With Middlesbrough struggling to survive the drop Steve Wilson asks why the chances of Hope Powell succeeding are so slim
As Middlesbrough’s steady slide towards relegation fast approaches a vertical drop into the Championship, questions are inevitably resurfacing over the wisdom of employing Gareth Southgate as the club’s manager in his first job in the dugout.
Simon Tyers on Jeff Stelling, Paul Gascoigne and the future of punditry
Jeff Stelling has a new book about Soccer Saturday, called Jelleyman’s Thrown A Wobbly. I’d have gone with What’s Been Happening, Charlie? as a more knowing title, but that may be why he’s on the television and I’m not. In his book, Jeff reminds the reader that in its first season after dropping the Sports Saturday title and starting to cover football at any great length, the pundits would leave the studio at ten to three and throughout the next two hours only be heard as disembodied voices over a still caption. We were supposed to think they were at the game they were covering even though they were clearly just in the VT suite, before coming back at ten past five as if nothing was untoward.
Bolton chairman Phil Gartside is in favour of a new division consisting of teams outside the upper echelons of the Premiership. Unfortunately for him it appears he may be one of very few, as Roger Titford explains
Property developers and farmers with a couple of well-situated fields never give up looking for planning permission. Every so often they come back with yet another application. Footballing conservationists will feel the same way about the idea floated by Phil Gartside, the Bolton chairman, that Rangers and Celtic should be invited to join a newly formed 18-club Premier League Two in 2014-15. At the same time the Premier League would be reduced from 20 to 18 clubs. The scheme was unveiled in the Sunday Mirror on April 19 as the Beginning Of The Next Revolution although in an accompanying piece, columnist Michael Calvin decried it as a “morally bankrupt plan to take the money and run”. There was a similar response throughout almost all of the press coverage – “Gartside’s ideas are barmy and destructive,” said Mick Dennis in the Express – with the Guardian’s Lawrence Donegan one of the few to suggest that the idea should be taken seriously: “The truth is that the Old Firm would bring a great deal to English football, the most significant aspect of which would be a following that exceeds all but one or two of the current Premier League teams.”
While their footballing principles may stop West Brom repeating 2005’s great escape from relegation, their fans remain steadfastly positive. The visit of the unpopular yet enduringly effective Bolton provides another opportunity to showcase their faith and fragility, and David Stubbs was there
As the West Brom fans enter by the Jeff Astle gate into The Hawthorns, many of them, young and old, male and female, pay tribute to painted images, fastened to the railings, of the hero of 1968’s FA Cup victory that look like they were commissioned by the same artist who does those mirror likenesses of Elvis Presley you get at fairgrounds. One by one, they come up and pat Astle, as if rubbing a rabbit’s paw for good luck. It’s a genuinely moving collective gesture of footballing faith – I’m reminded of the stream of newlyweds who come and pay tribute to the eternal flame dedicated to the Second World War fallen in Moscow’s Red Square.
Aston Villa and Tottenham Hotspur employ squad rotation in the UEFA Cup
It’s been 36 years since two English clubs played each other in the UEFA Cup. Villa and Spurs would have met in the last 16 this year had they got past CSKA Moscow and Shakhtar Donetsk respectively. Instead, they fielded under-strength teams – Spurs in both legs, Villa in their away tie in Moscow – with the same outcome, a 3-1 aggregate defeat. Spurs were knocked out in front of 30,000 at White Hart Lane, Villa were watched by 300 of their fans who’d travelled 3,200 miles for the privilege of getting an update on the progress of the reserve team. Four days later, Man Utd too rested players for the resoundingly awful Carling Cup final in which they nonetheless beat Spurs’ first eleven on penalties. At the same time an almost entirely different Villa team to the one in Moscow conceded two goals in the last four minutes to draw with Stoke. It didn’t seem like much of a return for effectively opting out of what would have been their best run in Europe for over a decade.