Tuesday 1 England scrape a 1-1 draw with Japan, who should have won after Shinji Ono equalised Michael Owen’s first-half goal. Sven’s not flustered: “The game today was not important. We were superb for 30 minutes but then we got tired.” Rafael Benítez resigns as Valencia coach and will shortly takeover at Liverpool. Inverness are turned down for promotion to the Scottish Premier League after failing to get the required two-thirds vote.
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Stories
Premiership crowds slipped a bit this season but, as John Morgan explains, it's boom time in Divisions One, Two, Three and beyond after yet another year of bumper attendances that put the rest of Europe to shame
The last thing you expect to find at a Dr Martens League Eastern Division game is a crowd. But when King’s Lynn played Histon in a top-of-the-table clash on Easter Monday there definitely was one: 1,617 people gathered together of their own free will in the same place. Empty seats in Lynn’s cavernous old wooden main stand were hard to find. The attendance might not seem much at first sight, but when you consider that the DML Eastern is on the seventh tier of English football, it becomes quite astonishing. It proved to be the highest gate of the season at that level, just one example of the attendance boom currently being experienced in England.
Reading fan Roger Titford is worried by the state of the Nationwide as the Premiership fulls further clear
Pre-season favourites West Ham were always going to be the big story in this league, whatever they did. One of the top dozen clubs in the country (in theory) slumming it in the Nationwide; would it be ruin or revival? From a distance it sounded like a catalogue of disasters: the Rotherham dressing room; Glenn Roeder’s exit; the ruck with Reading over Alan Pardew’s contract; his failure to get a win for ages; losing a 3-0 lead to West Brom; backroom staff shown the door; Jermain Defoe collecting red cards like they were Monopoly properties before following David James out of the club; fans booing awful home performances; dismal displays in key away games; the board under pressure from shareholders. And yet like a real EastEnders script they kept it going to the last moments of the season.
It's not the identity of the new Liverpool manager that concerns John Williams most at present – it's more the prospect of the club losing its own identity in a dash for cash
To say that it has been an eventful recent few weeks as a supporter and observer of Liverpool is a little like saying Dennis Wise could have more friends in the game or that Porto’s José Mourinho could think a little better of himself. Let’s recap.
It's quite a coincidence – a film about hooliganism has come out just before Euro 2004. David Stubbs finds barely a redeeming feature in people who really should know better
As evidence of the mindset of fevered gormlessness in which this film was forged, director Nick Love says he wanted to make a film about the white working-class men “who make up 70 per cent of this country”. That demographic howler speaks more about a disproportionate fascination with hooliganism, its camaraderie, its violence, its blood and honour, than about reality, about which The Football Factory proudly says next to nothing.