Search: 'UEFA'

Tim Springett looks at the latest edict from the World Anti-Doping Agency and its implications for football

If ever there was a topic that cried out for rational debate, it is the issue of drug use by sports people. Sadly, rationality has long since been buried under a tidal wave of self-righteousness. Even though football has far from the worst record of participants seeking to gain an illicit advantage through drugs, it seems constantly to be first in line for the bile of commentators and opinion-formers whenever the subject is raised. The usual mantra – that football’s procedures for drug testing lag way behind other sports – has been repeated so often it seems almost pointless to question it. To this can be added the well-known fact that every professional footballer is an overpaid prima donna.

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Leicester’s tussles with Atlético Madrid left fans simmering at injustice but, as Saul Pope recalls, these were heady days

Eleven years ago their fans would have never accepted it, but Leicester City’s UEFA Cup first round tie against Atlético Madrid in September 1997 will probably be as good as it gets. Leicester didn’t win the game, but for a time they were leading thanks to a player once described by the club fanzine The Fox as looking “knackered whenever he ran on to a football field”.

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A Yorkshire MEP is campaigning for an investigation into the 1973 Cup-Winners Cup final. Matthew Barker wonders why

The 1973 European Cup-Winners Cup final wasn’t, by all accounts, a great game. Leeds United and Milan kicked chunks out of each other in a typically brutal early-Seventies footballing culture-clash, played in a torrential downpour in Salonika. Luciano Chiarugi scored the only goal from a third-minute free-kick ­(indirect, claim Leeds), with the Italians happy to defend deep in a catenaccio master class under the tutelage of Nereo Rocco. Don R­evie’s team had three penalty claims waved away by Greek referee ­Christos Michas, while Norman Hunter was sent off. It was, as Italian newspaper Il ­Manifesto recently put it, “a disaster from beginning to end … a night of rain and rage”, with a disgruntled local crowd pelting Milan’s players with missiles as they attempted to celebrate their win.

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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.

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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.”

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