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Both Cambridge clubs United and City have seen their requests for new grounds denied, writes Matthew Gooding

Earlier this year Cambridge City Council did a U-turn on plans to build a two-metre high statue of a Subbuteo referee on Parker’s Piece, a common near the city centre. An artist had been commissioned to design the work to commemorate Cambridge’s role in the formation of the laws of football; it is thought that the FA’s Laws of the Game were based on rules drawn up in the park in the 19th century by students from the city’s university.

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by Giancarlo Rinaldi
Kindle via Amazon, £1.53
Reviewed by Matthew Barker
From WSC 318 August 2013

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Giancarlo Rinaldi has been writing about Italian football since the late 1980s, initially in the Rigore! fanzine. This ebook is akin to a best-of; a simple enough framework, compiling reports on 20 games that the author has previously written about in various formats, the earliest dating back to 1961 (though not as an eye-witness) and the most recent from 2005, with an accent on the 1980s and 1990s. Some have a particular relevance for the outcome of a championship, though others have been chosen on more personal grounds.

Rinaldi has a nice and breezy, economic style, which keeps things moving along and works best when he’s explaining the contexts of club rivalries, or the back stories of an individual player or coach at a crucial moment in their careers. For anyone looking for a decent primer on the history of post-war Italian football, there’s much to enjoy here.

However, despite its slight size (less than 100 pages) this is definitely a book best dipped into. Those match reports soon start to blur a little and you could miss out on some nice details, especially when it comes to the quotes, the majority sourced from contemporary press cuttings. Inter’s Sandro Mazzola remembering when, as an 18-year-old, a club car was sent around to pick him up after he sat his accountancy exams and drive him straight to the stadium for a game against Juventus; the claims that jars of “Berlsuconi’s Tears” were sold on the streets of Naples after Napoli won the 1990 scudetto; Claudio Ranieri snapping at journalists after his Fiorentina team were on the receiving end of an 8-2 tonking from Zdenek Zeman’s Lazio.

If I have any gripes, and with a £1.53 asking price it seems pretty churlish to have any at all, it would be the lack of match summaries – a couple of lines of which could sit underneath the chapter headings. There’s no mention of the final score, let alone other stats (scorers, times, actual dates as opposed to simply the month, attendance figures), which can make things confusing when trying to follow the narrative of a report, especially if you are just dipping in. Some images would be nice too, though I appreciate we’re still in the relatively early stages of ebook technology. Hopefully, along with a sympathetic editing job, we can get to enjoy a more fully rounded reading experience one fine day when a print edition appears.

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Trains are an important mode of transport for fans but Tom Hocking says that little is done to make them more convenient

“In terms of transportation,” read an official FA statement, following the controversy caused by setting the FA Cup final kick-off time at 5.15pm, “a small percentage of Cup final fans use the method of train travel.” The evening start, rather than the traditional 3pm, meant fans of both north-west-based finalists would have trouble catching the last train home. Wigan supporters had already faced similar problems for the semi-final against Millwall and been widely mocked for not selling out their entire ticket allocation. The situation was made more galling by the FA’s solution: use their official coach partner, National Express, instead.

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Damning evidence about the state of their ground makes tough reading for Owls fans, admits Tom Hocking

In late 1898 officials from The Wednesday FC learned that the lease on Olive Grove, their home for a decade, could not be renewed. The land was needed for a railway expansion and they had until the end of the season to find a replacement. With few locations available they settled on High Bridge, Owlerton. The plot of meadowland to the north of Sheffield was uneven, a long way from the city centre and poorly served by public transport.

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Calls for a trial of new safe standing technology in the top two tiers are slowly starting to gather political support, Tom Hocking writes

The Safe Standing Roadshow has spent the last year showing fans and officials around the country how standing could work in the England’s top two divisions. On December 11, 2012 it arrived in Parliament. The event, held in conjunction with the Football Supporters’ Federation (FSF) and sponsored by Roger Godsiff MP, took the case for safe standing to the Attlee Suite of Portcullis House, across the road from Big Ben.

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