Search: 'Get With The Programme'

The hosts are coming to terms with new realities of the bottom division, financial hardship and predatory bigger clubs, while the visitors are happy to be playing their second season in the League. Charles Morris reports

I first went to Crewe Alexandra’s ground in early, wide-eyed childhood. Ever since it has been a place capable of conjuring up some much-needed magic amid the industrial surroundings of Coronation Street-style houses to the west and the town’s railway station and sidings to the east.

Read more…

Brian Simpson reports on a disagreement between Oldham Athletic and Failsworth Dynamos, both keen on new footballing homes

Failsworth Dynamos, a club familiar with success on and off the pitch, have an ambitious plan to find a permanent home for their 27 teams. When it seemed the local council was about to offer the club the lease on a piece of land ideal for its ambitions, the Broadway site, it looked like an excuse for a party. However, the celebration pint quickly went flat with the news that the land had instead been promised to someone else. The irony is that the third party is not a supermarket chain or rapacious developer, but local professional club Oldham Athletic who want to move from their Boundary Park home.

Read more…

Simon Tyers looks at how some presenters and ex-players are not cut out for television

“Kayfabe” is a concept that is not widely known outside professional wrestling. Broadly speaking, it refers to the presentation of fictional or scripted events and opinions as reality. The term needs to be introduced to a wider audience as a way of defining what is going on with the viewer text and email sections that litter The Football League Show like overheating Corsas on the hard shoulder of the M25. You would imagine that the appeal of hearing comments about your club from supporters of other clubs would wither over time. On The Football League Show this sense that people are barging in on your business is heightened when the epithets are being read out by Jacqui Oatley’s co-host, Lizzie Greenwood-Hughes.

Read more…

The revamped stadium has been open since March 2007. Despite trying his best Cris Freddi just can't get used to it

I went to the opening game at the new Wembley. That sounds like a minor boast, I suppose. If there were anything to boast about. You can only judge a stadium in daylight. Lights at night gloss over things. On an overcast afternoon, the Wembley arch looks like a giant concrete rope. And you stand under it and think: what’s that all about? What’s an arch got to do with it?

Read more…

Cameron Carter casts his eye over the BBC's football presenters

With no summer tournament as a distraction the new season has been a long wait for all of us. Even so, it is still irritating of Gary Lineker to preface each Match of the Day with a promise of “enthralling” games and “high drama”, as if a significant amount of those watching were still debating whether to commit to the whole programme. Match of the Day is one of the few commodities left, along with milk and weapons-grade uranium, that does not require a hard sell. Lineker is dangerously close these days to resembling the kind of schoolboy no one ever liked until his parents invited all the neighbourhood kids to his birthday party with a bouncy castle (symbolically, Lineker’s 1986 World Cup goals) and a chocolate fountain (the 1990 World Cup goals). This makes the boy popular for a while, but not, as he mistakenly believes, forever. In other words, we’re not actually winking back at you, Gary.

Read more…