Search: ' Sheffield Wednesday'

Some couldn't bear to watch what seemed set to be City's most embarrassing moment, but Ian Farrell was richly rewarded for being too stunned to move

Anyone with a good memory for the cultural atroc­ities of the past may well be acquainted with Bernard Manning’s low-rent 1970s variety show The Wheeltappers and Shunters Club. Coming across this horror show of hopelessness I was shocked and saddened to see the once-mighty Roy Orbison hit rock bottom with an appearance. If a fan were to claim this as their favourite O moment, they would no doubt have got the sort of looks I receive upon telling non-Blues that the 1999 Division Two play-off final was as good as it got for Manchester City.

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Sunday 1 Mark Palios resigns, saying: “My action is essential to enable the Football Association to begin to return to normality.” Sven gossip-broker Colin Gibson is also reported to have offered to quit. At this rate Tord Grip will soon be answering the phones.

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Dear WSC
In his article Mind the Gap (WSC 209), which celebrated a rise in attendances in what used to be Division Two, Ed Park­inson did confess that as a fan of promoted Hartlepool he might be viewing the league with rose-tinted spectacles. Having read the article, I feel he must have gone the whole hog and had a full rose-tinted laser eye operation. Having witnessed many games in this division last season and having seen all the teams play at least once, I can honestly say that the standard of football nev­er exceeded mediocre. Plymouth were the only good footballing side and they didn’t look anywhere near as good once Paul Sturrock swapped addresses on the south coast. As well as attributing the rise in attendances to what he considered to be “fine football”, Ed also noted that the struggles of “a few self-styled big clubs” such as Sheffield Wednesday provided pleasure for many. However, average attendances in Division Two were only up 6.5 per cent on the previous year and, with an average home attendance of 22,000 (almost twice that of any other team in the Div­ision and four times more than Hart­lepool), is it not more likely that it was  the presence of “self-styled big club” Sheffield Wednesday that caused the upsurge in attendances rather than the alleged quality of the football?
Stuart Thorpe, via email 

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A fantasy football site which rewards ineptitude leads off Ian Plenderleith's guide to low quality web-browsing. And ideas don't get much worse than on a site offering pet coats for sale in club colours

There are few football fans who haven’t attempted to manage fantasy teams at some point over the past ten years, because we all harbour an illusion that we could do a better job than the men who are paid millions just to mostly mess up. Then we discover that the players we picked did not perform to expectations. This has not led to a noticeable rise in understanding of the trials and setbacks suffered by those in charge of a real team, but at least most of us now realise, after finishing in position 124,971 of whichever league we entered, that we are just as clueless as the men we routinely scorn and heckle from the safety of the stands.

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Ed Parkinson is delighted Hartlepool's stars are no longer thought worth a transfer to Chelsea as Stamford Bridge seems worlds apart from Victoria Park

As a follower of a newly promoted club who just achieved their highest league placing in 94 years of grim struggle, it’s tempting to view the Second Division through heavily rose-tinted specs. To me it seems a delightful, cheerful and friendly division which all clubs should visit regularly. A survey of the changes in the division since Hartlepool’s last visit in 1991 shows that rigorous asset-stripping of promoted teams seems to have fallen out of fashion. In 1991 the winners of the old Fourth Division were gleefully dismantled by middle-aged men in sheepskin coats – any promoted side would lose three or four key players to big clubs (defined as anyone who was in the First Division, had ever won a major trophy, or just had a big ground). This year all three upwardly mobile arrivals retained nine or ten of their first-choice promotion team.

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