Search: 'Fan culture'

Alan Moore explains why the Gulf kingdom is unlikely to spring many surprises at this year's World Cup, not to attract any high profile foreign players

Saudi Arabia arrived on the international scene with one of the greatest goals in World Cup history. Saed Al Owarain’s mazy run and shot against Belgium in 1994 lit the fuse for a footballing explosion in one of the most private and secretive countries on earth. But despite another World Cup qualification this time ar­ound, their third in a row, Saudi football has been in steady decline for some time.

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Stephen Wagg reflects on the achievements of the first man to manage England in a World Cup finals and how he cultured a generation of managers

Walter Winterbottom lived until he was nearly 90, so a lot of English football lovers below a certain age have probably never heard of him. Still fewer among the club’s global “fan base” will have known, until this month’s obituaries, that he played for a season in Manchester United’s first team. He coached England when the team was no more than a series of grainy and occasional black and white images on the nation’s TV screens and he was gone before the medium got seriously involved with Eng­lish football.

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England fans are forced to ticket touts for World Cup 2002 tickets as allocations fail to meet expectations, Mark Perryman reports

“Avez-vous des billets?” It was the one French phrase all who followed England to the 1998 World Cup learnt. The market for touted tick­ets in Ja­pan and Korea this summer will of course be much smaller, with few if any fans turning up just on the off chance of a spare going cheap. But those applying through englandfans, the Official England Supporters Club administered by the FA, have nevertheless been sur­prised at the barriers in the way of those who do want to get tickets.

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Arsène Wenger and David O'Leary have a moan

As we know, David O’Leary and Arsène Wenger are as fiercely competitive as their players. Just now they are locked in competition to prove that their club is the most unpopular, and therefore the most put upon, in the Premier League. David O’Leary seems to have been stopping every passing reporter in recent weeks to tell them of his despair at Leeds’s declining reputation. “From the being the second favourite club of most neutral supporters,” he says, “we seem to have become the most hated club in the country,” a development he ascri­bes partly to the Bowyer-Woodgate trial and its aftermath, since which “nobody misses the chance to criticise and condemn us”.

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The headlines were about English infiltration after trouble at Pittodrie. But the Scottish game would do better to take a long, hard look at itself, says Dianne Millen

Never mind Afghanistan – hold the front page for the Battle of Pittodrie, billed as the biggest Scots skirmish since Culloden. The coins had barely been picked up from pitchside before SPL chief executive Roger Mitchell had fallen back on that old stand-by, blaming the violence on “mindless morons”, a description later repeated by the police, press and both clubs. Idiots there most cer­tainly were at the game, but not all of them were throwing things.

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