Search: ' Port Vale'

Lincoln City boss Graham Taylor announced his arrival on the managerial scene as his side's outstanding home record gave them the Division Four title, Roger Titford recalls

The long-term significance
This was the season that launched Graham Taylor’s career. Look at those Lincoln City stats – 71 home goals (an average of more than three a game!), 111 in all and 74 points (equivalent to 106 with three points for a win). Among the stars of the side were John Ward and Percy Freeman up front; Ian Branfoot and Sam Ellis at the back. Two years later Taylor nearly repeated the feat with Fourth Division Watford. Sadly, international football was another matter.

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They may scrape the barrel raw, but each day club sites draw in more and more people like our writer. His name is Sean Kearns and he's a Reading World addict

The headline leaves a lasting impression – like Dave Jones’s eyelashes or Peter Schmeichel’s speech pattern: “Bas gets on his dancing shoes and performs the moonwalk!”

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With Atlético Madrid plumbing new depths of design disaster, David Wangerin traces the history of kit advertising from Kettering Tyres to Spiderman 2 and wonders if club identity has been lost along the way

Look at any football photograph from the mid-Seventies. The glue-pot pitch, the plain white ball and the wild sideburns of some of the players certainly call to mind an almost primitive era, as does the enor­mous terrace of fans crammed into the background. Yet one anachronism in particular reveals just how the visual elements of British football have changed: the remarkable austerity of the playing strips. There are no manufacturer trademarks and no league logos or appeals for fair play on the sleeves. Most conspicuously of all, nothing is displayed across the chest. It’s undeniably an outdated image, yet one that happily draws the eye closer to the tiny club crest, instead of toward some gargantuan commercial mes­sage. An age of marketing innocence, some will bewail, but one certainly to be admired for its aesthetic appeal, to say nothing of its integrity.

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The arrivals of Jose Mourinho and Rafael Benítez in England demonstrate that now it is managers, rather than players, who are the focus of the Premiership's hype machine, writes Jon Spurling

Bill Shankly’s prophecy – “One day, football man­agers will be as famous and as well paid as their players” – appears to be coming true. Thirty years after the Scot retired from the Liverpool job, the profiles of several Premiership managers, not to mention their wage demands, have never been higher. Players’ wage increases, according to a recent Deloitte & Touche report, are slowing considerably, increasing by an average of only eight per cent last season, as opposed to 25 per cent over each of the last three years. A select band of coaches seem set to close the financial gap on their young stars. Rafael Benítez will earn around £25,000 a week at Liverpool. Jose Mourinho is to be paid four times that amount at Chelsea.

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Another tournament, another predictable failure. Phil Ball looks at what went wrong for the Spanish this time and wonders whether they will ever find a winning formula

Spain rest in peace, in memoriam. ¡Lo de siempre! (The same as always!) screamed the sports tabloid Marca after the defeat to Portugal condemned them to another early exit. The squad usually packs its bags after the quarter-finals of a major tournament and, being slightly less accustomed to such early exits, the press – reasonably tolerant towards the affable Iñaki Saez for the preparatory weeks – finally showed their true feelings towards the manager the day after the defeat. Spain’s national paranoia traditionally centres on its team’s nervous collapse when the going gets tougher, so no one had really expected them to fail at the first hurdle, particularly in such a comfortable-looking group. 

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