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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.

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We covered the Three Kings on December 3 but for the 14th day of the WSC advent calendar we’re looking at their home – the Orient. Leyton Orient, obviously. After going nowhere but down since 1989, Martin Ling’s unsung east Londoners battled the yo-yoing Mariners with promotion or the agony of the play-offs at stake in June 2006, issue 232. Tom Davies reported

They don’t do triumphalism very well in this part of London. And going into an Easter Monday six-pointer in third place in League Two, with automatic promotion still in their own hands, takes most Leyton Orient fans into completely uncharted territory. This is a club that have not won promotion since 1989 – when a late play-off charge took the Os out of Division Four – and have not gone up automatically since 1970’s Third Division title. Grimsby, a point and a place below Orient, have been up two divisions and back again in that 17-year period. Other teams yomp up and down the divisions with drunken cavalier abandon. But Orient fans look on wistfully as nothing much changes in their landscape. “It was so much easier when we were coming 17th every year,” grumbles one fan in the bustling Birkbeck pub beforehand. He’s joking of course. Well, perhaps half-joking.

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Sheffield United are back in the Premiership, led there by one of the game's most outspoken managers. Pete Green examines the enigmatic and anagrammatical Neil Warnock

It has been said many times in recent weeks that there are no suitably qualified English managers to take charge of the national team. Yet one such man has 20 years of managerial experience in England and has won promotion six times at a series of different clubs, building an unparalleled knowledge of the game in this country along the way, and in the search for Sven’s successor his name has never once been mentioned. What do you mean, you don’t want Neil Warnock to do it?

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After promotion back to the Football League, Ashley Shaw finds renewed optimism in a corner of the north-west

Few small clubs can match the fame of Accrington Stanley. Synonymous with a lost era, Stanley’s premature and unnecessary exit from the Football League in 1962 lent the club a certain romance, especially as, only a few years before, they had been riding high, attracting gates of more than 10,000 to Peel Park.

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Southampton fans live in hope, despite a poor season and the sale of Theo Walcott. Will they soon see the back of the chairman? Tim Springett looks at the potential bidders

As far as many Southampton supporters are concerned, dissatisfaction with chairman Rupert Lowe has never been far below the surface. It became a tidal wave on January 21 during a home defeat by Ipswich. Some fans occupying prominent seats opposite the directors’ box unfurled a giant banner with the simple message: “Lowe Out”. This was followed by thunderous applause all around St Mary’s Stadium together with an innovative variation on Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (the irony of which would not have been lost on Sir Clive Woodward) suggesting that the hapless chairman be swung from the nearby Itchen Bridge.

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