Search: ' Rangers'

Ian Plenderleith delves into the highs and lows of Welsh football online, from Simon Davies's enthusiastic views on Qatar to Porthmadog's inexplicable rejection of after-match hospitality

The Welsh national side’s excellent start to the Euro 2004 qualifying campaign seems as good a reason as any to have a look at that nation’s web presence, starting with the quite tasty Dragon Soccer – Welsh International Football Online. It could also claim to be the Website Least Read By Welsh Internationals, judging by the answers given by leading play­ers on the site’s question and answer pages, which al­ways start with the touchingly hope­ful: “Have you ever visited the Dragon Soccer website?” The kindest answer is Andy Mel­ville’s “Not yet”.

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The decline of Scotland and Austria was encapsulated by a Champions League game in 2000 featuring hardly any Scots or Austrians, as Cris Freddi recalls

This being the Champions League, Rangers weren’t expected to stay around for long. It’s been the story of their lives for the last decade or so. This time at least they’d given themselves a real chance of reaching the second round, winning their first two group matches 5-0 against today’s opponents and 1-0 in Monaco. But this was a right rollercoaster of a group, and by the time they arrived in Graz they’d taken only one point from two matches with Galatasaray, while Sturm had won 2-0 at home to Monaco, who then thumped the Istanbul side.

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Sunday 1 Business as usual at Stamford Bridge as Chelsea’s 1-1 draw with Arsenal sees Patrick Vieira sent off and a David Seaman blunder. Bolton move off the bottom with a 1-0 win over non-scoring Aston Villa, thanks to a goal from Birmingham-born Michael Ricketts and a disallowed goal from Juan Pablo Angel. “In this country we have got good referees who are being let down by assistants who are not so good,” says Graham Taylor. Lloyd Owusu’s goal with his first touch for the club puts Wednesday on their way to a 2-0 win in the Sheffield derby.

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Kasper Steenbach recounts Brian Laudrup's short and unhappy spell at Chelsea in 1998

Overall, Brian Laudrup is today a happy man – he lives with his family at an exclusive address on the coast north of Copenhagen and turns out as a striker for the local amateur team. The chief executive of FC Copenhagen, Flemming Østergaard, is also happy. He heads virtually the only European club that is presently in­creasing in value on the stock market. Since he took over in 1997, the club has been turned into a big name in the entertainment business, having hosted the Eur­ovision Song Contest and a Mike Tyson fight. And, above all, he runs a club that has succeeded in attracting the support of most football fans in Copenhagen for the first time in recent history.

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From the Stade Louis II to Alloa and Queen of the South in three years, St Johnstone fan Gary Panton charts his club's sharp demise

Why did the team collapse so emphatically last season?
Sandy Clark’s inability to find suitable replacements for the players that achieved third place in the SPL, a League Cup final and a UEFA Cup run earn­ed him the sack back in October. His replacement Billy Stark – whose perennially folded arms and monotone drawl must make him one of the least animated managers in Scottish football hist­ory – struggled to prove he could do much better.

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