Football still isn't the number-one sport in Australia but, believes Mike Ticher, Guus Hiddink's team showed plenty of others how the game should be played
When the world seems to have changed utterly, it takes only one moment to shatter the illusion. Mine came after Craig Moore’s equalising penalty against Croatia in Stuttgart, when the animated bloke in the Socceroos shirt next to me said: “So, what happens if it’s a draw?”
The team were still a letdown, but England had more winning ways off the pitch, to the relief of Philip Cornwall
Six years ago, at Euro 2000, I was on the point of giving up on England. I had the masochistic streak needed to cope with events on the pitch, but not what came with it for much longer: the sullen contempt for anything and anyone who wasn’t English that radiated from so many of the team’s followers even if they weren’t expressing it in word, song, action. Some of these people seethed in their sleep.
With the commencement of the World Cup imminent it remains to be seen whether Germany 2006 will show us something that we haven't experienced before
It feels as though the World Cup started several months ago. The hype that surrounds every tournament seems to have been that bit more insistent and frenetic this time. Partly that can be put down to the mounting media anxiety over Wayne Rooney’s “fight for fitness” and the possibility that one of England’s very few undeniably world-class players may not take part. More generally, though, the immense outpouring of guff and stuff about Germany 2006 – the proliferation of dire songs, documentaries of wildly varying quality and St George cross products choking supermarket aisles – just shows that football has become an easily exploitable cultural product.
Dear WSC
The Spurs “yids” thing (WSC 230) is indeed well and truly weird. This derogatory term emanated from Arsenal, a club with a proud tradition of support from the large north London Jewish community. As an eight- or nine-year-old, sitting high in the Highbury east stand with my uncle at my first ever game, even my pre-pubescent jewdar was sufficiently sensitive to know I was among my own. These days it’s a London thing. The term is seldom heard from northern fans, whereas one Chelsea fan website, presumably popular as it is on Google’s first page, proudly lists the lyrics to more than 25 (I stopped counting) anti-Semitic songs. In the mid-1970s, some Spurs fans created an incomprehensibly bizarre variant on terrace youth sub-culture by wearing skinhead uniform, skullcaps and Israeli flags. There’s one for all the sociologists out there. I sit in a different east stand now and for years optimistically clung to the notion that, in reclaiming the word, Spurs fans displayed rudimentary class consciousness and solidarity with discriminated groups in our society. This forlorn hope has been shattered in the face of vicious, sustained homophobic chanting, ostensibly related to Sol Campbell’s predicaments. The lip service paid by most clubs to kick out racism seems positively enlightened by comparison, and if we can’t learn anything from all this then the future’s bleak for football.
Alan Fisher, Tonbridge
For 16 years, Scottish fans could read a football publication that didn’t begin and end in Glasgow. Archie MacGregor explains the rise and demise of his fanzine and the changes in the game in its lifetime
From December 1986 to September 2002, The Absolute Game (TAG) jinked its way through 60 issues about Scottish football in general and everything but the Old Firm in particular.