Search: 'MK Dons'

Dear WSC
I have read and reread your comment in Newswatch (WSC 254) that “almost every­where else in the football world, the tackle is largely considered a last resort” just to make sure that it wasn’t a misprint. If I have nothing else to do on a Tuesday or Wednesday evening, I may just watch the utterly compelling drama that I’m told is the Champions League. I see any number of ugly, mistimed and malicious challenges and plenty of good honest physical challenges. The idea that everyone else in the world is neatly passing in balletic patterns while we clog seven shades out of each other doesn’t withstand any sort of scrutiny. Furthermore, let’s not forget one other thing. We love tackling in this country. The one thing guaranteed to get a crowd going during a dull game is someone deciding to crunch in with a couple of hefty challenges. Pardon us for being unreconstructed, but it’s an intrinsic part of a game whose charm is that it combines skill and grace with physical prowess.And the cause of all of this breast-­beating ? The collective assaults of Keane, Rooney, Carvalho, Gerrard and Essien as they jump into challenges with both feet off the ground and their eyes not looking at the ball? Oh, no. An incompetent, mistimed tackle, ending with disastrous results, from a player who has made only a handful of Premiership appearances – because he’s not very good. It ill behoves a publication like yours to jump on this particular bandwagon – and, incidentally, there is no “reinvention”: his nickname has always been “Tiny”, it has been a constant source of irritation to Birmingham fans that a man with his build never “puts himself about” and the fact that he’s studying for a degree should be something of an example to be applauded rather than the object of the sneering dismissiveness you afford him.There may be plenty of things wrong with the game at the top level, but to put Martin Taylor’s tackle at the centre of the argument is to miss the point.
Jon Berry, St Albans

* Though there was room for confusion, the reference to Taylor being “reborn” referred to his being cast as “a victim”, rather than the perpetrator, using those facts.

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Well, OK, it will be 20 years in May since Wimbledon won the FA Cup, but Robert Jeffery and fellow fans are celebrating early as some key artefacts have at last come home, ending their Buckinghamshire exile

 As scenes of triumph go, Morden Library in south London does not seem the most likely venue. Wimbledon fans, however, will take any glory they can get their hands on – which is why, one evening in February, former players, local dignitaries and a group of randomly chosen supporters gathered to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Dons’ FA Cup victory over Liverpool and, more significantly, the return of the club’s honours from Milton Keynes.

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by David McVay
Reid Publishing, £9.99
Reviewed by Pete Green
From WSC 261 November 2008 

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How should a serious newspaper cover lower-league football? The Guardian hardly bothers at all, contemptuously summarising 72 clubs’ weekends in a negligible bullet-point “round-up”. The Times and Telegraph, superficially at least, sometimes offer the lower divisions greater respect, with weekly columns dedicated to life outside the top flight. But exactly how respectful is it to commission lower-league specialists to get their hands dirty at Underhill while their staff writers hoover up the posh nibbles in comfy Premier League press rooms?

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Football Fans, Terrace Songs and a Search for the Soul of Soccer
by Colin Irwin
Andre Deutsch, £12.99
Reviewed by Ed Upright
From WSC 243 May 2007 

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Sing When You’re Winning has a very broad brief. It is an attempt at an amusing travel journal, a brief history of several football clubs and the story of terrace songs. It supports the folk singer Martin Carthy’s view that football crowds “represent the one true surviving embodiment of an organic living folk tradition”. Above all, according to the subtitle, it is a “search for the soul of soccer”. With so many boxes to tick, this was always going to be difficult task and unfortunately it doesn’t quite succeed.

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Ciudad de Murcia have been taken over and relocated in the manner of Wimbledon moving to Buckinghamshire – while their fans have been ignored, writes Phil Ball

When I was a kid, a mate nicked a bike that was propped up on a lamp-post. I asked him why and he replied: “It’s not tied up. It’s mad not to nick it.” It was a brutal sort of logic, but I shrugged and let him get on with it. I’d forgotten about the incident till this summer, when Carlos Marsá, a 57-year-old industrialist from Granada, bought the shares, footballing rights and contracts of Spanish second-division club Ciudad de Murcia, and changed them into his own Granada 74, thereby effecting an MK Dons-like take-over – or, more prosaically, nicking the bike. Needless to say, as with Wimbledon, various bodies, among them UEFA, have shrugged their shoulders and let him get on with it.

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