Dear WSC
Thanks for digging deeper into the faceless consortium that are attempting to transplant Wimbledon FC to MK. Although the “stadium” would be on my doorstep, I naively assumed that the FA would fulfil their responsibility to the sport and dismiss the move out of hand. Having lived in MK most of my life I’ve hardly been deprived of reasonable live football action. As a child, Saturdays were down to Kenilworth Road (at ten,Luton was an exciting day out). Now I take my son to Sixfields, and both Northampton Town and, if we’re really going on safari, Rushden and Diamonds provide good entertainment, and more importantly teams and clubs that we can feel part of and be passionate about. It’s spurious and irrelevant to try to justify the project by stating that we’re the only city in Europe without a major football club. Firstly, MK is not a city and secondly, so what? The primary consideration should be how this move will benefit Wimbledon FC, and then let’s hear some quantifiable benefits for the area. It’s a small point but it looks like the ice-rink in MK will be closing despite being home to a reasonably successful Ice Hockey team, the MK Kings. The result of this commercial decision by the rink’s owners is that the Kings are likely to be playing out of Birmingham next year. So how long might it be before a more affluent club than Wimbledon decides to realise the capital locked up in their current piece of potential prime retail development land and offer the MK stadium landlords a deal for some “temporary” accommodation. This could be the top of a very slippery slope.
James McAuley, Milton Keynes
Search: ' Spain'
Stories
Phil Ball looks back on a strange tournament for the Spanish team, in which they missed out yet again, but for once did not take the rap
Getting beyond the World Cup quarter-finals would have represented a major image problem for Spain. The whole country would have been required to change its mind-set, from might-have-been-if-it-hadn’t-been-for-the-refs to something else less complicated, less open to the historical shrug. There had been signs that the country had been preparing for this, the press beginning to break its self-imposed vow to keep all optimism and flag-waving to a minimum.
Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger explains why Rudi Völler's battlers were different from their predecessors, and how they made him care about the national side again
Sometime around a quarter to three on Friday, June 21, I caught myself slowly and silently rocking back and forth. Even my son, a nervous chatterbox less than two hours earlier, was very quiet. He is only 12, and at that age it’s not only normal to support your national team but perhaps even, well, healthy. So I kept my mouth shut because there was nothing positive to say and I didn’t want to foster a cynical image by saying something negative. All the more so since there were plenty of other people already doing that.
Many Irish fans seem to think Mick McCarthy's squad did pretty well to reach the last 16. Paul Doyle says they should have higher standards
The Japanese World Cup organising committee voted Ireland’s fans the best of the tournament, and yes, the Green Army spread the word craic with great gusto. But were all Irish supporters a “credit to their nation”? What, for example, are we to make of the 100,000 who gathered with giddy delight in Dublin’s Phoenix Park to greet Mick McCarthy’s “heroes” on their return home? What were these strange folks saying about their country’s ambitions? Perhaps it was something like: “Anything above naked humilation will do for us.”
Gabriele Marcotti, who predicted the poor displays of France and Argentina in WSC two months ago, attempts to sort World Cup fact from fiction
For a competition that lasts 31 days – and one in which half the teams play just three matches – it’s quite remarkable that the World Cup is held in such high esteem as a barometer of footballing trends and relative strength. Especially a competition such as this one, where poor refereeing and bizarre episodes saw the World Cup lose a host of juggernauts (or potential juggernauts) before the quarter-finals, as fans of Portugal, Nigeria, Argentina, Italy and France will confirm. Still, this was not a 64-match exercise in futility. Once the hype subsides and the pundits go back to spouting the obvious about players whose names they can actually pronounce, we’ll be left with a neat set of memories we can stow in the back of our consciousness.