Search: 'laws'

Newcastle, managerless and looking for new ownership, travel to a seemingly far happier club, with West Ham fans welcoming Gianfranco Zola. But fresh turmoil is about to emerge: the papers reporting on the game predict the imminent verdict in Sheffield United’s appeal over Carlos Tevez, writes David Stubbs

I caught this fixture in April, on an unseasonably warm day. The Jubilee Line was subject to one of its rare closures and I had to make the trip in a replacement bus, which, like a mobile greenhouse and packed to the rafters, wended its way at gridlocked-traffic’s pace to Canning Town, then past some of east London’s most eye-catching industrial estates before reaching West Ham. Uncannily, though the journey lasted 40 minutes, the Millennium Dome hovered throughout, seemingly never more than 250 yards away; a curse of the white elephant. West Ham, under the lugubrious watch of Alan Curbishley, darted into a 2-0 lead but then, having blown their ­bubbles, conceded two quick goals to a Newcastle team with the air of having accidentally rediscovered their self-esteem under Kevin Keegan.

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The Northern League have their own anti-swearing initiative in place. Owen Amos reports

My first memory of football swearing is, strangely, a good one. It was the mid-1990s, Easington Colliery Welfare, near Sunderland, at home in the Northern League Second Division. The crowd was 60, at best. Easington had a corner. The right-winger jogged over and placed the ball. It was one inch – maximum – outside the quadrant. The referee couldn’t see; the linesman wasn’t bothered. The opposition were too busy shouting “Hold!” and “Tight!” to notice.

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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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Dear WSC
I thoroughly enjoyed your blow-by-blow review of Euro 2008, noting with some reassurance that I’m not the only one driven to distraction by the so-called expert input of BBC and ITV pundits. However your assessment of the Holland-Italy game surprised me somewhat. The furious and defiant ignorance of the laws of the game displayed by Clive Tyldesley and David Pleat with respect to Ruud van Nistelrooy’s goal were surely worthy of comment, indeed arguably the most damning condemnation of their failure in their roles in providing insight and ­explanation. Instead, you bafflingly seem to support their case and argue, in effect, that an official ought to base an offside call on whether he believes a player is faking an injury or not. Actually he’d already made that call by not stopping the game to permit treatment to the Italian defender in question, who had in effect left the field without permission and thus had to be playing the Dutch striker onside. One shudders to imagine the Machiavellian tricks that some domestic managers would concoct were it possible to play an opponent offside by tumbling off the pitch in a writhing heap. Next you’ll be condemning cliched and inappropriate English attitudes to the German team alongside an anglicised spelling of “dummkopf”…
Matt Rowson, Watford

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You Are The Ref challenge is back and testing would-be refs, writes Ian Plenderleith

In the future, everyone will be a referee for 15 minutes. Ruud van Nistelrooy’s goal for Holland against Italy at Euro 2008 not only prompted a fervent discussion about the offside laws, it also exposed the fact that players, ex-players, pundits and fans alike for once had something in common – very few of us are truly familiar with the laws of the game. By a nice coincidence, the BBC website chose Euro 2008 to revive the You Are The Ref column that puts exactly such unusual scenarios to its reader, and then lets them get on with exposing their own ignorance.

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