. "We will probably get more fans than if we'd signed Ronaldo," Bury manager Neil Warnock had predicted. They get 3,603.
Sunday 1 Tony Banks joins the Kate Hoey row: "If they go back in the FA Cup then that would be bloody disastrous. This sacrifice is worth paying even if it is unpopular with a number of politicians." Arsenal beat Man Utd 2-1 in the Charity Shield, Ray Parlour scoring the winner. Nicolas Anelka does not turn up to cheer on his old mates.
Mike Ticher talks to Graham Kelly about the formation of the Premier League, England's World Cup bid and the possibility of a future breakaway
When the Premier League began, you maintained it would benefit football as a whole. How successful has it been?
I think in two respects it’s been very successful. Firstly, commercially. The Premier League wasn’t set up in exactly the way that I envisaged at the start. We didn’t set up the Premier League within the structure of the FA, it was set up as an autonomous company, with its own board of directors and, not unnaturally, it was jealous of its own commercial properties. So to that extent the pattern isn’t as we envisaged. But nonetheless, helped by other factors, such as the Taylor Report and the emergence of satellite television, commercially the FA Premier League, standing alone, has been spectacularly successful. The second respect is the impetus it gave to the development of players. We argued for a number of years about getting the best young players more time with the best coaches, without a great deal of success. The Football League tended to operate at the pace of the slowest club rather than the fastest. Setting up the Premier League has led indirectly to the formation of the academies, and in time, hopefully, we will see more good English players coming through.
Thursday 1 The Department of Employment issue new rules on work permits. Players will be given permits for the length of their contracts rather than having their cases reviewed at the end of each season, and the rule stipulating that non-EU players must be among the top five wage earners at their clubs is scrapped. Forest's search for a manager ends with the appointment of the impressively tanned David Platt, who says: "The two months I had at Sampdoria were a massive learning curve." That's just what Sampdoria fans will have been thinking when they went down. The charges against Sol Camp≠bell for assaulting a steward after the Derby v Spurs match last autumn are dropped. Arsenal spend £3.5 million on a Brazilian full back, Silvinho, who says: "I have been following Arsenal ever since I knew they were watching me."
Friday 2 The PFA's Gordon Taylor criticises the changes to work permit rules. "We already have more foreign players than anywhere else in the world. Removing the wages criteria means you are opening the door to players who are not neccesarily top quality". Terry McDermott joins the Barnes-Dalglish dream team at Celtic as "social manager" – a highly specialised position which involves a lot of shouting and laughing plus the collecting of betting slips.